The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

KNOWING (LIVING) YOUR WHY

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ATHENS, March 8 (Reuters) – In her tiny Athens apartment, 93-year-old Ioanna Matsouka has knit thousands of brightly coloured scarves for children in need from Greece to Ukraine – and she has no plans to quit just yet.

“Until I die, I will be knitting,” Matsouka said. Her knitting needles clicked through her expert fingers, her nails painted red. “It brings me joy to share them.”  Since she took up knitting in the 1990s, Matsouka has easily made over 3,000 scarves, her daughters estimate.

In the hallway by the door, shopping bags filled with her latest creations await their new home. A knitted patchwork blanket is thrown over the sofa where she spends her days.In the beginning, the scarves were gifted to friends. As stock grew, they were donated to children’s shelters across Greece. Then, through acquaintances, they reached children in Bosnia and Ukraine. The latest batch of 70 went to a refugee camp near Athens this winter, via the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.

“The fact that we give them away gives her strength,” said her daughter Angeliki.

She recounted drawings and mail her mother received over the years: “Thank you, be well, keep going. You gave joy to children, you gave joy to people… That’s her only reward: a letter, a few words.”

Matsouka knits one scarf a day, now with small imperfections. Her vision is impaired and she suffers from bouts of severe facial pain, a condition known as trigeminal neuralgia.

Angeliki says her mother is an example of resilience and optimism.
Matsouka wakes up every morning, drinks a glass of milk, puts on her pearl earrings and gets to work. She takes a break for lunch and a nap, then painstakingly knits into the night.She may have even found the secret to a long life in it, she says.

“It’s the happiness I get from giving,” she said, sitting beside a big blue bag brimming with yarn.

HOW’S THAT FOR SOME KNITTED UP LOVE.         .         .

KNOWING YOUR

 W                  H                  Y

AT ANY AGE
IS THE GREATEST SECRET
TO NOT JUST GROWING OLD
BUT GROWING FOREVER
…just sayin’

Brrrrrrrrr(ing) The CHANGE

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I start my mornings with a cold plunge. For three minutes I immerse myself in approximately 44 degree water for three minutes.  

The health benefits are manifold and it’s worth looking up.

However, health is just the way I rationalize it. You see, at 5:45 AM, 25° outside, the last thing I want to do is step naked into my cold garage and subject myself to freezing water. Therefore, making the choice to do the difficult, dreaded, extremely uncomfortable thing, and DOING IT, is a metaphor. I’m proving myself to myself. I am creating a habit of doing the hard stuff so it becomes muscle memory. I want my natural inclination to be that I just automatically do the difficult stuff first.

I am showing myself that I WILL make the tough choices, have the difficult conversation, stand up in the face of hate and adversity, embrace discomfort, and push my own limits.

It’s my daily reminder that the best things in life rarely come from my comfort zone.

I’m wondering if I’m the odd-man-out in choosing to doing something difficult every day as a personal challenge and metaphor, or if you do that in some way… set your pace, affirm your standard of excellence, prove yourself to yourself?
So.            .             .
Up for taking the
P L U N G E
to change
to be different
to brrrrrr(EAK)
out of your
COMFORT ZONE.            .            .
I don’t know my Mike Rayburn personally, but only know him through the National Speakers Association globally. When I read his post, it made me start thinking how much I do in my comfort zone and rarely what I do out of my comfort zone and taking a plunge in cold water at 5:15 in the morning would definitely be out of my comfort zone, but not comparably to the things that every day I have a chance to do out of my comfort zone that would take much more courage than a cold morning plunge; How about you?
Where’s your comfort zone and how much time do you spend in it and what kind of caring catalyst things do you think you could do and would even be possible if just for three minutes a day you took the plunge and did something out of your comfort zone?
I guess there’s only one way to find out and it ain’t to dip your toe into the cold water
like without hesitation,
jumping in head first.          .          .
R  E  A  D  Y
S  E  T
GO

JUST A MOMENT. . .DO YOU EVER WONDER?

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Ahhhhhhhh the wonder of WONDERING.          .          .






