Desperation makes us do strange things.
I needed a blog topic.
My head is a million miles away.
An empty glass with an orange is at my elbow.
Here goes.
The orange in a glass is a circle within a circle.
The colors of the glass and the orange are opposing colors on a color wheel.
The inside of an orange looks a bit like a wheel.
Cut it in half and it’s a smile.
Smiles are infectious, but also cultural.
Americans smile at each other on the street.
Many other cultures do not even look each other in the eye on the street.
The word “street” was brought to England by the Romans.
A street was a paved way, but a road was simply a well-used option for traveling in the Middle Ages.
Greeks originally built roads so they could more easily move their armies, but they didn’t move oranges.
Ancient Mediterranean societies had no oranges.
Sweet oranges originated in southeast Asia in the third or fourth century B.C.
Sweet oranges are a cross of mandarins and pomelos.
Rolling through history and countries, oranges of some sort arrived in Europe with the Arabs in the early 8th century.
Via roads and streets, they were carried to the royal courts.
They eventually traveled to the Americas with rich colonists.
My orange traveled from Wegmans to my kitchen to my glass
– to my blog.
Yes, this month there’s a focus on Valentine’s Day. However, it’s also “American Heart Month” with a big focus on cardiovascular health.
Is there a reason the symbol for Valentine’s Day is a stylized representation of the shape of our hearts? Is the dual February focus on hearts a convenience of that image? Is there a separation of the emotional and physical definitions of “heart?”
Maybe. Maybe not.
Throughout February, the American Heart Association‘s “Heart to Heart: Why Losing One Woman Is Too Many” campaign will raise awareness about how 1 in 3 women are diagnosed with heart disease annually.
The Centers for Disease Control is encouraging and empowering Black adults to reduce their risks for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Black adults in the United States die from heart disease at a rate two times higher than White adults. (From my little podium, it seems to be just one more advantage for white males!)
How is “Heart” defined?
Let’s get back to the issue of emotional and physical definitions of the heart. There’s a great article on Abbott’s website about the complex connections between our emotions and our cardiovascular system, especially our hearts. They say that “science already tells us there is no doubt that emotion impacts not only our mental health but also our physical well-being, especially that of the heart.” Our nerves and brains have a big influence on the functioning of our hearts.
There’s also that little phrase we use about “getting to the heart of the matter.” It’s an age-old saying emphasizing that the key to something’s existence is at the core.
Whether it’s a problem, a challenge, a game, a relationship or something else, we need to learn what makes it work, what makes it “tick”. Until then, we can’t knowledgeably address it.
Until we know the core of something, we can’t intelligently talk about it.
Until we know the core of a problem, we can’t solve it.
Likewise, until we know what is at our core, successfully creating goals and fulfilling dreams is difficult.
What is your heart’s desire?
A friend of mine was telling me today about their son-in-law who was a software engineer, but is now repairing and rebuilding historic furniture. The joy of doing so was at his core. It fulfilled him.
I know a former medical professional who is now a professional photographer. It’s more fulfilling.
I was once drooling over some handmade jewelry at a craft show and talking to the artist. He revealed that creating jewelry had been his hobby for 20 years during his dentistry career. He retired early because creating beauty gave him much more joy than health care. I’m sure he wasn’t making a dentist’s income on his products, but they were unique, beautiful and priced well enough to make a substantial addition to his retirement pay.
Get to the heart of it
When we are facing a change and trying to decide how we’re going to handle it, we are going to be much more successful when we take time to get to our core. What is it that takes our breath away? What would we rather be doing than anything else?
What drives you to do what you do?
Why are you where you are?
What would be the most satisfying outcome of the change you are facing?
Get to the core of your being and your thinking. Get to the heart of it.
Your emotions and your physical heart keep you healthy. Getting to the heart of any issue you are trying to solve will also keep you mentally healthy.
You may expect a November blog to be about thankfulness. Well. . . it is and it isn’t. First, let’s talk about expectations.
The year-end holidays are filled with expectations. Hallmark movies, syrupy greetings, images of happy families and beautiful decorations fill us with goals for the “perfect” holiday. It’s their business.
Even before social media, the visual and mental portrayals of holiday observances were humbling influences on our expectations. For nearly fifty years, from 1916 until 1963, Norman Rockwell illustrated often idyllic situations instilling expectations of how Americans live and celebrate. Those images still linger. Home magazines are full of recipes, table décor, welcoming front doors and more. Fashion magazines show us fantastic, drool-worthy party fashions.
“Influencer” is not a new term.
A host of things like memories, wishful thinking, the opinions of others, and our perception of societal expectations have created internal “cognitive biases” and “unconscious beliefs” that we use as personal patterns to interpret life and the world around us. While they form the lens through which we see the world, they’re not always rational.
Is that special Thanksgiving china worth storing for fifty-one and a half weeks a year? Who has a 2 year old who sits still through an entire dinner with a dozen adults? How many of us can neatly carve a turkey at a dining table covered by grandma’s lace tablecloth? (Get real, Norman and Bon Appétit!)
