Eternal Searcher

Posted by random olio

I can find contentment in my life. I can appreciate what is right in front of me. Yet, I also find that I am always searching, voraciously for new information. I am a learner. I have often wondered what made me crave wanting to know and learn more. Over the weekend I finished reading: Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking by Elissa Altman. It is a memoir about food and she often talks fondly about her father and how he helped shape her craving to want to learn more about food. As a child he would whisk her away to upscale restaurants while her mother would be off getting her hair and nails done.

This quote made me think about why we search in life. Altman is talking about her father’s mother leaving when he was young.

“Her leaving him at such a young age turned my father into an eternal searcher–always walking, always moving and hoping and looking for something he was never quite able to find, or to nail down.” page 219

It made me wonder do I do that? It has always been so hard for me to slow down. My days and sometimes nights are filled with work, which I love. Yet, I also squeeze in my hour run each day, and this weekday blog. It often means I crawl into bed and look over at Chris and say “Before we turn the lights out, can I just catch up with my Words with Friends game? It is the first moment I have had all day.” Then my eyes close and I am quickly off to la la land.

Do we all have a bit of wanting to be wanderers? Do we know when to stop or when enough is enough? Usually I know when I have hit my limit. It happened last week. I came home from work and essentially crawled into bed and fell right to sleep. Chris woke me up a few hours later, and I babbled nonsense to him as I woke from my nap. None of it made sense, and I think it showed just how exhausted I was from my ongoing, never-ending days.

Maybe being an eternal searcher is a good thing, as it means that you are always creatively looking freshly at the world. I would like to think that I am the eternal searcher, content with my life just as it is, but always grateful for that new idea and inspiration that comes as I pop into a boutique, finish that good book, have an aha moment during my run. What I can tell you is that the only way you will find me as a couch potato is if I cannot keep my eyes open and I have to (s)nap out of my long wandering ways.

Start with the basics

Posted by random olio

Some of you that follow my blog know that I have a passion for money management. My passion evolved because I wanted to make sure that I truly understood what we were doing with our money, and that I trusted the information we were using to make our money decisions. I cannot do that in a vacuum. It means I have to read, learn, and ask the right questions. This recent Daily Worth had an idea that resonated with me:

“Money management is like cooking, or fixing a car or anything else you can learn,” says Myers. “But if you tell yourself you’re simply not good at it, you’re less likely to take steps to learn the basics you need to be financially healthy.”

I have to agree. While I am not a cook, I would feel comfortable calling myself a baker. I learned over time how to work with dough and understand why a recipe called for baking soda rather than baking powder. I am still learning new things about baking, and enjoy trying out new recipes. The same goes for money management. As the world changes and evolves fast, we have to shift and adjust with it, and be aware of whether the decisions we have made in the past continue to serve us, or if we need to adjust our financial allocations based on changes in the market, and our lifestyle.

Some individuals work with a financial planner that they trust, others rely on friends and family, and some look to books, the news, and the Internet to help inform them on what decisions they make regarding their money. Whatever step you take, I encourage you to continue to learn. Maybe you are young and a beginner, or you might have a family and are looking now at how to save for your children’s future, wherever you are in life, there is always something to learn that can benefit you today and in the future.

Sea squirts inspire play

Posted by random olio

You have to keep playing. Get on your hands and knees, crawl through the dirt, climb, surf, dance, sing. Each day the more we play, the more we grow. I do not mean your waist, I mean your brain muscle. Play is a catalyst to keep adapting and growing, learning and evolving. Last week I finished reading “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul” by Stuart Brown. It is a very interesting book and makes me realize how much more I need to PLAY in my life. This specific idea about sea squirts resonated with me:

“The sea squirt is an example of a basic principle of nature: Use it or lose it. If a capability is not being used, it becomes an extravagance that is jettisoned or fades away. Either we grow and develop or we waste away. Most animals don’t go to extremes like the sea squirt, but the pattern remains the same. Most animals grow new nerve connections extensively only during the juvenile period. The sea squirt stops moving, and many higher animals stop playing, and the brain stops growing. But not humans. The brain can keep developing long after we leave adolescence and play promotes that growth. We are designed to be lifelong players, built to benefit from play at any age. The human animal is shaped by evolution to be the most flexible of all animals: as we play, we continue to change and adapt into old age. Understanding why many animals stop playing in adulthood, and why humans don’t, helps further understand the role play has in adult life.” Page 48

A little side note about sea squirts. Earlier in the book, Brown explains that sea squirts swim around during adolescence, then attach themselves to ships or other structures, then later eat their own brains. It was his example of something that stops developing and growing. If you think about most kids, they do not stop moving, they do not stop playing. Even if they are glued to video games their brain is thinking, changing, even strategizing their next move.

Adults need to be more agile. We need to move it. We need to play. This week I am really going to try to embrace the idea of play. I am going to get rid of my sea squirt mentality and be adventurous, learn, play, and have fun. Are you with me?

Change the way you look at things

Posted by random olio

It hit me hard and felt like a colonic. Yes, that is what I said. It felt like a colonic. I have had one, I know what I am talking about. All the foggy thinking, gunk, and stirring thoughts and emotions were sucked out of my thought. A dilemma I have been agonizing over for the past few weeks, came clearly to me. I needed to shift my thought. I needed to change how I looked at this situation. It all happened after I came across this quote last week:

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.”

After a little Google sleuthing, I think it is a quote from Wayne Dyer. I am not sure if he means that by looking at a situation differently, we will see it differently. Or, if he means that by looking at a situation differently, the actual situation (or people involved will actually change). Maybe both would/could happen. Either way, it was an eye-opening moment for me. It has made me think about my little dilemma differently. How I approach it, how I think about it, and how I react to it. Hopefully, that means that it will resolve itself in a way that is better than I can even imagine.

Are there things in your life that could benefit from looking at them differently? Things within your marriage/relationship or with your family or friends? Is a work situation that you think is beyond repairable worth looking at differently and a slight shift gives you the answer(s) you need to realign, change course, and take a project to the next level? Just as I was hit hard, take some moments today, not to get an actual colonic, but to have a colonic of your thoughts. Clear out the gunk, change the way you look at things, and just maybe things will change.

It is all about moments…

Posted by random olio

Recently I came across this quote from Nicholas Sparks:

“And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love.”

It made me think about how often we get sucked into life, into work, into our day-to-day to-do lists. There is always so much to do, each hour, each day. Yet, I feel I have to constantly remind myself to slow down, to breathe, to take a moment to smell the fresh, beautiful, summer air. What came to me yesterday is that we all need to be more childlike. A child goes into each day, each playful moment as if it was brand new. What if we did the same thing?

I think we would find that we get less sucked into the things that waste our time. The drama and moments of negativity. We would be more aware of those conversations that do not serve us, we would walk away, or call folks out on their negativity. Kids do it all the time. They walk away. They are drawn to happiness, to individuals that make them feel comfortable. What if you removed yourself from moments that did not inspire you? Moments that brought you down? Would that change your day?

I think it is worth trying.