67 - Look Up When Looking at the Past
Look Up When Looking at the Past
Participants at the Memorial Day Service at the Williamsburg Indiana Cemetery show respect as the National Anthem is played.
I hope you had a wonderful weekend - and for my fellow Americans - I hope you were able to rest and refresh at least a bit during the Memorial Day Weekend. I opted to hold this week’s newsletter until today in honor of Memorial Day.
In a recent therapy session, my therapist said something close to, “When we look back at the past, we’re often looking down.”
This has been so true for me lately. I’m a bit overwhelmed by a couple of home projects that feel like they will never end. They will end - I’m just in the Messy Middle of them. However, I was also resisting some work on them because I was angry at myself for what got me there.
My therapist reminded me that hindsight lets us also choose our vantage point - do we see the thing we did in the past as good or bad. Hindsight’s so called 20/20 vision isn’t so perfect after all if we fail to see all sides of an event.
Whether I got great joy in the moment from creative endeavors that have left my house feeling cluttered with art supplies or I had the best of intentions but learned important time management lessons about trying to take on a project and buying supplies without actually figuring out when I’d do the work, good came from the clutter just as bad did.
So, as you think about the past remember to look up at yourself for the lessons learned, the value gained, and the joy you had just as much, or more, than you look down at the mistakes and missteps.
4 Things You Might Find Interesting
Last week I talked about using scheduling of my work to help me get more of what I intended done - especially publishing. It worked! Here's a roundup of what I published
Gayle was lamenting the difficulty of creating a specific playlist of Podcast episodes with Apple Podcasts. After playing around with it a little bit this week, I must agree with her. It’s why I use PocketCasts as my go to podcast app of choice. It lets me create very specific playlists very easily.
I had a lovely visit with my friends Alessandra and Devin when they were in Indiana for our mutual friend Hillary’s wedding. Alessandra reminded me after their trip of the value of Google Location Sharing for viewing your own location history and all the places you visited on a trip. Our family uses Google Location Sharing to always see where each other is - a handy feature for kids or senior adults who you want to keep quiet tabs on (with their consent - mostly ;-). It’s also great for reviewing a trip without lots of logging and journaling.
Gayle and I started watching The Hillsong Documentary last night. I’ll save opinions with the exception that it is generally well produced. If you’re looking for something interesting to wrap your brain around, this might be worth a try.
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