Tag Archives: useful thinking

HAVE YOU THE FAMILY YOU WOULD LOVE TO HAVE?

Ways of Remembering, ,

Most of us have a family we were born into, and a set of relatives that comes with that. And I often hear people say that they find it really hard to get on with a brother, or sister, or parent. This always feels hurtful because we have an expectation that these are the people who should care most for us. But it’s not really that surprising, because each of us is a unique personality, and we don’t get on with every other personality.

I like to think that we really have two sorts of family: the one we were born into and related to by blood, and the one we create for ourselves. This is our real family, because it is those we meet who become our mutual support network, people we feel genuine love and concern for. If we’re lucky, some of our blood ties are also in our ‘personalised’ family – we choose to have them as an important part of our lives – but it’s not compulsory.

And because this is a family we create throughout our lives, we are not constrained by numbers or categories or age – we can create according to any criteria we choose. I have lots of sisters and brothers, and many sons and daughters. When I was younger, I had more favourite aunts and uncles and elder brothers and sisters – now I think I’m probably the matriarch of my lovely created family!

When I was a child, we were encouraged to call friends of the family auntie or uncle. I think that was based on a form of showing respect because they were adults and we were children, but it also indicated that my parents felt they were part of the family really. And my favourite ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ were in this category. I felt loved and cared for by them as if they were real family, and of course they were!

So who have you got in your family? Let’s recognise our closeness and love for these special people who have agreed to be part of our family in this lifetime, just as we have chosen to have them in our family. Some of them will be very close to us: lots of contact and mutual support; some of them will have gone their own way, yet still be there if you need them; and some of them will be that somewhat eccentric or awkward one that you can’t help but love anyway!

Cherish these people – they are your real family. And if you meet someone you wish were part of your family, nurture the relationship and bring them in. You really can create the family you would love to have.

101 REASONS TO BE THANKFUL

Ways of Remembering,

OK, so I haven’t really found 101 yet, although I’m not far off! And I’ve only been looking at those things we take for granted.

My dad has lost his hearing temporarily, and I was thinking about the impact that would have on my life. TV and films would lose a chunk of their appeal, no music, wouldn’t hear the phone ring or be able to call anyone, wouldn’t know if someone came to the door – it’s a massive impact.

And that led me to thinking about how we take our senses for granted. We can feel, taste, smell, hear and see, and we don’t even think about it normally. Plus, our limbs move in a co-ordinated way, so it’s easy to move about, our hands can grasp and hold, our bodies just get on with complex procedures like digestion, repair, immune systems. Oh, and all those trillions of cells that we’re made of can co-operate and support each other in their various roles. And none of that requires conscious effort on my part.

Wow!! ‘What a piece of work is man’, as Shakespeare said.

Then there’s our minds, which manage all the amazing things our bodies can do as a matter of course, but also absorb and store incredible amounts of information, which enables us to remember, assess, discriminate, and learn and grow. I know they can also cause us problems, but they do a pretty good job on the whole.

So, without even looking outside ourselves, we have a lot of wonderful reasons to be thankful we’re human.

Add to that the simplest of our needs being met on a regular basis and we must be close to my 101 reasons. I’m referring to a bed to sleep in, a roof over our head, food on the table, water we can drink no predators hunting us so a level of safety, easy access to clothes to keep us warm, lights if it’s dark. We just take all of these for grated don’t we? I know I do most of the time.

It’s easy to get pissed off, feel life isn’t great, wish things were different. And on those days it can be hard to find anything to be thankful for – we just notice all the things that confirm our state of mind.

I think it is useful to remind ourselves of all these reasons to be thankful – it helps us to change our state of mind, and to realise that life isn’t that bad after all..

THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE

Ways of Remembering, ,

I was feeling pissed off with myself for not fitting in as much pilates practice as I intended – somehow five days had gone by and I hadn’t done any at all. I finally got round to doing it, and as I did so, I remembered that twenty five years ago, I didn’t do any pilates at all – it wasn’t even on my radar. And ten years ago, I rarely practised at all between lessons. And five years ago, I might do one practice in between lessons. Yet now, the new normal was practising three or four times a week, which is why I was disappointed with myself. Sod that! I’ve made lots of progress!

Most of us do not take great leaps forward in our evolution into being who we really are or how we want to be – we take two steps forward and one step back. So it’s easy to notice the step back, and forget to count the step forward we made anyway, and then we are discouraged.

So I think it’s time we noticed the overall trend, rather than the slips that happen along the way.

It’s as if we have a combination of the tortoise and the hare, from Aesop’s fables. We have a hare that rushes forward, and then gets tired and falls asleep, or gets distracted and goes in another direction, while our tortoise just plods along, slowly but surely covering the ground.

In order to recognise our progress, we need to pay attention to the tortoise rather than the hare, even though the hare is far more distracting and obvious, with its rushes hither and thither, and its frequent collapses!

Over the years, we get better at some things without necessarily realising it, because it happens slowly, small steps at a time. I know I am better at recognising reasons to feel good about myself and my life than I used to be. I am better at finding fewer things to worry about unnecessarily, and at getting past that worry when I do get caught by it. I am less prone to bad moods or being upset or miserable, and more prone to laugh at the absurdity of some aspects of life here on earth. And I’m better at Pilates!!

This form of progress is only really noticeable when you look back over years, if not decades – day by day it’s hard to notice because that tortoise of ours moves slowly!

So pay some attention to your tortoise: what progress has it made over the last five to ten years? It deserves that recognition, and will gradually help you to grow into who you really are.

WHAT IF…

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A little while ago I wrote a blog about ‘if only’ – that not so useful way of replaying the past. This time I’m looking at its equivalent about the future: ‘What if..’.

There’s one thing for sure about the future: it’s mostly unpredictable. We don’t know in advance what will work out and what won’t. We don’t know what might happen to help or hinder our plans. We don’t have control over the future.

Yet we spend a lot of energy trying to cater for possible problems, where we have some concern over the way it might go. This can be at the micro-level: ‘What if I miss the train tomorrow?’, or at the macro-level: ‘What if I get ill and can’t earn my living?’

Once we switch on the ‘what if’ button, we can take ourselves very easily into a place where everything could be a problem, because our thinking has that flavour attached to it – we get the ‘what if’ syndrome, where we run scenario after scenario of things going wrong.

And that is the issue with ‘what if’. It sends us into a lot of ‘rehearsals’ in our minds of things going wrong. We imagine what could happen, we feel the emotions attached to that, and we get ourselves in a right old state! It uses a lot of energy, and sets us up perfectly to be anxious when we reach the part of the future that we’ve done this not very useful rehearsal for!

And have you noticed how many of our ‘what if’s’ don’t come to pass? So all that energy we used was completely wasted.

If we spent that energy on rehearsing in our mind how we make it more likely that it works out OK, that would be far more useful. ‘I’ll catch the train I want to, and to make that easy, I’ll go to the station early, and buy my ticket in advance’. This is a useful rehearsal, and prompts us into preparing properly.

Now I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have a back-up plan. It can be useful to have an alternative approach up your sleeve. So we can come up with an alternative by saying to ourselves: ‘And if that doesn’t work out, what I’ll do is..’ This prompts us into rehearsing a back-up plan in case we need it.

We can neither control nor predict what exactly will happen in the future, but we can make it easier for ourselves to handle it, whatever it is, by sticking to useful rehearsals in our minds.

Life works, most of the time, so don’t stick a spanner in the works by ‘what if-ing’ yourself!