by midlifemaven on July 1, 2010
I was introduced to The Atlas of Experience by Louise van Swaaij and Jean Klare book as part of a graphic design project. Our task was to illustrate a major moment in life, and this book was one of several we were shown as a way others had solved this design dilemma. As someone who has always loved maps, the idea of creating a map of experiences was intriguing.
My solution to the task wasn’t a map, but I keep coming back to this book as an intriguing way of explaining, connecting and understanding your life so far. I like the idea that there are conventions in map making and reading that mean that others can interpret signs and symbols I chose to put on my map. There is also a good chance that the map others would draw may be quite familiar, as there are many life events people have in common.
This book also appeals because of its honesty. Life is not reported as an entirely happy and positive place, which is refreshing. I love the idea of maps of life areas including “Mountains of work”, “The Isles of forgetfulness”, “Change” and “Bad Habits”. I can certainly identify with having visited all these locations!
Each map is preceded by a commentary on the emotions and back story that support the map. Conventional wisdom, combined with the actual outcomes are interwoven in unconnected paragraphs of thoughts, just as our minds tend to recall things. The maps have contours, roads, coastlines, areas we were drawn to despite ourselves and areas we managed to avoid. They have pools of water where we may have stopped and spent some time, and delightful towns where we had memorable times. Almost all have ports and airports, because as with life there is usually a way out of even the stickiest places we land.
Some lands are very green and verdant, while others are cold and chilly. We have most of us been to both these locations some time in life. There are geologically formed elements; volcanos, steep cliffs, rivers that abruptly twist and change course. Who hasn’t visited the volcano called “sparks fly” at sometime in their life?
I love the idea that we can map our lives as one action to clarify where we’ve been. If you like maps and have a sense you’ve travelled a lot to get where you are today, this may be a book you also pick up repeatedly.
by midlifemaven on May 23, 2010
As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes life has to keep sending me the same message in different forms to get my attention. Lately they have been about different forms of happiness. I’m assuming I didn’t pay to much attention at first because ‘happiness’ is such a vague concept. We all know what it feels like to be happy, but for the most part life happens in the middle of the happy/unhappy spectrum where we are neither ecstatic nor depressed.
Somewhere in the process I came across a book called The Geography of Bliss by NPR reporter Eric Weiner. I had heard people talk about it and thought it was a book of travel essays, so got the book to see what he had to say. It turned out to be a study of what different cultures consider to constitute happiness, and surprisingly, there are major differences. What makes people happy in one culture, such as the freedom from lots of rules, is incredibly painful to another culture where proscribed social order is what makes every one feel safe and happy. I had assumed that much as sadness is a common human condition, so was happiness. To be fair, the book doesn’t measure the sensation of happiness, so that could be standard, it simply looks at what a group of people need to have in place for them to be aware that they are happy.
This sent me down the path of thinking about the daily happinesses we experience. If we felt elated all the time, simple pleasures would have no power to move us, so came to the conclusion that we move around the middle ground of happiness much of the time, which is what makes us so aware of great happiness or sadness when it arrives.
I started looking around for the things that bring microbursts of happiness into life, the leavening that makes an ordinary day a bit brighter. Often it can be opening the curtains to see sunshine and blue skies, and since it is spring here, the bursts of bird song and daily appearances of new flowers and foliage have provided bursts of happiness. Happiness also comes from spontaneous acts of kindness by others, letting a driver change lanes or out of a side road, doing an unexpected small favor , from sharing humor and the broad grin of someone who has realized that the day is good.
I’m sure there are many psychological studies into happiness, but I prefer the questionnaire approach to finding out what is going on inside my head! I found this downloadable booklet from MetLife called, Discovering What Matters: Your Guide to the Good Life. Since it is from an insurance agency, it has a vested interest in helping you contemplate your future and how you plane to finance it, but is also asks some good questions about how happy you now are in different areas of your life. Having answered the questions and got totals, it asks you what you plan to do to make the less happy areas of your life more happy in the future.
While the bottom line is that we are each responsible for creating our own happiness, it doesn’t hurt to have some help in identifying the areas we need to work on first.
by midlifemaven on April 24, 2010
Having discovered some broccoli in the microwave this morning, several days after I must have put it in there to cook, I am forced to wonder – once again – whether senility can be far away? Granted I’ve been busy launching my new “I’ll build you a website or blog then hold your hand until you’re comfortable about updating it” project, making multiple aging body doctor visits, and enduring the five hour waits for the technician visits needed to change over from Comcast to Verizon, but most people’s lives are just as busy, so can’t claim any of that as an excuse.
It was somewhat reassuring to read this article in the New York Times. In it the author suggests that by midlife our brains have got into the habit of using the same few synaptic paths for retrieving information. The rest of our knowledge isn’t lost to us, its just at the far end of memory trails, so we have to work harder to think of related events to help recall it. The solution is that as we age we need to do and learn new things to help create new pathways within our brains. Not only do we get to enjoy the new experiences, but the extra neural links help us recall less well-connected information more easily.
I was further encouraged to hear about the findings in Barbara Strauch’s new book, The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind. In it she acknowledges that although we might have memory lapses, by midlife we have become much more adept at processing complex information. For example, younger brains use only the right frontal lobes to learn pairs of words, but more mature brains automatically utilize both the left and right frontal lobes. Although we have more experience to draw on, our brains work more effectively. Not only are our brains better organized, but we are more likely to be optimistic, both characteristics that fly in the face of conventional wisdom that we become dotty and depressed as we age.
So, I suppose I should be grateful that my brain helped me process all the logistics for my site project, and made sure I was in the right place at the right time – with the right paperwork – for doctor and technician appointments. Despite all this reassurance, the mystery remains – what vegetables did I eat the night I planned to eat the broccoli, and how did I cook them?
by midlifemaven on April 1, 2010
As someone who has battled her weight much of her life, I liked this offering on the AARP site. It offers 10 ways to sneakily reduce caloric intake, and since the full frontal attack on weight loss can be exhausting, found this presentation to be a welcome change of pace.
It made me wonder what strategies other women are using to help reduce calorie intake? Do you have a favorite way of avoiding weight gain or to make yourself exercise when you don’t feel like it? I’m sure that between us we have an encyclopedic amount of information!
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