Now that you have been thoroughly
WONDER BOMBED
just what are you
 W          O          N          D          E          R          I          N        G
Pssssssssssssssssssssst:
How about some
EXTRA CREDIT
for WONDERING
ABOUT
H A P P I N E S S

Ahhhhhhhhhh.            .            .JUST A MOMENT.            .            .
THE WONDER OF WONDER

THE SECRET OF LIFE (from a funny man)

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Sometimes FUNNY is less HA HA HA
and a lot more of  AHHHH-HAAAAAA.           .             .

S H U S H I N G

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DARE WE BE QUIET.          .           .
DARE WE BE STILL.           .            .

NOW THAT YOU HAVE HEARD/SEEN THE POEM
R          E          A          D
I     T

KEEPING STILL
Pablo Neruda
(Translated from the Spanish by Dan Bellm)

Now we will count to twelve
and let’s keep quiet.

For once on earth
let’s not talk in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

A moment like that would smell sweet,
no hurry, no engines,
all of us at the same time
in need of rest.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would stop harming whales
and the gatherer of salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and go for a walk with their brothers
out in the shade, doing nothing.

Just don’t confuse what I want
with total inaction;
it’s life and life only;
I’m not talking about death.

If we weren’t so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and could maybe do nothing for once
a huge silence might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves,
of threatening ourselves with death;
perhaps the earth could teach us;
everything would seem dead
and then be alive.

Now I will count up to twelve
and you keep quiet
and I will go.

(My thanks for the poem to Pablo Neruda,
LIKE SO MANY TIMES WHEN POETRY POURS OVER ME.          .          .
IT POURS OUT OF ME IN A NOT SO QUIET SHUSHING:

Shhhhhhhhh
we were told
and often were offended
by this not-so-gentle
SHUTTING UP
but power it is
when we
Self-Shush
Even now
         NOW
Do It
Shhhhhhhh yourself down

Hush Hush yourself
Quiet down
to a Peace that be found
no other way
Let the self-imposed Stillness
SCREAM at you
what you truly need to hear
(FALLING SILENT IS THE GENTLEST FALLING DOWN THERE IS)
NOW
shush yourself

(And have a HAPPY MONDAY in your own ‘shushed’ way)

Fa-La-La-La-Whaaaaaaat?

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W     E     L     L.            .            .
are you ready to bring some
B  A  H
to everyone else’s
H  U  M  B  U  G.               .               .

Hold on there, Sparky
before you pull the plug on all of the festivities
there just may be

Two Surprising Ways to Make Your Holidays Less Stressful

We can find joy even if the holiday season doesn’t live up to our expectations.     .     .

Christine Carter, Ph.D. is a Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center. She is the author of The New Adolescence: Raising Happy and Successful Teens in an Age of Anxiety and Distraction (BenBella, 2020), The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less (Ballantine Books, 2015), and Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents (Random House, 2010). A former director of the GGSC, she served for many years as author of its parenting blog, Raising Happiness.  She may put some twinkle in your tinsel with some of these simple suggestions to keep you going as A Caring Catalyst during this Holiday Season.

Feeling overwhelmed? Wondering how you’re going to get it all done? Wishing you could just lie down? You aren’t alone.

The holidays can be stressful. Often, there’s a lot to do and a lot to buy and a lot of people to see. Sometimes we get so busy we have a hard time enjoying events that we’re otherwise looking forward to.

But we can make this holiday season less stressful for ourselves. Below are two tips to enjoy the holidays more.

 Accept that the holidays will probably be, at times, disappointing.     .     .

Bet you weren’t expecting that one! But acceptance is a strangely effective strategy for feeling happier and more relaxed at any time of the year. When we accept a person or a situation we find challenging, we let go of the resistance that creates stress and tension. There’s a lot of truth to the adage that “what we resist, persists.”

Here’s how this works. When someone or something is being a pain in your rear, take a deep breath and accept the situation. Say to yourself something like, “I accept that Jane is upset right now; I allow this situation to be as it is.” Then notice how you are feeling, and accept how you are feeling, as well. You can say to yourself, “I accept that I am feeling angry at Jane and disappointed. I allow my feelings to be as they are right now.”

