When you can’t do what you want, do what you can. All of these are ways we can help each other to survive times of trial and tribulation.
We are walking through interesting times, we humans. The world is going through a time of rapid change on a scope that is a mind-boggle. It’s all coming at us at a furious pace as we try to get some kind of handle on it. When our only effective weapons of defense are washing our hands with soap and water, avoiding sneezing and coughing at each other, and stepping far away from one another as the complex constructs we’ve built…
Here’s a thing. On your way to any dream of yours, there are always going to be people telling you what you “should” do and how you “must” move, pointing out paths that suit their own propensities and agendas. Every course you take, every video you watch, every book or post you read, every other person you talk to probably will have some embedded assumptions that might not resonate with your own. It gets confusing when all the other voices…
I’m coming off watching (again) Luam Keflezgy’s 2018 TEDxTalk, ‘The Art of Practical Daydreaming,” at TEDxPenn and I’m smiling big. It is a good one.
In America, dating since the original Social Security Act of 1935, retirement and making it intact to the “Golden Years,” (when you are supposedly free to stop working and “enjoy” lazing around in the little bit of life span you have left once you stop working) has been a gold-standard goal.
For the past few months, the Light of My Life and I have been showing up at the early Saturday-morning Upcountry Farmer’s Market fairly frequently. It has been some years since either of us visited the market.
I have a fondness for quilting. My own experiments in crazy-quilting and then sashiko quilting had me going blind doing fancy-stitching with wild and crazy colors and patterns as well as tactile combinations of bumps and lumps that were a heck of a lot of fun for me and for the heart-friends to whom I gifted these bits of silliness.
Here’s a thing from Jay Conrad Levinson’s GUERILLA MARKETING EXCELLENCE: The 50 Golden Rules for Small-Business Success: “Give till it helps.” It’s a very different take than the more usual “give until it hurts” that Mother Theresa espoused. Mother Theresa’s thing seems to encourage a degree of selflessness that’s way over the top. Some folks take it to mean that you’re supposed to give and give and give until you’ve nothing left to give….and then you give some more. With…
Here’s another way of Un-Seeing, one involving time and space. Google what “Hawaiian time” means and you will probably get some variation of “late.” Sometimes the definition comes with a fifteen-minute grace-period added and, often, there’s a bit of humor-filled tolerance included. As more than one entry so delicately puts it, we island people are afflicted by a “relaxed indifference to precise scheduling.” Uh-huh.
This YouTube video, “Why You Should Talk to Strangers,” features Robbie Stokes, Jr. giving a TEDxFSU talk at the Florida State University. It was published in 2013. In it, Stokes, a former Washington, DC events coordinator for a congressional delegate to the United States House of Representatives, tells how, the year before, he quit his job, sold all of his stuff and chased his dream about wandering around the world and talking to strangers.
I think that in every Maker’s heart of hearts, there is a dream of being surrounded by others like them who live their lives working and dancing to their own heartsong, trying to do their own best work and cheering each other on to greater effort. We dream of a place that supports us in our journey while letting us find our own way to our own best life.
