The Gifted Bear

 

 

There is a well-known saying that it takes a village to raise a child. That’s because it does.

Who doesn’t know a parent having a bad day that just lets out way more frustration and anger than needed to a situation based on an event or circumstance the child has no idea about. The whole purpose of a village is that the child still has a safe haven, a place to go where they feel loved and can work through big, new, different feelings, without raising the ire of a tired, frazzled parent who is trying to juggle two fulltime jobs, study for a promotion, cook dinner, iron tomorrows school uniform, complete the next days lunch order, and fill out the latest excursion permission form whilst trying to remember the date and when they last had a wee.

We’ve become quite separate from those around us, with our lives filled with technology, instant gratification and a daily level of ‘busy’ that doesn’t offer many opportunities to just hang out with those we love and care about. Even now, at this moment, I am sitting in the same room as my husband, both of us writing on our laptops and intermittently messaging each other as we have an idea or need help with a word.

Increasingly, our children and young people are expected to operate as miniature adults Continue reading “Lighthouse”

It’s that time of the month again when the mental fiends are released from their bonds to run riot in my brain space.

There’s a couple of old science experiments nearly everyone hears about when doing psychology 101. The first involves a group of chimps in a cage with a bunch of bananas. Every time a chimp reached for the food an electric shock would go through the cage causing all the primates pain. In a short amount of time the chimps all knew that reaching for the food caused pain, and so the group would stop the individual reaching for the food.

The scientists then swapped out one of the chimps for a new chimp, who hadn’t Continue reading “The Sky is Falling”

The Audacity of Hope

I am currently reading a book that contains 26 of the most influential addresses of Barack Obama spanning his political career. Readers that are in America will no doubt recognize the title of this post as a recurring theme throughout Obama’s speeches. He uses it in many different contexts, for many different subjects, but the phrase has stuck with me over the last few days, as no doubt it did with Obama when he first heard it.

Dictionary dot com defines ‘audacity’ as a shameless boldness or daring, especially with disregard for personal safety. Bold or daring acts or statements.

It defines ‘hope’ as ‘the feeling that what is wanted can be had, or that events will turn out for the best’

So the phrase ‘the audacity of hope’ can be defined, turned, used and pulled apart in many different ways, but before I go there, let me share a condensed version of my last 12 months with you.

 

 

Continue reading “The Audacity of Hope”

I’m falling
over and around.

Tumbling
down, down, down.
Into the abyss
into the black.

A darkness
so complete
I don’t know Continue reading “Into the Depths”

 

Last time I talked about grief. And how exhausted it has left me. Life is hard. Getting out of bed is hard, functioning during the day is hard, being excited about something is hard.

While this is all still true, I had a bit of an epiphany a few days after writing the post, which eased some of the heaviness and energy draining of it all. I was reading the news and two things struck me at the same time; people hoard and withhold love like its scarce and two, now is all we have and in each moment we get to choose how to spend that moment.

To counter this in my life I decided it was time to fall in love again. Continue reading “Love is All You Need”

I want to talk about empathy. Not sympathy. Sympathy according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “Feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.”

In contrast empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”

Feelings of pity, sorrow and commiserations with others doesn’t have a place alongside empathy.

When I was a child I used to have an overabundance of empathy without really knowing what it was or where it came from. Continue reading “Choose Kindness”

It’s been a while. Ok, years. It’s been years. Life got busy and blog posts went by the wayside. For all five of you out there that follow my posts (thanks guys, you’re the greatest!) I hope to have a post up once a week or so from now on.

Much has happened in the last five years, some of it deeply impactful but rather than sell myself or these experiences short, I’ll discuss them as they come up in future blog posts. There’s a lot of life that happens in five years!

I want to start this ‘new’ blog talking about laughter. It is SO important.

Continue reading “Lets Laugh!”