Does positive thinking really work?
You’ve heard the advice/clichés: But do you believe they really work? Is it all just “Pollyanna” thinking? Well, are you familiar with this fascinating experiment done by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer back in 1981? She and her colleagues piled two groups of men in their seventies and eighties into vans, drove […]
What’s Your Comfort Zone?
Everyone 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. And we tend to stay inside those mental boundaries because to step outside of it means going into unknown territory. And that often makes us anxious. In biology it […]
In celebration…
Last year at this time I deliberated much like this cartoon: But I’m celebrating now! It’s actually surprising to me that I’ve been blogging weekly for a whole year! I hope you enjoy reading the posts as much as I am enjoying creating them. And as I look back, you readers seemed to respond most enthusiastically […]
Making Your Own Summer
Yes, it’s official! summer is here! The Summer Solstice on Thursday, June 21, was the day of the greatest light (with fourteen to sixteen hours of daytime, even if the sun was hidden by the clouds and rain here in our Walla Walla Valley!) Our whole planet was turned fully to the brilliance of the sun. A millennium of […]
“Be Good to Your Old Man”
A dad is someone who wants to catch you before you fall but instead picks you up, brushes you off, and lets you try again. A dad is someone who wants to keep you from making mistakes but instead lets you find your own way, even though his heart breaks in silence when you get […]
Willpower (or procrastination!) part 2
Procrastination is often our response to the diminishment of our willpower. As we start “using up” our resource of willpower, we seem to find lots of ways to procrastinate, to distract ourselves from our feelings of frustration and/or inadequacy! I think many of us see ourselves as a “pro” at procrastinating. We learned it young, first […]
Never enough willpower! part 1
Don’t you just hate it when your willpower falters and fails and you hit the snooze button, roll over and skip your early morning exercise, again? We’ve read that willpower is a “finite” resource-easy to use up, often long before we’ve got that new habit established. So, what’s a gal like me to do with […]
Life is..?
Did you ever get lost on Google? I spent an untold amount of time searching for quotes that I could include when I write about what “Life” is to me. And I found so many fascinating quotes that I decided that this post would just be a summary of my favorites. I narrowed it down to these […]
The not-so-ugly duckling
Remember the Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Ugly Duckling? As a child, I found the story distressing to me with those bigger birds pecking on the poor homely “duckling” who finally ran away. The misery and the loneliness, the winter when he froze in the ice…I was unhappy for him until finally in the spring the mistreated bird […]