Cheers Everyone!

I was cleaning up the papers mounting up on my desk and found this little ditty that I had read somewhere and thought it might come in handy one day......and today is the day!

I think it is a fitting final post for 2008.

"This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.

Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done".

(Source: Anon, traditional)

The Moral? Communication is often more complicated than it first seems!

Looking forward to "visiting" you all over and over again in 2009. Stay safe everybody as this somebody really cares and hopes nobody misses out on the happiest and healthiest year ever. I hope I haven't missed anybody!

My cats Wilson and Ellie patiently waiting for SOMEBODY to open the door!

How We Perceive Ourselves

Each time we look in a mirror, we choose the lens through which we view ourselves. We choose which aspects of ourselves - of our bodies and of our beings - we focus our attention on. Sometimes we take in our whole figure, or more often, we see ourselves as a collection of individual parts, some of which we classify as "good" and others as "bad." We compare ourselves to our peers and to an ideal image we hold in our mind. We wonder if others see us the same way we see ourselves, if they make the same classifications and hold the same judgments.

A young child looks at the world through fresh eyes, seeing, taking it all in, but not judging. As we grow and learn about our world, we develop our own associations. We absorb the notions of beauty held by the culture in which we are raised and we internalise the remarks of parents, friends, and even strangers. All of these elements colour our view of ourselves.

Others view us through the filter of their own experiences. They bring their own associations to bear on what they see, but they also pick up the images each of us projects outward. Those little mental snapshots we take when we look at ourselves in the mirror become part of our energy field and part of our self-definition. Interestingly, we can change others' view of us simply by shifting the images we hold of ourselves.

The next time you look in the mirror, challenge yourself to see yourself anew. Be like a young child and, for a moment, suspend your judgments. Release the very human need to classify and label. Instead, see yourself with an open heart. Ask the universe to send you a higher, truer vision of yourself, then get quiet. If you're lucky, you may just catch a glimpse of the eternal you, the you that is perfect exactly as you are.

Darling Joseph from 1 day old till 2 years.

Marianne Williamson

Marianne Williamson is someone that I greatly admire. She writes with such clarity, I find her work very visual, can easily understand the concept, very powerful and insightful.

Her latest book The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife was published in January 2008. Below is a review of the book:

"Midlife is not a crisis; it is a time of rebirth. It is not a time to accept your death. It is time to accept your life and to finally, truly live it, as only you and you alone know deep in your heart it was meant to be lived. This book is a passionate call to embrace the power and inspiration that opens up to us in the middle of our lives. In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it".

I love the way Marianne sees mid life as the opportunity for a second (and sometimes a third) puberty... finally reaching the point in our lives where our personalities have matured enough to know how to handle the opportunities and challenges that we are faced with every day. Retirement is less about stopping work and more to do with finding and doing what is really our passion. At 40 or 50 we have (God willing) another 40 or 50 years to discover that passion and live it, knowing that all the experiences in previous careers and relationships with others have brought us to the point where we now, hopefully, know what to do with it all.

For me, my life only gets better as I age. The early years were actually rougher for me than getting older. But, for those of you struggling with mid-life, this book will give you a very positive perspective on the whole thing and may be just the ticket if you're feeling down.

I also found some quotes written by Marianne that I would like to share.

• Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.

• The secret of success is to realize that the crisis on our planet is much larger than just deciding what to do with your own life, and if the system under which we live the structure of western civilization begins to collapse because of our selfishness and greed, then it will make no difference whether you have $1 million dollars when the crash comes or just $1.00. The only work that will ultimately bring any good to any of us is the work of contributing to the healing of the world.

• The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

• Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

• When an idea reaches critical mass there is no stopping the shift its presence will induce.

• Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don't see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself.

• We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what's wrong in your life, or you can focus on what's right.

• Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.

• What happened to my generation is that we never grew up. The problem isn't that we're lost or apathetic, narcissistic or materialistic. The problem is we're terrified.
Wow ain't that the truth!!! She certainly doesn't let us off lightly!!!


I took this photo last week when I travelled to Wagstaffe, about one and half hours north of Sydney. How cute are these creatures!

Hope, Ethics and Character

When the last old year slipped into the new, even the most keen-eyed soothsayer could hardly have predicted that 2008 would bring such tumult.

As this year comes to an end and I reflect on the events that shaped it, I have been struck by the fact that so many people's lives are now affected by fear. Some are losing or have lost jobs, superannuation or businesses. Some are losing their homes.

An African friend wrote to say how fortunate the phrase "downsizing" is when contracted with the reality that increasing numbers where she lives have nothing to downsize from or to. That sharp reality doesn't always make our own fate easier to face, yet it is significant because this has been a year of quite momentous and surprising gains.

