Seasons change
Whether we are talking about the world around us or our own internal lives and relationships with others: change is constant. Even the nature of that change, changes. And that's OK.
When all seems to be shifting around us, like the wind re-making the beach before our very eyes, it’s easy to feel blown off course.
Some of these changes are huge and we can feel disoriented. We can often struggle to know how to tackle them.
I wonder if this is because for many people, we have been atomised into units of one. We are taught that we should cope alone. We are also told that we should stay in the now, focused on the present moment, as if this is all that matters.
Of course we have a past - and a future too.
Can we mine our own past to understand how to cope with what is going on for us in the now? Even if this is feels like a completely new situation, there is often something from a past experience that can help us with what we face. And if we pool these experiences together - both individual and collective experiences, past on through families and generations over time - then who knows what we can achieve?
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A happiness columnist’s three biggest happiness rules
Two years later, Arthur C. Brooks reflects on his thoughts about wellbeing and what’s really important in his 100th column.
Mother Nature doesn’t care if you are happy
Lasting happiness comes from habits, not hacks
Happiness is love
Three maxims isn’t so many to remember—the hard part is to livethem. And the best way to do that is to share them with others. Just as teaching math helps you understand it deeply, almost nothing works better for elevating your happiness than teaching it to others. In fact, my own happiness levels have increased a whopping 60 percent since I started writing this column, as measured with common and well-validated assessments I ask my students to take. Every single day, I think of how I can share what I have learned in the scientific literature with the world, and make sure that I am putting these ideas to use in my own life.
I LOVE this and it very much reflects what I try to achieve in my Substack and my wider writing and public mental health work too.
You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that?
Learning is lossy and there’s no way around that. You have to encode 100 units of information if you want to retain even a few. This is simply a law of nature, and if you’re mad about it, wait until you hear about perpetual motion machines.
This is a great Substack post on why we forget so much, how this is totally expected, and what we can do to change that.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
It is all about the vibe.
It’s especially remarkable that my brain ditched all the facts and kept all the feelings, because there were big incentives to keep the facts and none to keep the feelings. The feelings never showed up on an exam, nor did they score me points in a quizbowl match. I never took notes on them, I haven’t spent much time reminiscing about them, and I never really told them to anyone––even if I tried, it’s hard to capture a feeling in a few words, and I’m merely gesturing toward them here. And yet, despite explicitly directing my brain to store the facts, it stored the feelings instead.
How to get back in sync with your teen
With all the pandemic disruptions, it can feel like you may have come adrift from what is going on in your teen’s life. Here’s some great advice on how to connect back up again. And it starts with putting away your phones. Made free for Noise Reduction readers via my New York Times sub.
When a tween or a teen is surly or standoffish, it may not simply have to do with their changing hormones; it is normal for young people to pull away from their parents as they develop. Research even shows, for instance, that adolescents’ brains are hard-wired to tune out their mothers’ voices in favor of other less familiar ones.
“Every single teenager is testing the boundary of independence,” said Dr. Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis.
The Apollo space missions as you’ve never seen them before
I was going to post about the Artemis mission today, but that launch has been put off ‘til the weekend. Fingers crossed, because if that doesn’t happen, the next launch window in a month away.
In the meantime, take a look at these amazing images. Nasa’s original moon mission photographs, kept locked in a freezer in Houston, are some of the most vital artefacts of human endeavour. Now, they have been remastered for a new century.
There is a huge treasure trove of around 35,000 photographs, most of which are rarely seen, in part due to the quality or exposure of the original film. It’s easy to forget they were taken in an era when photography was purely analogue, requiring light-sensitive chemistry, film and paper… They offer an intoxicating mix of the pioneering, pre-digital 1960s era, capturing stunning otherworldly vistas, pre-computer-designed spacecraft and technology. The technical proficiency in their taking, combined with the quality of the equipment used, produced images so crisp, they border on the surreal.
Watching, listening, reading
Watching: We’ve been drawn into The Old Man on Disney+ We were little sceptical after the first episode, but decided to give it another episode. So glad we did - it’s weirdly meditative viewing about the flux of identity, but compelling at the same time.
Listening: For some reason, Kim Hill was playing this on her show on RNZ last weekend (check out the section at 9.40am). Gosh, it took me back. I’ve seen The Orb play three times. Once, they were amazing. The other two times, they were a little er … worse for wear, shall we say. Here’s one of their best, and a classic from the 90s.
Reading: Apart from everything I read to put this together, my new issue of Private Eye has arrived.
I feel like this post was written for me. I have been slightly off kilter this month. A change in the weather here in the UK? A change in my relationship living with my parents (three months now) mainly a positive one, but there have been hours, days and weeks where I have asked myself ‘What am I doing here?’ Have I changed? I feel I have. My focus has been on the now a smidge of the past being with my ageing parents I guess. My dad (late onset dementia) particularly only remembers the past clearly. My mother speaks of the now and of the future and I feel like I am on a continuous spin cycle with both of them and I just want to get off.
Thank the goddess my partner arrives in the UK next week and the three month holiday that everyone in NZ thinks I’ve been on will start with a welcome break and a change of scenery. Off to Ireland we go!
Positive change on the horizon though I feel guilty leaving my folks behind as the original plan was that we would take them with us for their welcome break. Due to you know what, their world has become so small. This whole experience for me and for them has being about change and will no doubt continue changing! Kia Ora.