Happiness is a choice

 

I was talking on the phone to my close friend of over 40 years (yikes, that dates me) and was expecting the bright, hopeful person I had spoken briefly to the day before. Instead, she was morose, sad and depressed. She is in the middle of a break-up with her boyfriend of a few years and was having a bad moment. As I listened quietly to her for a few moments (a new skill for me) I thought about a story someone told me a while ago.

Tony Robbins, the well-known author and motivational speaker, was helping a woman who was in a deep and seemingly bottomless pit of depression with the grief of losing her husband. She had tried everything, she said, and nothing seemed to work. She had been talking for a few minutes on stage, going on about how terrible her life was without him and how nothing, not even medication, helped with the misery of her life.

Suddenly, quite out of the blue, Tony Robbins took a step back and asked her loudly if she had just farted!

To read the rest of this blog, please go to The Kindness Project, where I am posting today. Thanks.

Politeness is a British Culture

My sister said this to me the other day when we were chatting. It really struck a chord with me. I started thinking about how politeness is so much a part of everyday life in England and how different it is in America. Not that I’m saying Americans aren’t polite. They are, just in a different way.

The word politeness derives from the Latin word “politus”, which means polished. My sister put forward a theory that we may have got our politeness from the mixing of the classes, when the Upstairs and Downstairs had to start polishing up their communication skills in order to socialize together and no-one knew how the hell to do it.

The English, in particular, admire politeness, reserve and restraint, although some might say we are merely stuck up, unfriendly and cold! Not so much of the Rule Britannia, but more of the Rude Britannia? Apparently, according to some research ...

If you want to read the rest of this blog, please go to The Kindness Project, as I'm blogging there today.

Sex, money and rock 'n' roll!

Hellooooooo! I'm back ... again! What a weird and wonderful couple of months it's been. Lots of fun, lots of de-cluttering and a little bit of drama. I can't believe how completely crap I've been when it's come to blogging though. Every day has been packed to the gunnels with exciting, boring, fun, tedious and exotic things I had to do, which somehow made it impossible to write. So much so, that I started not to think of myself as a writer ... which was a bit sad. So, I made a new resolution to properly schedule time to write. Not a New Year's Resolution, as I never bloody keep those, but maybe a Nearly Halloween Resolution. Hmmm, we'll see. But I digress. I am scheduling writing time and top of my list is blogging.

The Write On, Mamas! at Lit Crawl 2012

The slight problem, well, not exactly a problem, but one of the reasons why I haven't been writing is that my AMAZING writing group, the Write On, Mamas! has just launched its brand spanky new, incredibly wonderful website, and I am in charge of editing it and general maintenance. The only incy-wincy teensy-weensy issue there is our new site is Wordpress and I knew sod-all about how to work in effing Wordpress. All I knew was that Blogger and Wordpress don't play nice together. In fact, they're a little like my hormonal teenagers - sometimes sweetness and light and at others nasty, horrid vermin. So, another bloody steep learning curve ... and now that I'm the big five-oh, I really thought I wouldn't have to do that learning thing anymore. Drat and double drat.

Then we launched an Indigogo campaign to raise money for our fabby Anthology project and I somehow got roped into helping with the video as my son did the filming and editing. If any of you have any spare cash fluttering around your undies, and you fancy giving it to a bunch of VERY talented writers, please click here. You can even have some of us Mamas invade your home and perform at your request. Although no requests for pole-dancing in g-strings please. Strictly reading. However, we just successfully performed our "Your Mom had sex" theme at San Francisco's Lit Crawl to a packed house, so we are happy to be a bit risqué.

We even passed out these condoms, which went down well with passers-by. Oh, maybe I should re-phrase that! My piece started: "I opened my underwear drawer and recoiled in shock." I may upload the full script and video soon.

And if that isn't enough, my fellow bloggers in The Kindness Project decided that, instead of posting every 2nd Wednesday, we would have our very own site and blog about kindness all the time. Please go and take a look. I will let you know when I am posting, but all the contributors are inspirational. We shall be doing lots of exciting things in the future so watch this space.

I've also been to see a ton of bands, including America, The Tubes, Ed Sheeran (at last) who was playing free in San Francisco with Philip Phillips and Alanis Morrisette. I'm seeing Bob Dylan this week with Mark Knopfler, Muse in January and Ed Sheeran again in February.

Ok, so that's some of what I've been up to recently. What about you? What have I missed?

The Kindness Project

Brightening the world one smile, one kind word,

one blog post at a time

Please see the end of this post for a description of TKP and who else is participating.

A painting by my son, Tom

I have been thinking about what to write for this month's kindness blog and decided to write about the far-reaching effects of being kind, even small and seemingly insignificant acts, and how that can affect our entire planet. So being kind to someone is actually kinder than we think. We may hope that the person to whom we are being kind benefits (which they may do even if they don't even realise we are being kind to them), but I believe there is much more to it than that.

The Kindness Project - A Tribute to my Mum

Brightening the world one smile, one kind word,

one blog post at a time

Too often kindness is relegated to a random act performed only when we’re feeling good.  But an even greater kindness (to ourselves and others) occurs when we reach out even when we aren’t feeling entirely whole. It’s not easy, and no one is perfect. But we’ve decided it’s not impossible to brighten the world one smile, one kind word, one blog post at a time. To that end, a few of us writers have established The Kindness Project, posting the second Wednesday of every month. 

Want to join us? Grab our button and spread a little kindness.

For this month's Kindness Project I wanted to give a shout out to my Mum, Rosemary (or Ro as everyone knows her). Writing my last post about our awful day out at Wimbledon, and how she saw the funny side, made me think about her even more and I wanted to share her wonderful, kind side. She is such an amazing role model for me and always has been. She is the epitome of kindness. She has always been there for me and my two sisters throughout our entire lives, like a rock. She doesn't try and control us, or force her opinion on us, but allows us to make our own (many and varied) mistakes and learn and grow from our experiences.

