The Real Things in Life - Part 2

More advice that is constantly offered:

Be Healthy!

Of course it's good to be healthy, but this advice is normally so thoroughly bundled up with shame it often does more harm than good.

Yes, people enjoy happier and longer lives if they are not carrying extra weight.

They also enjoy longer and happier lives if they are not laid low by anxiety, depression and self-contempt.

Is our central problem that we ask too little of ourselves or that we demand too much?

We hate ourselves for our every imperfection and then we over-consume in various ways to suppress the shame of that previous over-consumption.

There are two epidemics under way in the West - obesity and depression.

How interesting that both started just as people began obsessing over their body mass index.


"The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind."
~~ G.K. Chesterton

I haven't shown photos of my two favourite boys for some time.  Here are a couple taken this year.

Bella and Charlie (aged 8) hanging out together - June 2012

Joseph aged 6. Photo taken at his school art exhibition  - September 2012.

PS  Still haven't found another music site, but discovered how to add a youtube and start it playing when you click on my blog.  So much for the peace and quiet!

The Real Things in Life - Part 1

People give us advice all day long - parents, lifestyle coaches, magazines, self-help gurus.  What a pity most of it is wrong!

Here is some food for thought Part 1:
Live in the present - This piece of advice is so often cited it has become a reason for NOT living in the present, since so much of the "present" now consists of people lecturing us about how we should live in it.

Actually the recollected past and the anticipated future are both quite nourishing places.  The present nearly always involves a soup of distractions; it contains the thing that's important, plus lots of things that get in the way.

Recollecting the moment you stood in front of a favourite painting/sculpture, for example, is often better than the moment itself, in recollection you can strip out all the things that were unimportant: your sore feet, the couple talking loudly behind you, the queue for admission.  Memory pares down the moment to its essence.

The same is true of the birth of a child, a kiss, a bushwalk.  In memory, the experience is at its most intense and pure.  After remembering these things in blissful reverie, we can then anticipate similar, or better, experiences in the future, the hoped-for experience fizzing in our mind in a way that is pure and unencumbered.

I'm not attacking the present.  It's highly useful in prompting both recollection and anticipation - the real things in life.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes"
~~ Marcel Proust

Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, Sydney November 2012.
Artist Greer Taylor, NSW called this delightful piece of artwork "transition"

PS My music site MixPod has closed and I haven't found the time to find another site, but I will get around to it shortly....meanwhile enjoy the peace and quiet.

Move Into The Sun

Like plants, to some degree, all of us struggle or flourish according to where we are positioned. Our lives can be hard or easy depending on where the pot is placed.

Most of us, I think, have had this experience: behaving quite differently according to the people in the room at the time. With some people we feel in perpetual shadow; with others, the sunlight seems to angle in and we are aglow.

With one friend you feel as if you are quite intelligent, discussing erudite issues of politics or literature. You are witty, insightful; the right phrase springs into your mouth at the right time. The very next night, in the company of someone else, you feel dumb and boring. Anxiety or insecurity grips so strongly that the right word, the witty phrase, can never fight its way through to the surface.

I've been thinking about the subtleties of positioning - how the sunlight can hit us when we are standing on this spot, but not in this other spot.

Why, then, don't we strive harder to move into the sun?

Why don't we spend more time with those who bring out our best selves, and less with those who bring a nuclear winter? Perhaps we could all send out the mental note: ''Paul Whatchamacallit, I know I'm booked in for a barbecue with you on Saturday week but suddenly I find that I am busy. I'm off to spend time with people who think I'm fabulous. And guess what? When I'm with them, I mostly prove them right.''

The best compliment you can pay someone is to say, ''I like the person I am when I'm with you''.
 
"Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun."
~~ John Lennon - Instant Karma



My friend Rose grows these beautiful orchids and has them in the perfect position for them to flourish.

These lovely women are a joy to spend time with and I feel so blessed to call each of them my friend.



