Category: Learned Through Others

Micro-Gratitude: It’s Little and It’s Very Big

I have been learning things from Maddy, my mother-in-law, for over 30 years.

Lately she’s been teaching me about what I want to call “micro-gratitude”: being grateful for the very smallest things in life.

Many things are hard for Maddy right now: getting out a chair, walking across the room, keeping track of the round-the-clock caretakers, and worrying about whether we really did close the windows.  But through all this, she continues to be deeply grateful for the feeling of warm water when she washes her hands.

Every time I turn on the water for her, she says “Oh thank you!” as if I had just given her a long-awaited gift.  Without fail, she tells me how wonderful it feels.  She luxuriates in the clear warm water and the ritual of washing.

I try to be grateful every day, but I tend to think of the big things, always starting with the health of my loved ones.  Maddy is teaching me that there is plenty of gratitude to go around for the little things, some of it as close as the nearest faucet.

Finding the Open Door

From Jill:

“You can’t run through a closed door without getting hurt. It’s usually better to accept it as one of those little dead ends on a maze that helps bump you back onto the path that will lead you to the open door! (I learned this when I bought my VW Bug…that I’m still paying for…..HUGE lesson learned)”

Nomophobia

I have learned that this is the only way to charge my phone overnight if I want to make sure that I have it with me on those crazy early Boston-bound mornings:

And because I learned this the hard way, I also learned a new term from Christy:  Nomophobia, the panic that comes from realizing that you are without your phone (as in no – mobile – phobia)

 

A Life-Saving Lesson

Years ago, after we spent a cloudy-turned-sunny morning waiting to meet Hillary Clinton, Sally taught me a lesson that I used every day since:  You need to wear sunscreen every single day of the year.  Steve and I were burnt.  Sally was not, at least not on her face.  What’s up with that, I asked.  I told you Mom, she said, you need to wear sunscreen EVERY day, not just the sunny ones!

Please take a minute and watch this video that I got from Sally’s blog.  There is a second life-saving lesson in here, on top of the sunscreen one.

Thoughts?

Recalculating!

This is awesome.  I learned, from Sara, about an interview with Sylvia Boorstein in which she suggested that we could all learn from the philosophy of the GPS.

When we make a mistake, it calmly and evenly says “recalculating” and then suggests a course correction.  Even if you get that wrong, it says “recalculating” and suggests another correction to get you back to where you said you were going.

No yelling.  No beating anyone up for making a mistake.  Just recalculating.

Here is an excerpt from the interview, below, but I recommend the whole interview.  What do you think??

“If something happens, it challenges us and the challenge is, OK, so do you want to get mad now? You could get mad, you could go home, you could make some phone calls, you could tell a few people you can’t believe what this person said or that person said. Indignation is tremendously seductive, you know, and to share with other people on the telephone and all that. So to not do it and to say, wait a minute, apropos of you said before, wise effort to say to yourself, wait a minute, this is not the right road. Literally, this is not the right road. There’s a fork in the road here. I could become indignant, I could flame up this flame of negativity or I could say, “Recalculating.” I’ll just go back here.”

Where there’s smoke…

there is not enough fire: that’s what I learned!

Steve gave me a beautiful fire in the fireplace for Christmas.  But first he found out how to do it smoke-free.

Somehow he got our neighbor, Bob, to climb up on the roof and check out the chimney, which Bob then declared to be clean and perfect.  So what’s with the smoke when we make  fires?  Bob told Steve that smoke comes from little fires, ones that don’t create enough heat to get the updraft going.

Here is the big roaring smoke-free fire that Steve made: