Weather App

The other day, my husband and I were discussing the weather forecast for that day. I mentioned it was supposed to rain in the morning but stop by the afternoon. He disagreed, stating it was supposed to rain all day. I had my weather app on my phone to back me up, and he had his. So we did a comparison.

As we stood side by side looking at our phones, it became apparent that even though the apps were the same, the forecasts were different. The app on my phone stated the rain would stick around for a few hours in the morning, his showed the rain would last all day. Neither of us understood how that could be, as the apps were the same. We chuckled at modern technology and then went about our business. A few minutes later I started laughing.

After asking me what was so funny I shared my thoughts: what if there was an app that could forecast our mood or temperament for the day? What if I could have an app that would let me know what kind of mood he was going to be in at various times throughout the day and his showed mine?

If I knew, for example, that from three to six his “mood weather” was going to be cloudy and rainy, possibly even storm, would I just say I’ve got errands to run and I’ll see you after six? And if he could tell that the weather indicated a cloudy day ahead for me, would he steer clear also?

While I can see the benefits of having such an app, there can be a down side. I imagine the flip side of knowing what was coming and then choosing to avoid it is that we would lose the benefit of how to handle those cloudy, windy, stormy times in any relationship.

Most every relationship has those moments, and it’s important we learn to navigate the stormy seas so that when they come we don’t sink or drown. If we always bypassed those overcast, turbulent times, how would we learn to compromise, be compassionate or become resilient? We most likely would only tolerate pleasant, sunny weather.

Even though a “mood weather” app could help us avoid some low atmospheric pressure, (and those gray moods of others), I think I’d rather just carry an umbrella.

Chatter Box

If you’ve ever spent time with a toddler, you know they often tend to talk incessantly. After a while of listening, you might wish they would just stop talking.

There is another little voice that can sometimes talk too much, and all you want it to do is be quiet. I’m referring to the one you don’t see, yet speaks non-stop in your head. You know that one, it prattles on and on while you’re in the shower, driving, people watching or even trying to have a conversation with someone. It can say some pretty terrible things.

In his book, The Untethered Soul, author Michael Singer refers to the voice as your inner roommate. He shares that you can meet your inner roommate rather quickly by sitting someplace alone and becoming completely quiet. Your roommate will start talking almost immediately. And most likely it will not shut up.

As long as you are awake, your thoughts are churning and the roommate speaks. It can go into overdrive when things are uncertain. Which they often are. I bet its favorite question during those times is “what if.” My husband recently said when things are uncertain, it increases the chatter.

If you’re lucky, it will talk nicely to you and tell you positive, uplifting, and encouraging things. And hopefully it will be patient and lovingly honest.

But for many of us, it likes to tell us, in great detail, what we should be upset about, and why. It loudly exclaims when we don’t like certain things and it’s quick to proclaim that someone or something is wrong or stupid. It may also lie to us and say mean, nasty things about others and even our self. I’ve often heard we would not allow someone to speak to us the way we speak to ourselves.

If you want to be free from how annoying this inner voice can be, you need to first be aware it is even there. Pay attention to how often it wants to be the director and conduct the narrative in your head. And I don’t encourage you to hate that little voice, because like it or not, it’s not going anywhere. It goes where you go. You’re stuck with it.

Perhaps if we befriend that little chatter box inside, treat it lovingly like we would our own child and teach it how to speak, show grace and be kind, it will end up being the best roommate we ever had.

Energy Bills

I wondered recently, what would happen if we were able to monetize our personal energy?

Think about this with me for a minute. If our energy were converted into cold hard cash, how would we spend it? Or save it?

Let’s say each morning we are given a hundred dollars in denominations of five, so a total of twenty bills. And for every incident where we got angry and acted badly because of that anger, maybe we said something hateful or nasty, perhaps texted or posted something on social media that was unkind or untrue, we had to pay that money out. Five dollars every time. And then let’s suppose that money was going to the person who was on the receiving end of that offense! That would make us more angry and additional money would be flying out of our pockets! I imagine there would be some people who would go broke rather quickly, and I bet you also can think of a few.

However, we do have the ability to save that money. The way to do that would be in how we treat others. Would our goal be to keep all one hundred dollars? Could we successfully do that?