These life long friends always let me shine and bring out the best in me.



My Mother and the GG

Her Excellency, Ms Quentin Bryce, Governor-General of Australia - 10 October 2012

For 5 years my mother (Beryl) and I have been volunteering for a children's organisation called AWCH (Association for the Wellbeing of Children in Healthcare). Beryl makes cookies every week for the office staff and I assist with administration jobs.

Last Wednesday AWCH celebrated the 25th Anniversary of one of it's programs called The Ward Grandparents Scheme.  This was hosted by the Governor-General of Australia, Quentin Bryce, at Admiralty House in Kirribilli, Sydney with an afternoon tea. Her Excellency was AWCH's first national president.

As you could imagine Beryl was over the moon and I was too, at the thought of meeting this lovely lady. And Quentin did not disappoint, she lived up to her reputation of the most elegant lady in Australia.  A lady who was genuinely interested in each person she spoke to.

Beryl has had an exciting year this year, she turned 90 in March and received many letters of congratulation including the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard; the Governor of NSW, Marie Bashir; Members of Parliament and Senators.  Meeting the Governor-General was the icing on the cake.

Beryl was chosen by Ms Bryce to stand next to her in the group photo. (Beryl is in the purple outfit).

Beryl and I in the front row with two other office volunteers.

View from Admiralty House, Kirribilli, Sydney

Nature-Deficit Disorder

“The future will belong to the nature-smart....those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.”

~~ Richard Louv

 

I read an article recently about American writer Richard Louv theory of "nature-deficit disorder".

For most people in their 50s and 60s, memories of childhood are wrapped up with nature: visits to farms owned by friends or relatives; days spent poking around the creeks or fields that intersected the suburbs; a tree house assembled by an unsupervised crew of 10-year-olds in nearby bush, mostly using materials pinched from home.

In just one generation, Louv argues, this easy access to nature has largely disappeared. This matters in all sorts of ways. Louv cites the recent leap in the incidence of short-sightedness. According to a 2008 Australian study, 12-year-olds with the lowest levels of outdoor activity were two to three times more likely to develop myopia. The reason: their eyes have not been exercised by focusing on a distant horizon.

There's something unbelievably sad about a childhood without far horizons: not only the missing eye exercise, but the missing daydreaming and hike planning, the urge to both wander and wonder that comes with the sight of a distant horizon.

According to Louv, time in nature also reduces anxiety by giving us perspective on our problems.

I remember childhood conflicts, with either parents or friends, and how I would take off from home and go walking in the bush and climb a tree so I could look out. Suddenly I was calmer and no longer felt caught in the centre of a storm.

Instead of this time in nature, many people - both young and old - now spend time with social media. Social media, of course, has many good points, especially the way it allows us to form communities outside the limitations of what's on offer in our own neighbourhood, office or school.

It strikes me, though, that social media also involves experiences that are exactly the opposite to what I found in nature.

If the bush makes you seem a small part of a big world, social media makes you feel like a big part of a small world. If nature dissolves ego, social media pumps it up.

No wonder so many of us are anxious.

Facebook and Twitter create a sense that we're at the centre of a Universe of our own creation - we're the planet around which everything swirls: our friends, our tastes, our hobbies.

They don't call them iPads and iPhones for nothing.

Even the name Facebook suggests a mirror into which we gaze at our own reflection. There can be power in that, I guess; the self-esteem of "likes" and "retweets", friendship requests and extra "followers". Yet, as every teenager knows, ego always seems to travel hand-in-hand with self-doubt, and time spent staring appreciatively into the mirror almost always turns sour.

So remember the antidote and the cure lies just an hour or two north, or south, or east, or west of where you are sitting right now.

It waits. The sky so bright it hurts your eyes. The eucalypt leaves glinting like silver.



These two photos below were taken on 1st September 2012 when a girlfriend and myself spent 4 hours wandering through Piles Creek reserve in the Brisbane Water National Park (about an hours drive north of Sydney).