Did you have a year filled with amazing photographic moments to be captured in your Christmas letter? Our expectations are often that we should have, ought to, or are less than if we don’t. We may even think we need to pretend we did.
Life flows.
Just as we say “time flies,” we can also realize “life flows.” Sometimes smoothly passing through flower-filled meadows, but sometimes raging through rock-strewn crevices. Two year-olds grow up. Some of our years really are photo-worthy. However, I’ve not met anyone yet who can neatly carve a turkey at the table.
Real life can disappoint, or worse yet, make us feel inadequate or unsuccessful. If we’re logical, we accept that we can’t do and have it all. Magic wands just don’t exist! We do have friends and support teams.
We help each other live a life that is physically and mentally healthy, a life in which we are acknowledged for the qualities we have without comparison, to share love and appreciation. We can encourage (and support) realistic holiday expectations by recognizing the influences on those expectations and realistically evaluating them. Let’s remember to be grateful for what makes us smile, keeps us healthy, brings us joy, satisfies our souls, and brings us love.
Gratitude Gravy
Let’s bring beauty and festivity into our holidays. Let’s make mentally and physically healthy choices that make us joyful, not overwhelmed.
Your sliced turkey may look like it was shredded rather than carved. Your main course may be plant-based burgers or macaroni and cheese instead of a 14-pound bird. Your entryway may be full of muddy boots instead of pumpkins. Your Thanksgiving dinner may be dinner for two at a kitchen table or a houseful eating on lap trays.
Be thankful this November, but, like gravy smothering a slice of turkey, let gratitude smother your expectations. Even if it’s lumpy.
At some time in our lives we are encouraged to save our money for a rainy day. Perhaps, what you save is simply those pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters you receive as change. Do you put them in a jar, a coin sorter, or maybe a piggy bank?
I seriously saved coins only once. My sister and I planned a trip to Great Britain for a significant birthday. I saved all the quarters I acquired over our three year planning process. In the end, those quarters paid for lunches for both of us during our the two-week trip. The financial benefit? My immediate need for cash the month of the trip was just a bit less because I had planned ahead and saved some my change.
Collecting “change” in life has benefits, too. There are similarities between collecting dimes or quarters and collecting life and work experiences. Eventually that unsolicited, and at times, unwanted, change can add up to something valuable. When you keep a mental or written record of that unanticipated change, it can pay off in financial benefits, as well as time benefits.
That’s my Piggy Bank Theory of Change. The change experiences you collect add up to the valuable assets of learning and knowledge. Assets to use for something great in the future.
Future Investment
Although my life has been full of changes, the experiences I gathered along the way usually added up to something I could spend when applying for a new job or a new opportunity. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are,” Theodore Roosevelt once said.
If you’ve save the key elements of different changes in your life, you can find ways to invest or spend them. Just as you sort your coins into different piles, sometimes you have to sort your experiences in different ways. You’ve seen the recommendations about different resume styles. It’s a key opportunity to mix things up.
Ten Lessons Learned
Through all the changes and “reinvestments” in life, I’ve learned a few key practices:
Keep a full list of all your experiences, training, and knowledge.
Review and update that list periodically.
Look for and highlight the connections between your experiences, training, and acquired knowledge.
If relevant, keep some samples or records of your work and accomplishments.
Discover, remember, and review your strengths.
Research and frequently monitor the opportunities and options that are always around you.
Reframe how you’ve presented yourself in the past, perhaps focus on a different strength than you have marketed before. In other words, sort your skills and experience in new ways and go for it.
If you need to, create an opportunity for yourself.
Believe that good things really can happen to you.
Believe in yourself and be confident in your worth.
Not all changes pay off like you expect or hope they will, but there will be something of value in each change. Put it in your Piggy Bank.
The Piggy Bank Theory of Change provides one way of transforming an involuntary change into a more proactive change. Managing an involuntary change in a way that gives you a proactive choice takes some creativity. It requires envisioning possibilities in new and creative ways, but it can be done.
I was stuck in a foreign country for a year after completely my graduate degree because of a family member’s commitment. I took out my Piggy Bank and resorted my change. Then, I made an unsolicited call to a government official in a country where I didn’t speak the language. With resorted and purposefully organized skills, experiences and knowledge, I talked my way into two different and exciting gigs.
I admit that several of my opportunities resulted from having serendipity on one shoulder and an angel on the other. However, if you’re not prepared, serendipity can drop all the opportunities in the world at your feet and they will be either invisible or impossible.
Practice sorting your Piggy Bank
Can you identify a change you were recently handed that you can set aside as a future “investment”?
Imagining work that is totally different from your current employment situation, how would you identify and sort your skills, knowledge and experience to qualify for that work?
Change can be good. When you save it, change can add up to something of value. Do you need to find new ways to fill your Piggy Bank?
“Untitled” by artist Maddalena Ambrosio, 2013, Part of the Locus Solus exhibit at Arter Gallery, Istanbul, 2022.
