At the recent Houston International Quilt Festival, I was mesmerized by this huge (22 ft) quilt by Australian Helen Godden. Read her story at https://helengodden.com/gallery-2/my-australia-the-huge-quilt/ or Facebook.
I took iPhone photos of certain details that enchanted me. I hope you enjoy them, too!
While I understand on a general basis how I can get stuck, it's really helpful to have a procedure for getting UNstuck. Here's a good one.
DeProcrastination.co: 3 questions to get unstuck and start making progress by Vita Benes and K. M. Michna
the 3 questions that will help you get unstuck and start making progress are:
- What haven't I done yet?
- What's stopping me from doing this?
- What is making me frustrated or discontent?
While I am sensitive to the way my emotions are affected by health and circumstances, this new approach gives me even more influences to consider and control. When my feelings are pushing me around, I can do a little audit:
Or should I claim "emotional flu" and just delay my reaction? Or should I try to relax and start asking questions?
BBC Science Focus: How emotions trick your brain, 2018-May by Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett
Your brain makes meaning from the identical sensation in different ways, depending on context. That’s how emotions are made. They are not built-in at birth. They are built in the moment.
In a sense, your emotions are constructed unconsciously from three ingredients: your body budget*, your current situation, and predictions from past experience. If you modify any of these ingredients, you can take some control over your emotions. I’m not saying this is easy, but it’s possible....
The third ingredient, your predictions from past experience, is the toughest to alter because it’s impossible to change your past. Yet if you take action in the present, you can modify your brain’s predictions in the future, changing your future emotions. For example, in my family, we came up with an idea we call the ‘emotional flu’.
Have you ever felt wretched, like you’re a horrible person, everybody hates you, and the world is going to end… but in fact, there’s nothing actually wrong with your life? That’s the emotional flu – you’re having an unpleasant physical feeling, probably from a disrupted body budget, and your brain has constructed all sorts of negative explanations that are deeply personal....
By repeatedly reframing the situation from personal to physical, my family and I changed our brains’ future forecasts, making it easier to create the non-personal, non-judgmental, emotional flu. This was challenging to do at first, but it got easier with practice, and we’ve passed the idea along to friends who have also succeeded....
For hundreds of years, people have drawn a boundary between mental and physical illness. Cancer, heart disease and diabetes are seen as disorders of the body, while depression and anxiety are often viewed as ailments of the mind. But we now know that your brain constantly regulates your body budget, and when the budget’s in the red, you feel bad.
*Along with predictions about the world, your brain also makes them about your body so you stay alive and healthy. It forecasts when your heart should speed up or slow down, when your blood pressure should rise and fall, when your breathing should deepen, and when you need more salt, sugar, water or hormones, and attempts to meet those needs before they arise. It’s like running a budget for your body, but instead of money, the currency is biological. This budgeting process continues through your entire life, and most of the time, you aren’t aware of it. But it produces something you know well: your mood.
I have to share this quote which struck me as SO funny and SO insightful. We "know" things based on our experience. And yet, our experience is not universal. The best way to make it more universal is to share it. Think about it! How many times have you swallowed your opinion when you ought to have shared it?
NY Times: The internet takes some time off, 2023-Sep-1, by Madison Malone Kircher
There is a pet theory I’ve long held about the internet. I will disclose upfront that it has absolutely zero scientific merit. The only peer review it has received is me telling my actual peers about it. You are now all my friends.
I'm so glad that Ian Leslie made part of this Substack post open! I've read so many posts which wrestle with WHAT DOES IT MEAN...? It means we can laugh at ourselves and the way we see the world. We can PLAY.
The Ruffian: Barbearheimer [excerpt], 2023-Aug-26 by Ian Leslie
... Barbie is best enjoyed with your left brain switched off. People are making a category error when they try to establish whether it has a feminist message or not. Barbie doesn’t make a coherent argument about feminism or capitalism and it’s not trying to. It’s aiming to feel modern, fresh, and above all, funny. Rather than advancing intellectual ideas, it uses intellectual-sounding talk as a colour in its tonal palette, a striking and funny contrast to the vacuity of its characters. Barbie tickles the frontal cortex, site of Deep Thoughts, but its purpose is to raid the hypothalamus, source of endorphins...