Category Archives: An A-Z for your life

An A-Z for your life – Laughter

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Humour is part of what makes life pleasurable.  Smiling and laughing is good for our heart and helps us to de-stress. It does not get rid of the stresses altogether but offers some respite from them and is enjoyable in its own right.  It can make us feel happy.

Psychologists and others have spent time analysing humour and why we find certain things funny.  What you find funny can say a lot about who you are.  If you spend enough time listening to comedians you could see the punch line as it approaches.  That does not make it any less funny.

Laughter

Do you laugh because of what you hear when someone tells a joke or is it about what you see.  Many of the early silent movies are very entertaining to look at.  I don’t think humour is about picking on any one person or making fun of a group of people. That is unnecessary and cruel. Generally I prefer my humour in situation comedy or clever stand-ups with witty word play.  But often it is the silliest things that remain in our memories.

Comedy does not have to be performed for us.  Laughter can come from our everyday encounters with the people in our life.  This can provide many private episodes of riotous laughter. We can always laugh at ourselves too. In surveys women often say that they want a man with a sense of humour although men don’t seem to rate this as important for them.  I do not know why that is.

I am glad I know what makes me laugh and where to find it.  Is there a place for laughter in your life? Could you laugh with the ones you love?

 

 


An A-Z for your life – Kindness

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Kindness is a good quality to practice on our journey through life.  The Bible talks about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.  But there is also something to be said for being kind whilst not expecting anything.   Kindness is simply about saying yes to a request that we can accommodate or offering to do something that we know will help another person.  It could be as simple as picking up someone’s shopping, watering their plants, giving them a lift, phoning to check that they are ok.  It is about allowing someone else’s situation to cross our mind and allowing ourselves to offer to ease their burden without feeling superior or heroic.  It is sharing the gifts and resources that we have.

waterfall

We may also find ourselves on the receiving end of such generosity.  John Donne wrote that ‘no man is an island’ and it helps us to remember that our lives are all connected.   Unfortunately it often takes a tragedy to remind us of this.  Sometimes giving of our time and energy has more of an impact than writing a cheque.   I am reminded here of a television program called The Secret Millionaire, where wealthy people go undercover to discover real needs and later, financially support these.  I know they can get publicity from the show but as they already have a high profile in their field I do not think that is their motivation.  It seems to me that they want to help and to feel the joy of giving.  There are of course many who give of their time quietly through caring and volunteering.

Kindness is not about wealth.  We are all capable of giving of ourselves, whoever we are, wherever we live.  Is kindness something you experience of yourself or from those around you? Would you like to be kinder to yourself and others?

 

An A-Z for your life – Journey

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Appreciating who you are cannot be done in the time it takes you to read this post. I have included in these posts (and the book) some of the key things I have discovered in my life to date.  This is the result of my age, having lived in three different countries and my experience of three career paths including the study of psychology, sociology and counselling.  So it is an accumulation of my experience so far and undoubtedly part of my life’s journey.

Journey copy

What has your life journey been like so far and have you begun to make sense of it?  Is it all ahead of you or all behind you?  How does that affect your day-to-day choices?  For me I am grateful to my past and hopeful about my future whilst feeling that my current opportunities are good enough.  It is up to me to make the best of what is available to me rather than focusing on what is imperfect.  (Imperfection is part of the human condition and provides us all with opportunities to be vulnerable).  I certainly feel that I am now on my individual life journey even though I don’t know what happens next.  Do you have a sense of having a past, present and future?

The sense of life being a journey can help us gain perspective.  If we use the metaphor of travel then we can appreciate that sometimes we will like the scenery and other times we really want to get out of town.  Some paths are easy to walk through and others require us to accept assistance.  We may see others on our journey who appear to be having an easier or more difficult time.  Making comparisons can be a distraction to keeping on our own path.  We may feel we are running a marathon or a short sprint, doing hurdles or mountain climbing!   Henry David Thoreau says that ‘what lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.’

What opportunities do our journeys present for us and for those we meet?  How do we cope with the difficulties and the privileges?  What do we protect and what can we share with others we meet on the way?  Maybe we can only appreciate a journey when we’ve got to the end and reflected on where we have been.  It may be that we have time at the end to do this or it may be that others do that for us.  It does not matter; our journey is ours and no one else’s.

How do you feel about your journey so far – share your thoughts

An A-Z for your life – Identity

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Bird of Paradise

Bird of Paradise

So who are we?  Do you feel you know who you are?

In my work as a counsellor I find that underlying many problems is the sense that people do not know who they are.  I myself have been exploring who I am in a more meaningful way.  Each of us is unique; from the experiences of our early life, our family of origin, location of our early years and the backdrop of world events.  These all have an impact on who we are and how we see ourselves.  Some of this may seem quite random, but imagine being a teenager in Iraq during the last decade.  Whatever the family stands for they cannot remove the impact of the community and the world.  All of our past goes into who we are now.  This may now determine where and how we choose to live our lives, what we do with our time and how we maintain our relationships.  As we get older and the world continues to change we could find ourselves, and our sense of identity, in constant flux.

Our identity is about our sense of self and belonging, how we see ourselves and our place in the world.  For me it is a complex thing that is not fully captured by those who see us from the outside.  I truly believe that only we can explore and own our unique identity.

For me it is about exploring and being connected to all the different aspects of who I am.  So I am a woman and need to figure how I relate to other women, both in our similarities and our differences. Similarly, how do I relate to men generally and specifically?  As a Black Caribbean woman who lives a very British life how do I relate to Black British women of a different background, Caribbean women living elsewhere and British women who are not Black? – I have some similar experiences to all of these.  It’s about being aware of those points of connection.  Add in faith, education, class, age and sexuality; these are all aspects of how I see myself and how the world might see me.  But my internal sense of these observable identifiers may be different from that of the onlooker.

So how about you?  What does it mean to be your specific gender, ethnicity, class, culture, sexuality and age?  Do you have a difference that is hidden (e.g. deafness, epilepsy)?  If you feel you are ordinary then imagine someone different from you in those identifiers.  Do they remind you of someone in your social circle or someone you have never met and whom you may have strong opinions about?  Only by truthfully looking at ourselves can we begin to figure out our identity.  As we look deeper within we will have a better sense of the truth about who we are and how we relate to the rest of the world.

For me it is about trying to connect to all parts of me, good and bad, and having people in my life who reflect different parts of that to me as I do for them. What does identity mean to you?

 

An A- Z for your life – Hope

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 Hope

Hope helps us to believe in possibilities. It tells us that good things can and do happen and it is up to us to pay attention.  Certainly this is a better way to approach life than feeling hopeless.

If we have hope we are more likely to put in effort and make plans for ourselves, because we expect to make things happen.  Of course hope does not mean things will happen the way we want them to but it puts us in a good frame of mind and encourages us to try; this is the first step to something occurring. ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’ Anais Nin.  Without hope we would not try.

Like everything else it is about balance.  If something has proved unlikely to happen with our effort then there will be a time to accept this and move on.  Hope is a starting point but it would be foolish to hold on to it when reality points the other way.  We can redirect that effort elsewhere without feeling wronged or punished.  Life has something better planned for us and we need to reach out and accept it.

Are you someone who is scared of hoping for anything because you fear being disappointed? Do you hope more for things you want to create or things you would like to be given?