She even made my horrendously difficult decision to move her only two grandchildren halfway round the world as easy as she possibly could, while still letting me know how much she didn't want us to go and how much she loved us and would miss us. She has been not just a mother, but a sister, a friend, a bank, an ironing lady, a cleaner, a babysitter, and someone to have a bloody good laugh with down the pub. I could go on and on, but I already have tears in my eyes and the screen's a bit blurry.

(Sniff. Blow nose. Wipe eyes. Deep breath.)

She is also brave and courageous and adventurous. She went skiing for the first time in her 40's when she was terrified and returned triumphant but black and blue - literally - I have never seen bruises like it. She learned how to windsurf and waterski, even though she hated every moment. She drives like a bat out of hell (and yes, Mum, I know you're an Advanced Driver) in a sporty car that is totally impractical for driving narrow, windy country roads and parking in tiny spaces, but she doesn't want to swap it in for something more sensible as that would make her feel 'old' (she's 76!).

She decided to learn to fly and got her private pilot's license at the age of 50 (I know, how incredible is that? She used to have to lock herself in the loo to get some peace to study indecipherable diagrams for the extremely complicated navigation test).

But aside from all the fun stuff, she has also spent so much of her life helping others, with kindness and extreme generosity. In particular, she is a very active member of various charities that help disabled people learn how to fly. I can't remember all their correct names but I'm sure Flying for the Disabled is one. Anyway, their names are unimportant. What is important is how she looks after all the incredibly courageous disabled people who put their sometimes life-threatening ailments to one side in order to follow their passion to fly. She follows them as they take their massively difficult written tests; is there when they are helped into the small aeroplane to take their first flight with an instructor; celebrates with them if they actually pass their private pilot's license and is there to witness and cheer them on their first solo flight.

She doesn't stop there, either. She writes to them, thanks them, phones them, makes them laugh as they endure another horrific series of operations, organises nicer Bed & Breakfast places to stay or even offers them her spare bed, meets them for lunch, gets them better jobs, emails them and generally is like a second Mum. She does all this for free. She doesn't get one penny, just the undying adoration of all her 'pupils'.

I try to practice kindness every day. And fail. Often. I don't know how she does it all the time, often with complete strangers, but she is my hero and a tough act to follow.

I miss her like crazy.
Every. Single. Day.




Who's your kindness hero?

TKP - Being Kind to Myself

Brightening the world one smile, one kind word,

one blog post at a time

The Kindness Project

The Kindness Project

Too often kindness is relegated to a random act performed only when we’re feeling good.  But an even greater kindness (to ourselves and others) occurs when we reach out even when we aren’t feeling entirely whole. It’s not easy, and no one is perfect. But we’ve decided it’s not impossible to brighten the world one smile, one kind word, one blog post at a time. To that end, a few of us writers have established The Kindness Project, starting with a series of inspirational posts.

Elizabeth Davis

Sarah Fine

Liza KaneAmie Kaufman

Sara Larson

Matthew MacNish

Sara McClung

Gretchen McNeil

Tracey Neithercott

Lola Sharp

Michele Shaw

Meagan Spooner

Carolina Valdez Miller

Wow. What a great thing to do. The above group of bloggers have started this amazing Kindness Project. I read their posts last week and wanted to participate. We can't have enough kindness in the world, in my opinion. Every second Wednesday they are going to post a blog on kindness. I am going to join them -

are you?

To that end, I thought I would share a couple of thoughts on kindness. I am currently trying to practice 'radical kindness'. I keep failing. And then beating myself up for not being kind to others. So what I am trying to do now is practice being just a tiny bit kind to myself, then perhaps I might be able to be kind to other people.

But one of my friends told me some success she had the other day. She had been having lots of problems with a colleague at work and no matter what she did, the situation just wouldn't improve. She tried to be kind, but found she was being impatient and critical in her head, even if not directly to the person. Then she suddenly had a brainwave. She realised that all her negative thoughts about work, and how annoying this person was, would be affecting the planet. She believes that negative thoughts harm the earth. And so, even though she was finding it difficult to be kind to this person, she wanted to be kind to the planet. From then on, every time she had a negative thought, she would stop herself and think of something else, something positive. And do you know what happened? Without her doing anything else, the situtation with her work colleague improved dramatically, to the point where she is almost starting to like her and feel compassion for her. This situation had been going on for well over a year and yet was solved in a few weeks. Her life is now so much better, and not just her relationship with this person, but in every area of her life.

I loved seeing how happy she was now after months of stress and thought it was a great example of how we don't always have to solve the problem in front of us. If we can only take our eyes off it for a moment and think of something else more positive, the Universe has a chance to rearrange itself to create a better situation.

On a slightly different note - my meditating has been going very well. I have done a minimum of 10 minutes every day, sometimes even 25 minutes, except for last weekend. I simply got too busy and forgot, so that highlighted to me the need to make it more of a habit. Someone suggested that I schedule my meditating for the same time each day and then it is more likely I will remember. Sounds like good advice. Wonder if I will take it?

I have definitely been feeling the strain after the A-Z Challenge and it has been quite nice having a week's break from blogging. I am ready to start back up and come and visit everyone - you have been warned!

Tomorrow night I am hoping to do an Open Mic reading of something I am writing as part of an Anthology my writing group (the Write On, Mamas!) is going to self-publish by the end of the year. I have to keep changing it as the humourous references only work on a British audience. Arrgh! I will let you know if I am a complete flop.