Because when we think about it, it takes a lot of energy to be angry, unkind, and bitter each day. It not only drains our energy, it also robs us of peace and harmony, and so much more.

If this could actually happen, if we could monetize our energy, it would be really interesting to see what could change, and would change in the world.

It makes me wonder.

Junk Drawer

Does your home have a junk drawer? It’s often located in the kitchen, and it’s a space that ends up cluttered with odds and ends that might not have a designated spot, and often random things get thrown in. Items like rubber bands and paper clips, restaurant take out menus, scotch tape, pens and pencils, a random band aid and maybe one of those plastic clips that come on the bread bag.

Every once in a while we go through our junk drawer, throw away the pens that no longer work, the broken rubber bands and even the empty scotch tape dispenser (who put that back in the drawer)? I don’t think I need more space, what I really needs is less “stuff.”

Why do we do this, keep some of the things we do?

For many of us, we have a “junk drawer” in our minds. We hold onto things that no longer serve a purpose, but for some reason we find it difficult to let it go. Maybe it was a hurtful comment made to us, or we said to someone else, or a painful memory we are struggling with. Perhaps it’s the driver that cut us off in traffic – several days ago! That mental junk is taking up valuable space in our minds.

I’m thinking about this because we recently had our kitchen cabinets resurfaced which required us to remove everything, and I mean everything, out of our kitchen. Oh my!

I’ve realized the clutter that fills our house can also affect the clutter that is in our minds. As I’ve taken on this project of deciding what to get rid of, and more importantly, what to keep (how many soup ladles does a person really need), it inspires me to think about doing some mental clean up as well.

As stated by author Peter Walsh, who has written a few books on this subject “Clutter isn’t just the stuff in your closet. It’s anything that gets between you and the life that you want to be living.”

This task is not something I will do overnight, or really ever finish. I think it will be an ongoing process of choosing to keep only what is most important and useful to hold onto, both physically and mentally.

My goal is no more junk drawers.

Permission Granted

The other day, I was getting ready to tell my husband something I had done, and I prefaced it with “now don’t get mad at me.” After I told him what it was, I changed my mind and said “actually, it’s okay if you are angry.”

He did say what I had done wasn’t a big deal and he was not mad. He then asked me why I had changed what I had said.

I told him I realized my statement was asking him to deny a feeling that could cause me to feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to fall into the trap I have in the past, and we see too often, where we are not allowing each other to have the feelings we have.

How often has someone told you not to feel sad or maybe angry, those feelings that often seem more unacceptable? How often have you said that to someone else? I know there were times I have, and still catch myself doing.

The truth is, we all have feelings we are going to feel, whether we want to or not. When we are told by others or even ourselves, that we should not feel certain feelings, that doesn’t mean they are going to go away. If we don’t acknowledge our feelings or even deny their existence, they often get trapped inside our bodies.

The challenge is to allow and accept the feelings without letting them rule our behavior. A challenge as old as time. History books, as well as our own personal and family history, is filled with accounts of people who have led with their emotions instead of wisdom.

Until we can encourage and permit each other to have our feelings, and learn how to express them in a healthy way, this world is not going to change. History will just continue to repeat itself.

We need to grant each other, and ourselves, that permission.

Weeds and Wildflowers

I am not a gardener. I don’t particularly enjoy digging in the dirt, planting flowers, weeding and all the chores that gardeners do.

Weeding is a task that must be repeated regularly in order to keep them from overtaking the whole garden and choking out the more desirable plants. And where do the weeds come from? You must plant seeds in order for the flowers to bud and grow, but the weeds appear on their own, sprouting from the earth without any provocation.

Flowers require water and pruning to live and grow and thrive. Not those pesky weeds, you can pull them out again and again and they continue to vigorously grow and regenerate, especially when there is an imbalance in the soil.

This makes me think about having a garden in our mind. This garden is also filled with weeds and wildflowers. The weeds are those thoughts that pop up without any warning. We often don’t have to specifically think about creating those types of thoughts. They are usually the negative, judgmental kind. There are also the wildflower thoughts. Those are the positive, healthy thoughts that often require a seed we plant and take a more intentional approach to cultivate and grow.

Those weedy thoughts can overtake our minds and wreak havoc. They often darken our moods and affect our behavior and how we see and treat ourselves and others. The weeds often flourish when there is an imbalance in our soul.

It takes our continued effort to keep those weeds from overtaking the beauty of the wildflower thoughts, those that represent actions and behaviors of kindness, caring, acceptance and compassion.

When our mental garden is filled with more wildflowers than weeds, our lives are often more full of beauty and enriching, our relationships can be more fun and rewarding, and our physical health is often better.

That kind of weeding is worth my effort.

Awesomeology

Yes, that is a word. It is the study of things that are awesome.

Learning of this word led me to do a little research. In 2008 Author Neil Pasricha started a blog titled 1000 Awesome Things. His goal was to each day write about something that made him happy. He didn’t start this because his life was full of fun and happiness. In fact, he was getting divorced and his good friend attempted suicide. After another attempt, he succeeded.

He began the blog because his life was not full of contentment and joy.

I won’t go into details as to what his blog included, which eventually led to a book, The Book of Awesome and then a few more books.

This is more about what his experience taught him, as he spent each day looking for something positive or awesome, and wrote about it. You might guess the result.

He found more happiness.

Studies have been performed that actually show how your life can improve if every day you look for something that makes you happy or brings you joy. It will improve even more if you write it down. One published model shows that fifty percent of your happiness is based on genetics, ten percent of your happiness is based upon circumstances, and forty percent of your happiness is based on your intentional activities. Forty percent!

This just proves that we do have some control over our own happiness. Actually, a lot more than just our circumstances provide. I don’t want to discount the trauma and pain we go through. It’s important to deal with those in a healthy, productive way, and even seek help when we need to. It does, however, reveal that almost half of our happiness is up to us. Which I imagine will make some people angry, because then they have no one else to blame for their misery. Especially in the world we live in today, where you can find someone unhappy and miserable on every corner – and they are blaming someone else for it.

What are those intentional activities we can do? There is a wealth of resources available online or even at your local library or bookstore. A few simple things come to mind: writing down each day one or two things that make you happy, sharing with someone what those things are, showing others kindness, practicing forgiveness, and being creative.

Those are just a few, and it’s important to find what works for you.

Perhaps the lesson is, if you want to live a happier life, become an awesomologist.

Good News

I would like to share one of my favorite quotes, this is by Marvin J. Ashton. 

“Be the one who nurtures and builds. Be the one who has an understanding and a forgiving heart, one who looks for the best in people. Leave people better than you found them.” 

I love that last part. Unfortunately, this isn’t the pattern of behavior we are currently seeing reported in the world, especially in mainstream media. 

In the beginning of the pandemic, when the news was filled with so much tragedy and sadness, one program my family looked forward to watching on Sunday evenings was the weekly episode of Some Good News with the actor John Krasinski. The show was on YouTube and did not appear professionally produced. I believe it was just him recording and posting it himself.  It usually lasted around twenty minutes with several short segments of goodness. John portrays a reporter highlighting uplifting stories of people around the globe who were performing acts of kindness and doing something positive. 

One segment shows a teenage girl coming home from her last chemo treatment.  This was during that time of social distancing and she had the surprise of driving down her street which was lined with vehicles decorated with balloons and signs, with her friends and family welcoming her home. Another segment captures a sanitation worker standing outside a retirement home, singing happy birthday to a woman turning 94 who, at the time, was not allowed visitors. And on one episode, John tells the audience his goal when creating the show was to report only good news.  He then tells them, the truth is, the people are the good news. 

Even though you can search for the show on YouTube, unfortunately Some Good News is no longer being recorded or aired weekly.  That doesn’t mean the good isn’t out there. It still is, we just might have to look a little bit harder to see it. 

I’m going to close with how the quote above ended: “leave people better than you found them.”

Be the good news.

Discovering a New Chapter

Last week my post was about perspective, and how when we look at something or someone with a different lens, we often learn something new, and perhaps even remove the hat of judgement.

