Let's hope this this wonderful Himalayan country with its unique cultures and courageous people can survive and flourish in the future.

Dr. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End provides healthy doses of reality - the realities of disease, deterioration, debilitation, decline, dementia, dependence, despondency, and demise.

My friend Kendrick calls us "guerilla grandmothers." As a White person, and as I inch up towards age 60, I have definitely shifted how I engage in public response to racial profiling, police brutality and lack of accountability in Ferguson, Staten Island, and my hometown of Minneapolis.

In a world where it has become exceedingly common and even trendy to be apathetic towards a different people's struggle, you are, by default, already doing something by feeling what you're feeling.

There wasn't one person who graced that stage who didn't, at one time or another, think, "This is too much. I can't handle it." And everyone who has come around the bend of that stress-induced despair didn't do it by beating stress or "winning," but by changing their mindset.

While it is natural to reflect on upsetting experiences, brooding involves replaying the same scenes in your mind and reliving the emotional distress you felt at the time. Once you are in the habit of ruminating, the urge to brood can be easy to trigger and difficult to ignore.