Have we completely taken our children’s birthday parties hostage and created another platform that we feel the urge to compete with one another in a vicious cycle of bigger, better, faster, stronger? And, if so, what is the impact on our children?

If you’ve been struggling to understand why you aren’t happy even thought there may be a number of things in your life you are grateful for, happy about and have worked hard for, then perhaps you need to examine and explore what you expected from life.

Recently, on a flight home from New York, I met an interesting young woman. She was an attractive woman in her mid-thirties. I was travelling with my four-year-old daughter. I must have looked tired, shabby and slightly annoyed. We had been on a whirlwind trip to New York to celebrate the marriage of our beautiful friends, Riccardo and Fillipo. We had literally just left the wedding lunch to catch our 20-hour flight home to Sydney.