Monday, April 26, 2010
Stress Be Gone: the benefits of practicing yoga.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Goals and Happiness
Graduation day is a week and a half away, and I am so excited I can barely stand it! Work and my classes this semester have stretched me to my limit and beyond. I guess that's the only way we grow, is to push past our comfort level and keep on pushing!
Last weekend I felt like I jammed about a month and a half into one weekend. I do have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind, though, that I will have to sleep for that month-and-a-half to recover from it. =)
I'm almost ready to submit my Business Plan for my Entrepreneurship class, and I'm so excited to have finished it! Even more, I think it is a document that will actually be useful for Dana's business, if he wants to use it.
And now to my purpose on this post...
One of the reasons people remain unhappy is that they don't know what will make them fulfilled. We each need to create our own personal plan or blueprint for happiness. When we make goals, or lists of things we want to see happen in our lives, how and when we want to accomplish these things, we can get places we never could otherwise. This really is the key for achieving our dreams, and no dream is too big!
Robert Louis Stevenson said, "An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself." Only we can decide what will make us happy. When we decide, setting and achieving those goals truly make for a happy life.
I heard somewhere that if we take the time to write a goal, we have an 85 percent chance of achieving that goal. That is HUGE!
Regarding my school plan, I had not completed an actual, written goal and a plan to achieve it until 2007. Until I actually completed a schedule, semester-by-semester, I didn't have the key to move beyond the moment. Fitzhugh Dodson said, "Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination." I think I was like that ship. I did have a goal, but no plan to reach it.
I am so pleased to have planned, worked, and achieved this goal!! For those of you who have helped me through the process - family, friends, teachers - I can't thank you enough!
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Families - Enjoying Every Minute
Lexi and Cambrie may not be exactly the same age, but they sure had a wonderful time playing together! They spent all day Saturday playing - Dana, Diana and Grandma Meier took them to the Dinosaur Museum in St. George and then they came back and played in "Papa's Park" here at our house. As you can see, they had plenty of bubble fun, lots of swinging, and they even got to feed some carrots and apples to our neighbor's horse!
An important lesson I learned this weekend:
Enjoy these moments, no matter when they come! I have been really struggling with incredible end-of-semester stress both in my job and my classes. I have HUGE projects due in both classes this week, and although I've been working to get my Business Plan finished for my Entrepreneurship class, it hasn't been moving as quickly as I had hoped. So, taking time away from that could have felt like a nuisance, an impossibility, or total bliss. I consciously chose the latter.
At our family party, we kept the food as simple as possible (relying on help from some great cooks in the family), and just enjoyed each other's company. I am a lucky woman to have such a great family!
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Does Feminism Teach Us to Be Discontent?
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Don't Postpone Happiness
So, the next time we find ourselves wishing time away, thinking we will be happy after some event or stage is over... STOP! Stop and realize that the time to be happy is now. Right now, when you are mucking through the hard stuff. After all, that's what life is made up of.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Value of Persistence
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
~ Thomas Edison
Studying the life of Thomas Edison can help one realize the values of learning and creativity must be accompanied by the value of persistence! Edison was brilliant and extremely creative, and although he is well-known for inventing the telephone (with his close friend, Alexander Graham Bell), he got next to nothing in return. In fact, by the time Edison was well into his twenties, he was penniless - deeply in debt, starving, and living on the streets of New York City.
It was in New York's financial district, though, that his story began to take a turn for the better. He finally landed a job as a fix-it man for a financial corporation there.
"Edison recalled that the incident was more euphoric than anything he ever experienced in his life because it made him feel as though he had been "suddenly delivered out of abject poverty and into prosperity." http://www.thomasedison.com/biography.html
Thomas Edison's accomplishments are legendary, but if he had not been persistent in pursuing his dreams, even after countless failures, his name would be meaningless to us.
My take from this brief study... keep on keeping on! The next few months until graduation will be extremely busy, challenging, and exhausting. But if I keep setting my goals, persisting (even if I encounter failures), and keep looking forward, I will get through it all.
I may not be a genius like Edison, but I can still learn great lessons from a great man.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Hope
It doesn't matter that my mind may have been weighted down with worries of the coming day - the meetings, projects, classes, and general stresses - this sight brightened my mood by leaps and bounds. Why? Because, to me, it represents brighter, sunnier, greener things to come; it represents HOPE of a better day.
This lesson can be applied in facing the real challenges in our lives, too... not just enduring trivial weather patterns, but enduring genuinely difficult trials. If we can hold onto hope - hope of a brighter, sunnier, time; hope of a strength gained through enduring the hardship; hope of weathering whatever storm besets us - then somehow our trials become easier to bear. Either that, or our hope strengthens us to be able to bear the trials more gracefully.
So, when you see the trees budding, bulbs peeking through the soil, snow melting, even weeds growing, any sign that our world is awakening with spring in the air, think of something more than the impending allergy season... think of HOPE!