We now can't help but see the underbelly of ruthlessly speculative investing. Getting rich by such trading never did have the same social value as making real things or offering needed services. When money and ethics are divorced, we all suffer.

How wonderful it will be if, even five years from now, we can look back on 2008 as the year in which ethics returned to centre stage, determining the big decisions and benefiting people's lives in relation to the issues that matter most.

Certainly, there are signs this is what people want. In Australia we began wonderfully with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's public apology to indigenous people. More remains to be done, and the needs of the environment are no less urgent just because money worries have eclipsed them. But the call to more ethical living does not end there.

On a global scale, the year's most significant public event has been the election of Barack Obama, a man who doesn't belong to any traditional ruling elite and who was surely elected not because he is African-American but because he is exceptionally ethical as well as exceptionally intelligent. That he is also African-American, however, makes his victory so much sweeter.

Hope can only flourish in an ethical environment. The hopes that drove Obama and gave him victory were those expressed by one of my greatest heroes, Martin Luther King jnr: that his "children" might one day be judged not by the colour of their skin but on the strength of their character. Hope, ethics and character create a formidable trinity.

For me, it has also been a year of hope and inspiration. Some of that has come from books I have read or music I have listened to, as well as from invaluable personal encounters.

The novel I most enjoyed was the thought-provoking "Tuesdays with Morrie", "a beautifully written book of great clarity and wisdom that lovingly captures the simplicity beyond life's complexities".

The outstanding concert was Philip Glass's musical interpretation of Leonard Cohen's poems , Book of Longing, and my favourite movie was The Black Balloon, a story about fitting in, discovering love and accepting your family.

Read, see or listen if you can.

Jessen (whom I travelled with to Rwanda in Nov 2006) and Amiee at the photo exhibition we organised to exhibit the children's photos.

Managing Our Ups and Downs

Moods are strange things. Driven as much by thought as emotion, and by biology as well as psychology, they can easily feel bigger than we are. They come. They seem to lift our spirits or lower them. And usually they go again as a different mood takes their place.

Some lucky people are genuinely stable in their moods. If pushed too far, they may be ratty, sharp or anxious, but generally speaking they can rely on feeling pretty positive about life, and - as significantly - the people around them can also rely on them being pleasant and easy to be around.

That kind of optimistic stability is a gift to be treasured because there are also many people whose default moods are considerably less sunny. They are not people who are clinically depressed, necessarily, but they live with an inner flatness and absence of pleasure, or a low-grade constant irritability, that significantly colours how they see the world and everyone around them.

Many people come to view this kind of existence as normal and, in a way, they are right. It is normal for them, and the energy it takes to think about change can feel far out of reach. Yet change is needed, in part because a low mood can slip lower, but also because the person living this bleak existence is never doing so alone.

Moods are highly contagious. We step into a room and pick up at once if someone is feeling down. They don't need to talk. Moods "leak" into the atmosphere and, for better or worse, affect everyone around.

Over the past few weeks, several of my friends have spoken to me about the helplessness they feel living or working with someone who is chronically low. One woman described her colleague as "low-grade depressed, like a battery that is not quite flat but not really turning over either". What make the situation worse, in her view, is that he seems incapable of taking action, either because he has become so used to how he is or because whatever he's tried in the past has had little effect.

When it is a beloved partner, parent or child who is struck in the world of grey, those feelings of helplessness can be harder to bear - and more contagious still. Yet people in this situation often find themselves facing some kind of taboo on tough and truthful talking.

We don't want to add to the sufferer's pain, so we bury our own. It becomes easy to lose touch with our own reality and needs, even when that adds to the sum of suffering and doesn't reduce it.

In his book Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer comments on how some people with chronic low or flat mood came to feel their most fundamental sense of "self" had been restored when medication and therapy worked effectively. What struck Kramer was that while his patients had in most cases not previously known a lively and optimistic adult self, something within them eagerly claimed it.

Medication and therapy are not for everyone but, intelligently used, they can make a powerful difference; I know they did for me, after the break up of my marriage.

What can also make a difference is to choose to engage far more intensely and energetically than usual with other people, ideas, events, nature and the myriad physical aspects of life that can both stimulate and heal us - even and especially when it's not instantly rewarding or is the last thing you feel like doing.

Putting choice and action ahead of feelings is critical here. It may be true that we can't choose our moods, but we can certainly choose how we will live them out and how we will respond to other people's.

Life is tough at times but it is also precious, every minute of it! Losing sight of that is tragic. It is precisely when throwing ourselves more completely into life seems counter-intuitive or plain impossible that it is most urgently needed - restoring and renewing sufferers and supporter alike.

Joseph - September 2008 - In a pensive mood

Joseph - September 2008 - Happy Mood