Do you find it challenging to make decisions or manage change? Are your decision factors fuzzy? Does it stress you out to determine what’s next? One of the most helpful tools for a successful outcome is identifying and focusing on your Most Important Thing.
What do I mean by that term? It’s simple, yet complex.
Where are you rooted? What grounds you?
What is at the core of your being able to do what you love? What is essential to your life?
It’s Personal
Our Most Important Thing (M.I.T.) is very personal. I’m sure you’ve learned by now that we are all very unique individuals. Our core, our inner being, is even very different from that of our best friend.
How others may judge your M.I.T. isn’t valid. Your Most Important Thing is that which speaks to your inner being, to your core. It is the foundation on which you build, or want to build, your life.
Making a decision is easier and produces more successful outcomes when you keep your Most Important Thing at the forefront of your mind. When you are faced with a choice or decision, your success will depend in large part on how it relates to and affects your M.I.T.
Our Most Important Thing usually sits in the background of our minds. It’s the subconscious desire, passion, and focus that we don’t often think about or voice. How our M.I.T. influences the success of the decisions and choices we make may be sub-conscious, but it exists. Your focus, energy and enthusiasm will be much greater when your choices and decisions are as closely aligned with your M.I.T. as possible.
Life isn’t perfect nor always accommodating. We don’t always have the options for a perfectly aligned choice or decision, but there is one thing to keep in mind. The choices we make in life create or eliminate our future possibilities and opportunities. Bringing that Most Important Thing to our conscious level when we make choices and decisions will have a positive effect on our satisfaction and success.
The Need To Identify And Define Our Core
Identifying and clarifying your Most Important Thing is a deep thinking, soul searching exercise. You have to dig down to the roots. Use a long, quiet, meditative session. Work on it over a period of time. Since we are all unique, we’ll all have different ways to approach the exercise. Here is one exercise to get you started:
1. List three important things in your life. No names or relationships, not Susan, Steve or “my sister.” It could be anything, but for examples, the following things could be at your core:
emotional or physical safety,
financial security,
personal growth,
a sense of accomplishment,
a child’s future security,
education,
independence,
health,
adventure,
addressing a critical world need,
freedom,
ANYTHING that is most important to you
2. Identify the element or “thing” on your list that you would most consider or re-consider when making a choice about the following:
Taking a job in a foreign country
Taking an expensive trip
Being an organ donor
Having a second piece of chocolate cake
Buying a second home
Buying a sports car
Moving to a larger or smaller home
Moving to (or out of) Hawaii
Taking a work sabbatical
Changing your family structure
Coming home late from work
Draining your savings for a new car
Having a (another) child
Going back to school
Changing your eating patterns and food choices
Having elective or cosmetic surgery
If you segmented your very important things into one for work, one for family, one for your free time, what if you have to choose what to do with a decision that affects all three? Which one rises to the top?
Unique, Broad, Phased?
Your M.I.T. is very unique and personal. It can be broad. It can change as you go through different life phases. Yet, at each time in your life, your Most Important Thing at that time is ONE thing.
Learn what it is and your choices and decisions will be more satisfying. Managing change will become easier because your choices and decisions will be better focused.
Sharing a personal insight, my M.I.T. is “discovery.” I apply it very broadly to my choices on the allocation of my time, money and energy. When changes appear, that’s what I keep in mind as I look for available choices and make my decisions.
I had to dig deep for that knowledge. I didn’t identify it in a three minute exercise, or three hours of contemplation. It rose up after several weeks of conscious and subconscious thinking. I dug down to the roots, and I found gold.
What is the Most Important Thing in your life? It is something you most want to protect and preserve because it is fulfilling. It is the core of your being able to do what you love and what is essential for you.
Parts of our planet Earth look so fractured from 30,000’ above. As a result of millennials of change, our planet has reacted to the flow of substances, to the push and pull of movement, to heat and to ice. It’s been scoured, broken, moved, ground and layered, in some cases multi-layered. In 98% of it’s forms, it retains beauty, stillness and, in diverse ways, it retains life-giving richness.
In our decades of life, we are also subject to disruptions and changes in our existence. Our bones and our homes can get broken. We can be swept away by substances. We get moved by relocation or emotion. The layers of our bodies change.
Change. As mortals, we experience it in a much more condensed time frame than our planet does. We don’t have thousands of years to adjust. As with the shutdowns during, Covid, we sometimes have less than a week. How do we retain our inner beauty, our stillness, our life-giving richness?
I believe we do so in much the same always as the Earth. We maintain our core. I believe, as we respond to the pull and push of various influences on our lives, we are most capable of successfully adapting and adjusting when we maintain our focus on that which is at the center of our being. Just like our physical core that supports the capable functioning of our bodies, we need to keep our mental and emotional strengthened, as well.
What is most valuable to you? How do you keep it strengthened and enriched? Do you make your choices and decisions based on maintaining and nurturing that core of your being?