I’m going to share a personal example, taken from a chapter in my mother’s life. I grew up knowing my mother’s parents divorced when she was a child, still in elementary school. We were told my grandfather came back from WWII and although my grandparents tried to make it work, even adopting a little boy like they had dreamed about, the marriage fell apart. He left my grandmother for someone else. My mother was always matter of fact in her comments, she never showed much emotion about this part of her life, but it must have hurt her deeply.

The story we heard is that my grandfather was changed by what he witnessed in the war. It is said that he might have been responsible for documenting some of the war with photos , for he came back with several black and white pictures of the bodies. They were piled high like trash, the Jewish people who were killed during that time. At some point my mom came across the photos and he was so upset that she had seen them, he burned them all.

A few years ago I read the book ‘The Choice’ by Dr. Edith Eger. She is a Holocaust survivor and spent time in an internment camp. On the day they were finally liberated, she was pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. She depicts the scene vividly. She’s lying in a heap of bodies, the majority of them already dead, in various stages of decomposition. She shares about being barely able to move but somehow, she shifts her body just enough it alerts one of the American soldiers that in that pile of death, someone was alive. They pulled her out. She survives.

I remember reading that part and thinking “Is this the horror my grandfather witnessed?” How can anyone not be changed, affected by that?

After my mother passed away, I have become the keeper of the letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while he was in the war. There must be about 150 of them. The fact that my grandmother kept them all those years means something. I don’t believe my mom ever read them, and at one point she wanted to destroy them. Thankfully, someone stopped her. So now I have them.

I pull out my grandfather’s letters, there are probably 150 of them and I place them in order of the post mark date. I begin reading. I see the handwriting of a man I never met. He had been long gone to another state, his relationship with my mom non-existent before she was even married. What strikes me is the love and devotion pouring out to both my grandmother and my mom in those letters. He often tells his beloved she is doing an amazing job with their “Joanie” – my mom. His care and support for my grandmother are palpable on the pages, in penmanship and phrases from long ago. He writes so eloquently of his love, it brings tears to my eyes.

I struggle reconciling this man with the one I’ve been told about. I also discovered through ancestry that he had become the grandfather to his step-daughter’s little girl. He had been her grandpa her whole life. I had an opportunity to talk with her. She describes a loving, caring grandfather. A grandfather I never even had a chance to meet.

My grandfather went off to war one man and came home to his loving wife and daughter changed, different, tormented. He was unable to resolve in his mind the atrocities he had seen. He could no longer convey his love the same way. I can’t imagine the anguish this caused both of my grandparents.

My perception of this man has changed. What I can understand now is that he wasn’t an awful person. It does not change the fact that his actions hurt my grandmother and their children deeply. Hurting people often hurt others. But I want to and choose to believe there was a part of him that always loved them. Unfortunately, that love was buried too deep under the rubble of his pain, so much so that he was never the same husband and father as before.

His story is a reminder to me to remain curious and open to learn, there may be more than we know, as each of us has many chapters in our lives, and they all matter.

Perspective

If you’ve ever seen the movie National Treasure, you might remember the glasses in the movie. Ben, the main character, finds a pair of old spectacles that are designed to help him read a map to find the treasure. There are multiple lenses and they are very unique.  When he first uses them, the glasses do reveal a clue, however not enough to find the treasure. Later in the movie Ben realizes that as you move a lens, it will reveal even more.  Another hidden clue appears on the map.

I often think of those glasses when I have learned something on a subject that alters my viewpoint. I can’t help but think about what can happen when we change our own “lens” of perspective to gain a little more understanding about something, or someone.

I have a daily calendar and the quote on Monday of this week was by Joan Chittister. She said “Humility does not necessarily require me to agree and comply with everyone else’s position, but it does demand that I be willing to understand and respect the many sides of every issue.” 

“The many sides of every issue.” We don’t always see things the way others do. Just ask siblings to talk about a family vacation or memory growing up and you can easily have very different versions. Each one thinks their memory is the correct one.

People often hear and interpret things based upon their own unique history, upbringing and life experiences. Imagine what could happen when we allow ourselves to be curious about what someone else might see or think, rather than believe our version is the absolute truth. We might still disagree, but at least we are talking and listening to each other. I believe when we do this, life can get bigger, more expansive. I know mine has.