If accepting a disappointing situation or person seems too hard for you, here are the handy alternatives you’re left with:

  • You can judge and criticize others and the disappointing situation in general, and blame others for your own negative feelings. As a bonus, everyone around you will no doubt feel your judgment. Some people will likely feel wrongly accused, or like you are trying to “fix” them. You’ll achieve the dual outcomes of being hurtful to others while simultaneously making yourself feel tense and lonely.
  • Another alternative to acceptance is to nurse your anxiety and despair over the situation through rumination. To ruminate effectively, think about what is wrong with the situation or person as often as possible. Don’t let yourself become distracted from the negative. Tell everyone what you don’t like about the situation or person. This will successfully amplify both your negative feelings and the difficulty of the situation.
  • You can also definitely deny how difficult the situation is by pretending that nothing is bothering you. You can stuff your hard feelings down by drinking too much or by staying really, really busy and stressed. Simply avoid situations and people you don’t want to deal with, because that’s more important than participating in meaningful traditions and events.

Criticism, judgment, rumination, blaming, denial, and avoidance are almost like holiday rituals for some of us. But they are all tactics of resistance, and they won’t protect you. Ironically, these tactics will allow the disappointments or difficulties to further embed themselves into your psyche.

This is a long-winded way of pointing out that resistance doesn’t make us less stressed or more joyful in difficult situations. What does work is to simply accept that the circumstance is currently hard. We can accept a difficult situation, and still make an effort to improve things. This gentle acceptance does not mean that you are resigned to a miserable holiday, or that nothing you do will make the situation better. Maybe it will get better—and maybe it won’t.

Accepting the reality of a difficult situation allows us to soften. This softening opens the door to our own compassion and wisdom; and we all know that over the holidays, we are going to need those things.

 Let go of expectations while turning your attention to what you appreciate.     .     .

Some people (myself included) suffer from what I think of as an abundance paradox: Because we have so much, it becomes easy to take our good fortune for granted. As a result, we are more likely to feel disappointed when we don’t get what we want than to feel grateful when we do.

This tendency can be especially pronounced during the holidays, when we tend to have high hopes that everything will be perfect and wonderful and memorable. You might have a fantasy of a sweet, close relationship with an in-law, for instance, or grand ideas about the perfect Christmas Eve dinner.

This sort of hope, as my dear friend Susie Rinehart has reminded me, can be a slippery slope to unhappiness: Hoping a holiday event will be the best-ever can quickly become a feeling that we won’t be happy unless it is, leading to sadness and disappointment when reality doesn’t live up to our ideal.

Unfortunately, the reality of the holidays is unlikely to ever outdo our fantasies of how great everything could be. So the trick is to ditch our expectations and instead notice what is actually happening in the moment. And then find something about that moment to appreciate.

Can you appreciate that your spouse did a lot of planning (or dishes, or shopping) this week? Do you feel grateful that you have enough food for your holiday table? Are you thankful for your health (or if your health is not great, that you are still here)?

It’s enough to notice and appreciate the small things, but when I’m having trouble with this, I like to practice an extreme form of gratitude that involves contemplating how fleeting our lives may be. There’s nothing like facing death to make us appreciate our lives—and sure enough, research finds that when people visualize their own death in detail, their gratitude increases.

If you feel stuck on what isn’t going well rather than what is, set aside some time to reflect on the following questions. Take each question one at a time, and try journaling an answer to each before moving on to the next one.

  • What would I do if this were the last holiday season I had left to live? What would I do the same, and what would I do differently?
  • What would I do if this were the last holiday season that my spouse, parents, or children had left to live? What would I do the same, and what would I do differently?

It’s a little heavy, I know, but contemplating death does tend to put things in perspective.

As the holidays approach, we will likely feel stressed and exhausted, but we need not feel like victims to this time of year. We often have a great deal of choice about what we do and how we feel. We can choose to bring acceptance to difficult situations and emotions, and we can choose to turn our attention to the things that we appreciate.

This holiday season, may we all see abundance when it is all around us—not an abundance of stuff, necessarily, but rather an abundance of love and connection. Even during the difficult bits.

There’s still a whole lot of
F   A
to go along with your
L    A
L    A
L    A
Hopefully this will help keep your
lights burning
b r i g h t
and bring you some
M E R R Y
M E R R Y
to share your cup of
C  H  E  E  R

 

THE ART OF DOING NOTHING

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THERE IS AN ART TO DOING NOTHING.     .     .
I MEAN
N O T H I N G
that means, not listening to music or doodling or meditating or yoga or breath work or daydreaming or conniving or scheming or once-upon-a-timing or, Or, OR, ORRING
N                   O                    T                    H                   I                    N                    G
HUGE STACKED BOXES OF
n o t h i n g

.       .       .and so when I recently read I WANT TO BE UNPRODUCTIVE, a little piece from Danielle Coffyn, who has ever reason to be doing everything but NOTHING. Danielle is a writer, mother, teacher, mental health advocate, eating disorder survivor, and outdoor enthusiast. She started her poetry account @musingsonbeing in 2021 where she worked through her perfectionism by sharing rough drafts of her work. Her main themes include healing, feminism, rewilding, mental health, and reclaiming the body. She is a co-founder of The Superbloom Society, a community for anyone looking to build authentic, intentional connection through writing workshops and retreats.

I WANT TO BE UNPRODUCTIVE

to ponder the meaning of yellow. to listen as summer cicadas sing their final symphony of the season. to dine with friends. to savor course after course. to inhale the scent of San Marzano tomatoes bathed in balsamic brine. to taste vanilla bean gelato and espresso marry on my tongue. to study the morning habits of a neighborhood robin. to plunge blistered toes into sun-ripened sand. to float in the sea. to feel my heartbeat slow to the rhythm of the tide. to memorize the laugh lines of a California redwood. to spend a morning rereading stories from childhood. to determine which song most resembles a honey bee collecting lavender pollen. to observe a spider spinning her web. to chart freckled constellations along my child’s spine. to taste test every croissant in the city. to rest for the sole purpose of slowing down. to savor stillness. to allow myself the gift of being.
Psssssssssssssssssst:
WE ALL KNOW WHERE TO GET OUR WAX.      .      .
but the best is when you do a
SACRED NOTHINGNESS
that’ll have
THE FLAME
coming to the WICK
instead of the candle chasing it in the wind.    .     .

 

DREAM ON

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So here’s the tragedy about
D R E A M I N G
.        .       .we only think it’s for the young
that it has an age limit attached to it
that after a certain time, a certain age
it’s no longer viable
a               n                d
we do little to
DISPROVE IT.            .            .

ALONE. . .WITH YOUR THOUGHTS

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Most of us feel like we just need to
STEP BACK
and take a moment to process
TO THINK 
and some of us do all we can
to make sure we don’t.          .          .
WHAT SAY YOU

How to Enjoy Being Alone with Your Thoughts

It’s hard to think pleasant thoughts—but a new study suggests a quick way to make it easier.     .     .

Kira M. Newman of the Greater Good Magazine took an inside peak of dealing with our THOUGHTS, Alone.

Be optimistic. Think happy thoughts. Lots of happiness advice makes it sound as if we could flip a switch and fill our heads with puppies and rainbows—and wouldn’t that be great?

But it turns out that positive thinking isn’t so easy. In an infamous 2014 study where people had 15 minutes to mentally entertain themselves, about 40 percent chose to help pass the time by—no, not meditating—receiving an electric shock.

In fact, a recent study found that only 13 percent of people’s thoughts are positive and inner-directed, and they enjoy those thoughts more when they arise spontaneously. (In other words, they prefer that happy thoughts come naturally rather than putting in the effort to “think positive.”)

Could this process be easier and more enjoyable? It’s not an idle question: According to the researchers behind the new study, if people were better able to generate pleasant thoughts, they might rely less on technology for constant stimulation. It could help those who have trouble falling asleep, or who start pounding the steering wheel in traffic.

The researchers didn’t find a magic switch. But they did discover a simple trick.

Across four studies, more than 250 college undergraduates and 800 online participants started by listing eight topics they’d enjoy thinking about, including memories, fantasies, and things they were looking forward to. People wrote down everything from their wedding day to Valentine’s Day, their family or the summer, eating decadent cake, or living in the World of Warcraft universe.

Next, participants (alone in a room) were instructed to entertain themselves for four to six minutes with thoughts about the topics they had listed. “Your goal should be to have a pleasant experience, as opposed to spending the time focusing on everyday activities or negative things,” the researchers advised.

That was it, except for one small difference: Half of the participants had access to their list of topics, either written on notecards or displayed on a computer screen one by one. The other half didn’t.

