| IN THIS ISSUE | | WELCOME | A Little Curiosity Can Change Your Life!
| What's Your Metaphor?
| A Little Inspiration
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RECENT BLOGS
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Happy July to everyone!
Welcome to the new subscribers this month! Once again I am sharing my summer with my Dad (who will be 94 this year) at our family cottage at The Chautauqua Institution in Western NY State. I've waited all my adult life for the opportunity to be here for nine weeks each summer, and I am thrilled that he is able to repeat last year's wonderful experience.
The availability of great speakers, performances and learning opportunities means that I will be talking about little else for the next couple of months. I'll try to share some of the wonderful bits of knowledge, web-sites and books that I encounter with all of you. There are nine weeks and each one has a theme that I will be summarizing with my blog posts. Visit the blog and sign up for the RSS feed to receive each new post via email. www.lifeandworkbydesign.com/blog
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Thanks to everyone who participated in my survey last month. I had over 100 responses and the results were very interesting. Happily, the majority of respondents are looking forward to the years from 60 - 75 as a time to learn, travel and try new experiences. Unfortunately, and predictably, the major obstacles you checked are financial stability and health care expenses.
And for those of you who commented that you and your spouse disagree on issues like where to live, when to retire, or how to spend/save your money, please know that you are not alone.
I'll be using these answers to frame not only my blog posts and articles, but also to create teleclasses and workshops around individual topics that are common to most of us during this new phase of our lives.
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Please forward this copy of the newsletter to friends and family who might enjoy it, and feel free to email me with any questions or comments.
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A Little Curiosity Can Change Your Life!
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From 10:45 to 12:00 each morning for the last 5 days, I, and several thousand others, have been privileged to learn about the lives and experiences of 5 curious and motivated scientists and photo-journalists associated with National Geographic. I'll tell you about the first one.
Annie Griffiths Belt is an award-winning photographer who has traveled the world photographing the people and cultures that populate places most of us will never visit. Her book, A Camera, Two Kids and a Camel documents a career of what she describes as "wondering - following her innate sense of joy, curiosity and play. She has wandered from the mountains of Tibet to Greenland to the Arctic and all places in between taking her two children and journalist husband along on any trip longer than two weeks. Her start with National Geographic came as the result of a severe hail storm in her small mid-western town where she worked on the weekly newspaper. The magazine contacted her for a few shots and she responded. Those led to other assignments and a fascinating career was launched.
One of the many stories she told was about how she has had to learn to communicate with indigenous people in countries where she does not speak the language. In one instance, she arrived and wanted to befriend a group of women who were on a pilgrimage. She took a Polaroid photo of them and watched their reaction as the photo developed. They all began to giggle and laugh, point at each other and fall down on the ground gleefully. She realized that they had never seen their own faces before but it dawned on them slowly as they recognized their clothing and shoes in the photo.
But then they indicated that she could not join them because they thought she was a man since she was dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt with a backpack and a ball cap on her head . She had to bare her breasts to prove she was a woman, and although they let her walk with them after that, they indicated that she was a pretty ugly woman by their standards!
Now a 50-something, she is giving back in an encore career that provides photos for aid organizations such as Church World Services and Habitat for Humanity. Her latest book, Last Stand: American Virgin Lands, was developed with renowned author Barbara Kingsolver to document the undeveloped natural beauty of our own country.
Every speaker here this summer will be someone who allowed their curiosity to fuel their future in some way. As we embark on the second half of our lives we should take the time to explore and look around for something that sparks our curiosity and take a few steps down a new path. You never know where it might lead.
To see some of Annie's wonderful photos or to learn more about her, visit http://www.anniegriffithsbelt.com/
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What's the Metaphor for Your Life?
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Since I am on a sort of vacation and spending lots of time with my Dad, I'm going to re-publish an article (author anonymous) that appeared on a website I visited recently. Your mental attitude about life in general can influence many of your decisions - what's your metaphor? Here's the article:
On the television show Ally McBeal the characters had theme songs. The songs were supposed to reflect how they lived their lives, or maybe how they would have liked to live their lives. Most of us don't have theme songs, but we often have metaphors for our lives that either help us or hinder us.
Some people see life as a battle. Every encounter is a struggle, and if they don't win, they feel like they have lost. Others view life as an adventure. A new day brings new opportunities to explore. If something goes badly today, there's always tomorrow.
How do these metaphors develop? As children we begin to understand and organize the world. If we think of the brain as a filing cabinet, then childhood is when we open the files and label them. We often spend the rest of our lives putting new material in these old files. If childhood was healthy, then we may have a pretty good filing system. If it was a struggle, then we often see struggles for the rest of our life.
What are your metaphors? This is not usually obvious. We have to stand back a long way to see patterns like this in our lives. A few examples:
A Battle - Everything is a competition or a struggle. We are always either winning or losing.
A Garden - Relationships are cultivated like flowers or vegetables. We see things as growing, flowering, producing.
A Mission - We believe that we have the truth and we need to convince others that our point-of-view is right.
A Journey - We travel from place to place meeting new people and exploring.
A Roller Coaster - Life consists of ups and downs, and we are along for the ride.
A Mountain Climb - Life consists of hierarchies. We are always climbing the corporate ladder.
A Race - always finding the fastest route, "keeping up with the Joneses."
A Courtroom - Everything in life should be fair.
Stepping Stones - We barely get comfortable where we are before we are looking for better job or a bigger house.
A Prison - Feeling like we don't have choices, like others have all the power.
A Classroom - There are always new lessons to learn.
A Battery - Every encounter seems to drain energy. We need the weekends to recharge.
These are just a few of the life metaphors that run people's lives. What metaphor(s) fit your life? Do they work or do they cause problems and limit your choices? It's possible to change metaphors, but it's not easy. Good mental health includes having life metaphors that work.
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One thing we are all facing is some sort of exit - an exit from career, an exit from parenting, or maybe an exit from a relationship. I believe that I learn even from the most difficult situations and crisis I've faced.
Ellen Goodman, one of my favorite inspirational writers, said this about exits:
"There's a trick to the Graceful Exit, I suspect. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over and to let it go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of the future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, we are moving on rather than out...It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the Capital or the office. We own what we learned back there, the experience and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along. Quite gracefully."
My e-mail box is always open if you'd just like to chat..
lifeworkdesigner at me dot com
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