Overwhelmed by Love and Religion

Getting Over Overwhelm

The attendees filtered in more slowly than usual to Parler Paris Après Midi yesterday, but filled the room by the time Dr. Monique Wells began her talk on “Keys to Mastering a Well-rounded Life.”

I had a hard time getting my head around the title of her talk — “What does that mean?,” I asked Monique. Then, as the “Muse of Paris Time Management,” she made it clear with a slide show on her laptop and a clear explanation how we can organize and manage our time, our priorities and our lives so that we balance our lives in a way that gets us ‘over the overwhelm’…as she so aptly describes it.

We learned a lot about how to prioritize, how to delegate and how to remove unworthy projects from our overwhelming to-do lists. She held us in the palm of her hand until after 5 p.m. — and we wanted more!

Her videos are on sale on her Web site and coming up this April is her conference titled “Make Time Your Ally – Increase Your  Revenue with Better Time Mastery” taking place April 11-12 here in Paris. For more information about the conference, visit Make Time Your Ally.

And to ‘discover’ more about the other hats Monique wears, visit “Simply the best way to experience Paris!”

To read all about the afternoon and see the photos, visit Parler Paris Après Midi.

Equal Rights for Equal Partners

It’s almost a done deal. The right for two people of the same sex to be legally wed was approved in the French National Assembly yesterday with 329 against 229 votes and 10 abstentions. It still has to pass through the Senate sometime in April before it can become law, where it is likely to be confirmed.

After recently seeing the movie “Lincoln” and learning what Abraham Lincoln and his advocates went through to abolish slavery, I am reminded how far we have come in human and civil equal rights.

Those who claimed that slavery was good because the slaves “could live better than poor people in Europe” — because their ‘caring’ masters provided for them and that every great civilization was based on slave labor — were not slaves themselves and therefore didn’t see the need to be freed. In this case, those who have opposed same-sex marriage, and of course, the right to adopt, are mostly religious conservatives and clearly not gay themselves, therefore don’t see the value of this right that is more about equality than anything else.

France, of course, isn’t the only nation to support same-sex marriages. Count among them Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Spain, South Africa and Norway. Even Americans are now more in favor than not. The ironic thing is that in 76 countries, same-sex relations are illegal, and in five of those the perpetrators can receive the death penalty.

The Pope Poops Out

Just before Ash Wednesday, while New Orleanians were gearing up for Mardi Gras and carnivals are taking place all over the world, Pope Benedict announced his resignation — the first in 600 years. He claims that “he no longer had the mental and physical strength to carry on.”

Talk about a man against human and civil rights! He was opposed to same-sex anything, resisted ordaining women as priests, opposed to embryonic stem cell research and actually led an anti-condom initiative in Africa where the battle against AIDS is toughest. On top of it all, he dealt with the child abuse by priests scandal for which he apologized, compared Islam to violence and supported deniers of the Holocaust.

Let’s hope the Catholic Church can appoint a more tolerant human being as their leader.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

A la prochaine…

Adrian Leeds

(Photo by Tom Reeves)

Director of The Adrian Leeds Group, LLC

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P.S. Don’t miss the House Hunters International episode “Starting Over in Paris” on February 28 at 7 p.m. E/P. Did you know that many Parler Paris Apartments have been featured on House Hunters International? You can stay in one of the gorgeous apartments appearing in this popular show! Visit Parler Paris Apartments and look for the HGTV the logo.