Afterward, participants rated how pleasant the activity was (how enjoyable, entertaining, and boring) and how cognitively difficult it was (how hard it was to concentrate, how much their mind wandered, and how much time they devoted to irrelevant topics).

Ultimately, the researchers found that the group who could look at their list of topics found the experience more pleasant and less cognitively demanding. All the participants had made lists in the first part of the experiment, but having access to that “thinking aid” was key.

“Often when we have a few free minutes, we reach for our cell phones to entertain us,” says Erin C. Westgate of the University of Virginia. “But with a little planning ahead of time, we might be able to use our own minds instead.”

She and her co-authors (including Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University) speculate that the list might have made it easier for people to concentrate; to remember their go-to, happiness-boosting topics; or to decide which one to think about when.

After reading this study, I’ve already  put up some kind of posters and art work in my little man cave, filled it with images of loved ones, surrounded by my favorite books, with a great sound system and yes, even a nice ECHO that allows me to listen to music that seems to fit my mood or my anxiety at any given time.  Those are certainly better than an electric shock!

 

STINKIN’ THINKIN’

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How to Manage Catastrophic Thinking
or get rid of
STINKIN’  THINKIN’.   .   .

Illustration by Giulio Bonasera for TIME
 MARTIN SELIGMAN
from Time Magazine, recently shared some interesting thoughts about THOUGHTS that haunt/taunt us all from time to time

When something really bad happens to you, how do you think about your future? Catastrophizers think, Everything will now unravel, and my life will be ruined. This mindset turns out to be an enormous impediment to happiness and, even worse, it is a major risk factor for post­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

We found this out by tracking every single one of the 79,438 U.S. Army soldiers who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan from 2009 to 2013. On their very first day in the Army, they took a psychological questionnaire asking them to rate how they felt about several statements related to pessimism and its most extreme form, catastrophization. For example:

  • “When bad things happen to me, I expect more bad things to happen”
  • “When bad things happen to me, I blame myself for them”
  • “I have no control over the things that happen to me”
  • “When bad things happen to me, I cannot stop thinking about how much worse things will get”
  • “When I have a physical problem, I am likely to think that it is something very serious”
  • “When I fail at something, I give up all hope”
  • “I respond to stress by making things worse than they are.”

It turns out that we could have used the day-one questionnaire to predict robustly who would develop PTSD. Catastrophizers who faced severe combat stress were almost four times as likely as non­catastrophizers to get PTSD over the course of their service. But even those catastrophizers who faced minimal combat were at greater risk for PTSD than noncatastrophizers, and at all other levels of combat as well.

Combat is near the extreme of the bad events that human beings face. So what is the lesson for the rest of us, the civilian population? If you catastrophize, you will likely suffer more from bad events, and if you have the opposite, optimistic mindset, you will likely be more resilient.

I confess that I am a catastrophizer, but I take my own medicine. I have learned how to combat catastrophization, and you can too. In our upcoming book Tomorrow­mind, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and I discuss how you can build this strength. One potent exercise is “putting it in perspective”: you begin by imagining a troubling event which has an uncertain, but potentially terrible, explanation. For soldiers, the example was a man missing at night. They start with the worst possible explanation: “He’s dead, and it’s all my fault.” Then, the best possible: “His radio battery died, and he will show up in a few minutes.” Finally, the most likely, along with plans to cope with it: “He’s probably injured, so we need to retrace our steps, find him, and bring him back.” Following this pattern built resilience in soldiers.

When COVID-19 broke out as I neared my 78th birthday, I catastrophized: “I’m in the most vulnerable group. I am sure to die.”  But then I asked myself about the best outcome: “I am very healthy and will likely escape altogether.” And then I focused on the most likely outcome, and I planned for it: “I will isolate for now as best I can, take all the vaccines, and escape with a mild case, if that.” There is no way to completely eliminate uncertainty from your life. But this exercise is one way to systematically reduce catastrophization—and, therefore, both maintain happiness despite uncertainty and develop emotional resilience.

Do you have Stinking’ Thinking’?
Are you a true Catastrophizer.       .     .
and you handle it by______________________
and now you will at least try to:
______________________________________

Uhhhhhhhhhhhh.          .         .
try filling in your own blanks
.          .          .an ounce of
self-acceptance
and a pinch of self-compassion
may bring you a ton
of
s a t i s f a c t i o n

 

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man