Midlife Rediscovery

Happiness

November 29, 2009

It turns out that Penn has a department of positive psychology, and their website has a battery of quizzes you can take to find out how happy-or depressed-you are. As a longtime answerer of quizzes and questionnaires, I immediately signed up (the results become part of the research so your consent to participate is required) and got going.

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Giving thanks for the small things

November 26, 2009

Since I am actively trying to notice when I am nudged in the same direction by a variety of sources, it seemed appropriate that today’s post should be about the things I am truly thankful for.

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Revamping and revising

November 22, 2009

It has been a while since I last posted and feel you deserve an explanation for my absence. As with so many things, it was the result of a sense of uncertainty about the direction I was taking. I realized that although I had set up my midlife sites as ideas evolved, nearly a year later it was no longer clear to me what purpose each site was aiming to fulfill. Clearly the sites needed rationalizing, and the time had come to create order from the emerging chaos – and to clarify for myself what I was trying to accomplish.

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Knowledge vs. pop culture

October 28, 2009

I recently wrote that I was becoming aware that seeking or having knowledge was becoming taboo. The post struck a chord with several people, and made me realize that sometimes it is not the knowledge itself that is under attack, but is more often the knee jerk reaction of those protecting themselves because of their lack of knowledge. To avoid the discomfort of being shown to not know something, they aggressively attack person with the knowledge.

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Antiques have something to teach us.

October 21, 2009

In our world where time is money and we don’t like to wait for anything, it is refreshing to look closely at things that took hours for someone to make. Too often we can now buy the quick version of a project that saves us the tedium of going through the whole process for ourselves – think cake mixes. I have to admit that I have given up doing many things that require long hours of effort – unless I can multi-task and do something else at the same time – and could stand to relearn the values of patience and perseverance.

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Is knowledge the latest taboo?

October 17, 2009

The worst kind of peer pressure seems to have risen to the surface so those who are least interested in education are imposing their values on everyone else. Gaining or displaying knowledge is now apparently something to hide.

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Is what you fear as bad as you fear?

October 12, 2009

I was intrigued by this story on the BBC website about a new installation at the Tate Modern in London. The installation is a huge box that the visitor can walk into, however it is completely black, and the visitor is left to work out for themselves what is inside. The goal of the artist is to allow the visitor to work out that even when they can’t see where they are going, the outcome is seldom as scary as they imagine it will be.

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. . . and what to add back in to your life.

October 6, 2009

In amongst the decision-making about shedding activities, roles and attitudes that no longer work, it was something of a surprise to discover that what I most urgently need to shed was failing to make time to do things that energize and excite me. In my over-achieving mind taking time out for fun is time ‘wasted’. I hadn’t consciously realized that in doing this, although I initially got a great deal more work done, I was now stalling and losing impetus.

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More nudges

October 3, 2009

Basking in the glow of realizing (once again) that stepping back from a situation is sometimes the best thing to do, I wondered if there was anything else I needed to let go of? I recognize that there is a fine line between letting go of things that you can no longer do anything about and simply bailing out when things get tough, so tried to think what fell into the first category.

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Inner thoughts = outer actions

September 29, 2009

Have you noticed how an idea or concept suddenly appears in your life, only to be repeated in different contexts over the space of a few days? Whatever the psychological backstory is to this phenomenon, my message from the universe is currently that whatever is on the inside will be evident on the outside. Not earth-shatteringly new information, I’ll admit, but over the past three days I’ve encountered it in writing, in a discussion and on television.

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