Take Back Your Life!

I love Yes! Magazine and its tagline: Powerful Ideas, Practical actions. Every issue comes jam packed with new ways to look at the way we humans do things.

The article titled “Survival of the Nicest” in the spring 2013 issue caught my eye right away. Runs contrary to what I’ve been raised to believe about my fellow humans.

Hello all,

Beginning something new can be really hard for people. They get scared they will fail, so they don’t even start. The right answer syndrome is the most likely culprit. Years of being trained to only see one answer acts as an anti-catalyst. People don’t want to be wrong. They don’t want to fail. They don’t want to feel embarrassed.

We all need encouragement to try new things, to go for new adventures, to try all the things we want to do but that often get relegated to life’s back burner. I had a boyfriend encourage me to sing when I’d been told I had a terrible voice. As it turns out, I didn’t have a terrible voice. His encouragement changed my life. Make that, saved my life. It had a ripple effect across my entire being – from my enthusiasm to my attitude to my self-esteem.  Thank you ex-boyfriend! (more…)

I came into the world loving myself. Bold, boundless, brave. At some point, I learned not to love myself, not to believe in myself, not to love life. Sometimes, others who do not love themselves want to drag you down into their no-self love world. That’s how I ended up there. It was dark and cold and lonely. I found myself trying to drag others down as well. It’s one of those misery loves company scenarios. A weird recruitment program, for sure.

Once up, I turned around to see who I could offer hope and inspiration to and there were many. If we all did reach out our hands, the world could be a loving place for all. Way too much suffering goes on in the world because folks do not love themselves enough. They do bad things to other people because of their own pain. It continues down through the generations until no one knows how it even got started or that they have the power to stop it.Can we please change that model, already? It doesn’t work. It’s hell on earth. What’s the point of it all? (more…)

I sometimes pick up Origin, the conscious culture magazine. It’s got alternative viewpoints on a wide variety of topics. New ways of thinking about old things. Interviews with folks whose ideas lives closer to the fringes.

The article “Subterranean Cathedral” stopped me in my skimming tracks. James Ramsey and Daniel Barasch heard about the vast, abandoned underground spaces that lie dormant under New York City and approached the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to turn it into an underground park illuminated with their invention of redirected sunlight. Fascinated with how they will do that. The forgotten world reminded me of the 1987ish show Beauty and the Beast. In that show, The Beast and a bunch of other folks lived under New York City. (more…)

I’m reading Improv Wisdom and the subtitle is “Don’t prepare, just show up.”

It reminded me to live my life unscripted as much as possible.

For example, last night I went to a stacked Town Meeting knowing I was going to speak against the crowd. It was for more money for an athletic complex that has gone way over budget because they stuck with the plan when they hit significant financial issues early on. Many voters felt like they were stuck between a rock and a hard place. We’ve spent millions and they wanted another million and say they will come back again for even more. (more…)

I’m doing a lot of meaningful things in my life. A complete 180 from my late teens and twenties when I did almost nothing meaningful. Depression followed me around back then. I’m convinced that for me a lack of a meaningFULL life brought it on. Those were grey days, for sure. I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning the phrase, “meaningful life.” Always, “make money” or “get good grades” or other such empty silliness. What do good grades mean? I never quite got that one. (more…)

I’ve been reading the words of Marina Keegan, a young woman from my hometown who died over the weekend. She had just graduated from Yale and had a writing job waiting for her at The New Yorker. I’ve got one word to describe Marina: phenomenal.

She cared about people, about changing the world, about community, about doing good, about writing from the heart, about living every minute she was alive.

God, we need more people like her. To think there is one less, gets me all choked up. (more…)

I’m aware of the swift passage of time. When I was a kid, my mother said to me that life seemed to be going faster and faster with each passing year. She often said, “I don’t know where the time goes.” Now that I’m progressing through life, I understand what she meant. It seemed so slow as a kid, painfully slow at times. Now, it seems ultra fast at times.

March, April and most of May flew by while I worked with others in town to save the Devil’s Den from execution. It’s been mutilated but it’s still with us. In time, erosion will smooth out the gouges left by heavy equipment that didn’t give two hoots about nature.

But as fast as it has gone by, it’s been a terrific three months. I’m surrounded by other folks that care about history and nature. Folks that take time out of their busy lives to do something that matters to them. (more…)

Advice often gets a bad rap. People advise you not listen to advice, which is, of course, advice.

Yet, words of wisdom from another person often make our journey on earth much easier. They may have already experienced something you are going through now. Or, they’ve lived longer and know what worked for them during the more trying times of life. While some advice may not be right for you, other advice may be. (more…)

As a child I saw the movie Pollyanna starring Haley Mills and never forgot it, especially the scenes where prisms created rainbows on the walls. As an adult, I used to frequent antique stores looking for a lamp just like the one I saw in the movie. I wanted pretty rainbows to dance  on my walls, too.

Recently, I rented the film in the children’s section of the library. I’ve watched it twice. Even better than I remembered because the moral of the story clearly seemed directed at adults. In the film, Pollyanna Whittier’s parents die, so she goes to live in a huge Victorian with her wealthy, spinster aunt Polly Harrington in the town of Harrington. Polly treats her in a cold manner, even giving her a small, dusty room way up in the attic. But Pollyanna’s grateful for the room because she’s never had her own room. (more…)