photo credit: psdIn this wintery month of February, what can you pause to celebrate?
Well, if you expected this to be another post about procrastination then you may be surprised to learn that, ironically, I’ve postponed it – I’d forgotten about Valentine’s Day and couldn’t let the holiday go by without this wee bit of a hurrah. More on procrastination is ready to roll, just not today, nor tomorrow either. Watch for it… and in the meantime, let’s celebrate February!
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
— Albert Camus
February’s upon us… and this 2010 version of the second month roared in with the winter madness of an El Nino year – we’ve endured blizzards, rainstorms, floods and mudslides, just to name a few of the weather challenges so far. It’s been a cold, cold winter since the exuberance of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza and New Years Day. Some (many?) among us are feeling the winter doldrums. While we wait for spring to be sprung, we need something to Continue reading » What’s to Celebrate? February, of Course!
What is your reality?
Today has been a writing day for me. And it has created two realities for me.
Reality #1
I spent most of the day working on three different pieces which never quite felt right. I deliberately took a break and came back to them a couple of hours later. They didn’t seem any better. I worked with them for another half hour and finally got myself so depressed that I decided to just leave.
Reality #2
Having given up in disgust, I grabbed the lead and took the dog for a walk. She’s pretty much always up for a walk and I just felt awful. I had worked myself into quite a state about what I would write for my next post.
Continue reading » The Blessing of Reality
Perhaps you’ve heard that one of the most influential factors in resilience and mood management is self-talk. According to Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism
, self-talk – the internal monologue going ’round in our heads – is how we make sense of our world; it’s how we explain what’s happening. And our explanations are often, by habit, pessimistic or optimistic. And that gets me to wondering about all those family clichés we heard growing up. Take my Irish/German Mother’s answers to almost every crisis:
No news is good news
It’s the luck of the Irish
You’ll be well before you’re married
What goes around comes around
Knock wood
As a kid I used to ponder over each of these sayings, wondering, what does that MEAN? Continue reading » What Goes ‘Round Comes Around: Self-Talk and Family Clichés
Posts
Comments
Recent Comments