Food for Thought

Today I got to pick the movie that sweetie and I went to. We saw Bucket List. It is about 2 men who meet in a hospital. Together they make a "things to do before I kick the bucket" List and then set out to do this. In the above photo, Carter (Morgan Freeman) has just asked Edward (Jack Nicholson) what he thinks about life. Carter tells him a story about 2 questions asked of the ancient Egyptians (?) upon reaching Heaven. "Have you found joy in your life?" to which Edward replied "yes". Followed up by "Have you given joy through the living of your life?"
Now that is a food for thought. This movie is essentially asking "what is the purpose of our living?" What will people be able to say about our life when we are finished with our time on this earth?

This is an interesting movie as it brings together 2 men who would not have met otherwise. They were from different backgrounds/class, but were brought together by irony and their health issues. From this shared experience, they learned to live life to the fullest and how to enrich themselves by sharing of themselves.

Life's Lesson # 3064

Did you ever notice that some times a certain theme recurs in a short time span? Things you see on TV, or read, news or conversation will revovle around a certain topic or theme. Sometimes that is just what we are focused on but I wonder if it isn't God's way of telling us something.

Yesterday a "lesson" or "truth" was reiterated for me at work. A frustrating one at that. People come to you and say they want help, but not the help you have to offer. They want it a certain way and when they don't get it that way.. they get upset. (Which some times upsets me because I want to help them, but they don't like what I have to offer and I have to remember not to take it personally, but when you are in the helping profession, it is hard to detach your "Self" from this profession.)

Sometimes, when people are frustrated from things not going their way, they get angry and take it out on the people nearest them. Unfortunately, that messes up relationships especially if something happens at work, or school and then you take it home to the family or some other "innocent" person.

And you know all of these things in your head, but it hard not to be emotionally invovled with a situation at the time. One of those hazards of the helping profession from time to time I guess.

Depressing Day

Today is supposed to be the MOST DEPRESSING DAY of the YEAR!! Imagine?! It is supposedly determined by math...(see excerpt from News article)

The formula for the day of misery reads 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.

Where W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January's pay day - and T is the time since Christmas.

Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it.

GPs say exercise will boost spirits

Dr Arnalls calculated the effects of cold, wet and dark January weather after the cosiness of Christmas coupled with extra spending in the sales.

He found 24 January was especially dangerous, coming a whole month after Christmas festivities.

Any energy from the holiday had worn off by the third week of January, he said.

By Monday, most people will have fallen off the wagon or abandoned the nicotine patches as they fail to keep New Year's resolutions.

That compounds a sense of failure and knocks confidence needed to get through January.

The fact that the most depressing day fell on a Monday was not planned but a coincidence, he said.

So this was the message that I started my day with. Ironically I did not meet a lot of depressed people , nor was it raining ... a rare thing for Vancouver eh?... and I wasn't depressed either. I can understand that some people would find this time of year depressing. Snow, cold weather, illness, no holiday to break the monotony of the month...

The important thing to note is that depression is an emotion that we feel from time to time, but there is a difference between feeling depressed and having clinical depression.

Themes for the week

Do you ever notice themes in your life? By this I mean, a certain idea (theme) keeps coming up through out your week/month that doesn’t go away? Well this week’s theme has been communication. So yesterday at work, I visited with a patient who is stressed by their health problems and it is exasperating the stressful situations in their family as well. From what I have been told for the past few months by this person, there is a dysfunction in the marriage. Specifically in the communication of goals.

Ok, let me back up a bit for theory. So basically the theory is this: In a system, we’ll say a family, there are certain ways of relating to each other. Sometimes there is an issue that people chose to ignore or is taboo. Such as drinking, drugs, or the like. This is the thing that everyone in the family knows about but no one actually talks about a nd they all choose to deal with it in their own way. Then, a crisis hits and the dysfunctional functioning is exaggerated because no one can avoid it. It impedes/interferes with the coping or dealing with the crisis.

So patient has had a health scare and the family has dealt with it. Day by day. Other family members deal with in their own way and hope that this will be resolved, or “fixed” and then things will go back to normal. This is the “hope” that everyone clings to. But the health issue affects them all even only one person is sick, but they all deal with it as the sick person is away from the regular routine.. and the snowball gets bigger.

So … the issue in this case is that spouses didn’t really have an appropriate communication style in the first place and now that the system/relationships are stressed, they fight about little things but they are actually a part of a whole things that is not working.
The interesting thing about this type of situation is that people in crisis either function and rise above, or they hide their heads in the sand and hope it will go away so they can continue living as it was before. Crisis either makes you stronger or you break.

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Yesterday was New Year's Eve. My friends and I were at a function where we ate and chatted. In the end, my single friends were talking with my hubby about men. "What is it about men?" It was interesting to note the differences in style about communication with men. The nuances, etc. So hubby explains to my friend that "men don't do subtle very well" and proceeded to give examples of this. "Oh I would like to see this movie." might be the woman's way of saying "how about it" , but he advised her to say " I would like to see this movie, how about Tuesday or Friday?" Then if he says "no I can't, but how about Saturday/Sunday." this indicates that he is interested in woman.

I found it funny to hear that my friend was getting advice from my hubby. In the end, the whole room was in on the conversation, agreeing to various parts and offering their views on the matter of male/female communications and the ensuing frustrations. Hence the theme of communications for my week.