Bookworm

The magic ingredient for a fulfilling life is . . . - lifehack.org

Link: The magic ingredient for a fulfilling life is . . . - lifehack.org.

Why rush through life? Do you want it to be over so soon? Doesn’t it take time to appreciate its joys and experiences?

    * Time to learn. Time is necessary to learn, to think, to reflect, and to internalize fresh ideas. The more you rush, the more you are forced to stick with what you already know.
    * Time to think. Time to plan, to prioritize, and to choose how best to expend your attention and energy. Doing anything in haste increases the risks of missing key elements, making needless mistakes, and wasting effort.
    * Time to enjoy. Rushing through an experience robs it of most of its value. Gobbling down a fine meal, leafing through a work of literature with more than half your mind elsewhere, allocating 10 seconds to see the sunset. You might as well not bother.
    * Time for others. It’s not only unpleasant and callous to deny the people close to you your time and attention, it’s downright rude. Why do so many relationships break down nowadays? My bet is that those involved simply don’t allocate enough time to spend together, learning how to enjoy one another’s company.
    * Time to be creative. You need time to reflect and see the links between items or areas of knowledge. The human brain doesn’t work well with disconnected ideas or pieces of information. In all those “gaps” where they appear to be doing nothing at all, the world’s outstanding creative minds are hard at work reflecting, ruminating, “noodling” with odd ideas—tinkering with patterns and unexpected connections. What you see as the result is a mental iceberg: nearly all the activity that brought it about is hidden below the surface.
    * Time just to be. This is the only life you have. How much of it have you missed already because your attention and energy were elsewhere? How much will you still miss, because your days are so filled with activities that there’s no space left to just to live?

What would you say in your last lecture?

Carnegie Mellon has a lecture series called Last Lecture.  In this clip, you see a professor giving the talk who knows it is literally his last lecture.

Values and Motivations

Why do we do what we do?  Why do we spend Sunday morning in church or Saturday morning with our child or those few precious minutes of free time writing or painting or reading?  We all have to determine our own values and build our lives around them.  If someone looked at how you had spent your time this weekend, would it accurately reflect your most important values and priorities? 

I've been thinking of this tonight because I tend to watch a lot of television in the evenings.  And it's not so much that I value television itself so highly (although there are certainly valuable and uplifting things to be seen), as that I usually feel I just need time to not think.  Honestly, if I wasn't watching television, I would probably not be working on various anticipated or inactive writing or photography or scrapbooking projects.  I want to do those things, but after a busy day at work followed by a couple of hours with my beloved and sometimes demanding three year old, I usually can't calm my frazzled brain enough.  So, I treat the frazzle with the Cinderella stories of What Not To Wear and the Cormac McCarthy interview on Oprah and watching people do amazing things with their bodies on So You Think You Can Dance.

I feel a little guilty about this.  But isn't that kind of ridiculous?  If I'm being a responsible worker and wife and mother, who or what exactly am I letting down? 

Resolved: to spend my leisure time as I want to with less guilt.

Life Goals

I recently spoke with a friend who talked about traveling, seeing various places he wanted to see before he dies. (He's young and in good health -- these are just life goals.)

I see people online posting lists of the 100 things they want to do -- everything from learn to play the guitar to skydive.  Maybe I'll make a list like that and add it to this post soon. 

But my life goals, the really important ones, are:

• To be a loving mother to my daughter
• To be a loving partner to my husband
• To be a loving sister, granddaughter, niece, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, friend...
• To walk the walk of my religious beliefs
• To fill my life to the brim with the things that make me happy and fulfill me: creative pursuits like writing and photography, intellectual pursuits like reading and studying, and active pursuits that will keep me healthy and fit like walking and biking.