Thermometer or thermostat?

Given our ever-changing weather, have you been messing around with your house thermostat? When it gets too warm, do you have the air conditioner on? Too cold and have the heater kick on?

In biology “comfort zone” means the range between 28 and 30 degrees Centigrade at which the naked body is able to maintain a heat balance without shivering or sweating. That’s a pretty narrow range!

Moving from the physical arena to the psychological arena, we often get stuck in particular grooves as old experiences, habitual thoughts, comfortable beliefs continue to keep us in our “familiar” zone. (Ever thought of those grooves as “ruts”?)

What’s your comfort zone? Everyone of us has one. It’s that place where we feel safe, where we know what to do and how to do it without a sense of risk.

It often seems difficult to extract ourselves from them, even when we want to. We create excuses or justifications to either procrastinate or to utterly avoid the discomfort of new thinking and new behavior.

One of my proudest comfort zone expansions was over a decade ago! I asked my younger sister to join me in experiencing Tree2Tree Adventure Park in Oregon, with its myriad tree-top rope activities. And, not ever having been noted for my athletic abilities, I found this quite a challenge.

(Besides, having become a woman of “a certain age,” I figured I’d better do it before I no long could!)

And I (we) did!

I’m pretty sure I was the oldest person on the course then and I did make it through.

I learned, once again, that I…

• (we) can do more than we think;
• (we) can move beyond our self-imposed restrictions, and
• (we) can gain the deserved exhilaration of being more than we thought we could be.

How about you?

What have you learned when you’ve expanded your comfort zone?

feeling creative?

There is fascinating research saying that 98% of us test as highly creative at the age of five, and by age twenty-five, only 2% of us test that way. (Guess what that means for us seniors!) Since this is the month of Halloween, I looked for some creative jack-o-lanterns online. Eight years ago, I did […]

Squirrels as role models!?

Squirrels are just lowly rodents to some folks, but to admirers they are high flying acrobats, fuzzy tailed philosophers, scampering tree huggers, and resourceful survivors. (They are also awfully cute!) There are some life lessons we can learn from them! Consider these: First, we all know this easy one…to save for the future! The smart […]

Potholes in life!

I’ve discovered potholes can be of use. And that’s a good thing, because there seem to be so many of them! We often slow down, become more alert, and drive around them carefully. As a metaphor, they can make us aware of the places in our lives where we need to exercise care and caution. […]

Fall as a new beginning?

Summer is over. Fall is here! School is underway. Halloween decorations are everywhere. Fall is a fun, new beginning for me. I love it’s fresh energy, the “clean slate” feeling. And I love checking things off my “to do” lists. I hate having tired goals, unfinished goals; so I redo them to make me feel […]

I often eat dessert first!

(My sister and I were smart enough never to hire the applicant who said “I’d give anything to work in a chocoate store!” for we knew we couldn’t affort the loss of inventory!) We’ve all been overwhelmed with the messages to take pleasure when and where we can: Don’t worry-BE HAPPY! ENJOY LIFE NOW-this is […]

The rights of the reader!

This French author has quite the list! Let me know which of these resonate with you and/or if you have found others. The right to read anywhere! And the right to reread! Plus these too… We can skip pages if we want. And don’t forget the right to not have to defend our taste! No […]

Do less?!

Matthew McConaughey had shut down his production company and his music label because as he said…”I was making B’s in five things. I want to make A’s in three things.” (Those three things were his family, his foundation, his acting career.) Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius would say that doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” We […]

Letting go and creating new!

We seem to like the idea of new beginnings. I’m letting go of some this season to prepare for my clean slate for fall. Here’s some mantras I’ve been using! For my clean slate, I’m considering these for my fall thoughts: In some areas of life, value is unlocked by starting. Even a five-minute exercise […]

September as a new January!

“September” is such an invigorating idea! It’s back to school and new projects! It’s unofficially the beginning of fall and plenty of time to look at the “clean slate” that it provides. We can choose to stop “doing” for a moment and reflect on what it is that we really want… to be, to do, […]