 This is not an actual photo of what my sister's kids could do to a room when they were little, but it kind of captures the spirit. Photo by Cultura RM Exclusive/Henglein and Steets / Getty Images “I read somewhere that your house is a reflection of your soul,” my sister Kate once told me when her sons were little. She looked around at the chaos, rolled her eyes, then laughed. “God, I hope that’s not true.” I could see what she meant; it’s natural to believe our inner lives should be orderly and tranquil, with less clutter and fewer scars. But I thought there was a lot to be said for a spiritual path crowded with books and toys and casually scattered jackets, ringing with the laughter of young boys chasing each other up the stairs. There seemed to me to be plenty of zen in the midst of all that zing. Whether we view them as our souls made visible or simply an expression of our tastes and times, our homes have plenty to say about us. Right now I’m trying to make sure mine isn’t shouting, “A couple of crazies spent too much time here in isolation!” My second inoculation takes complete effect this week, changing the number of people I can safely socialize with from one (Rich) to 52 million fully vaccinated Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide. My head is spinning at the thought that soon family and friends will be arriving to celebrate this first step towards a post-pandemic life. Is my house ready? Am I?  An important message for our times Some changes are already in the works, like removing the jigsaw puzzle from the dining room table. But what about our decontamination zone? Should all our masks and hand sanitizers be discreetly whisked out of sight — or offered to guests? Do I leave the “Don’t Panic!” towel draped over the railing at the top of the stairs? Rich and I find it amusing, and frankly, a bracing reminder on darker days, but will it strike our pals as peculiar? And what about the TV area, where we’ve dragged our chairs into positions that are no longer symmetrical but offer better angles for viewing the screen? Should we shove everything back into apple pie order? Or do we let people see how we really live? And then there are the DIY projects. Do we bore our visitors with a tour? I’m aware that A) gutters are just gutters, even if Rich did put them up himself, and B) after the first glass of wine, we probably don’t want guests climbing a ladder to inspect the solar panels he installed on the shed roof to power our Bad Boy generator. Will guests feel the Apocalypse Chow Food Locker signals runaway paranoia? Do we even show them our succulent garden, which to be honest, looks like a collection of alien life forms just waiting until we fall asleep to take over our bodies and finish conquering the planet? Clearly the road from solitude to socializing is going to have its bumps and potholes. Whether you're facing this transition now or later in the year, and no matter how long you wished and waited for it, somehow it's still shocking. It makes you realize just how much the pandemic changed our relationship to the place we call "home" and our comfort level with fellow humans. “We’re all like feral weirdos now,” comments Kate Wagner, the New Republic’s architecture critic, who says of the past year, “It reminds me of when I was in high school. I didn’t have anything in common with my peers. I would go to school, not talk to anyone and come home and read or write terrible science fiction. I lived a totally interior life. Now I’ve reverted. It’s been so productive. What if this is just better for me, to live a life of isolation?”  Kate Wagner is the architecture critic for The New Republic and creator of the McMansion Hell blog, which chronicles housing excesses. Photo courtesy of Kate Wagner “In our home, we have a ritual of expressing gratitude every day, in prayer or other ways, to little things,” says sociologist Matthew Desmond, who before the pandemic lived in a mobile home park to chronicle the violence of eviction — a subject that became acutely relevant when the pandemic put 40 million people at risk of losing their homes. “We have windows that keep the cold out. Everyone has their own bed. Our kids have separate rooms. Light. When the plumbing stops working, we can get it fixed. Our mail comes; there is hot water. When I lived in the mobile home park, I met families that didn’t have heat. They would crouch around a space heater and cover themselves with a blanket to get warm. Families are really at risk. So many of us are so tired of looking at the same walls, but there is a chunk of Americans that’s just praying they get to hang onto those walls.” Which brings up an interesting question of how much of our contentment is dependent upon the comparisons we make — between ourselves and others, and between current reality and our romanticized images of the past and future. Economist Nat Ware proposed a thought experiment about this in his TED Talk Why We’re Unhappy — the Expectation Gap. “Imagine that you’re competing in the Olympic Games.… Would you prefer to come second [or] third?” Naturally most of the audience chose second place. He then showed photos of disgruntled silver medalists and radiant winners brandishing the bronze. “It’s expectations that explain why a bronze medalist can be happier than a silver medalist. Because the silver medalist imagines coming first, the bronze medalist imagines coming fourth… At a very basic simple level, we’re unhappy when our expectations of reality exceed our experiences of reality.” The inevitable comparisons we make between the way we live now and what we once expected of 2020/2021 are as frustrating as measuring ourselves against the gold medalists. Whenever I’m tempted to go down that road, I remember visiting this basement hideout where some hardy souls rode out long stretches of the siege of Sarajevo (April 1992 to February 1996) with only that little stove for heat and no Internet or TV.  I'll bet your home is looking a little better right now, isn't it? I know mine is. Like every other aspect of the pandemic, being isolated in our homes has tested our stamina and ingenuity. One upside of restricted socializing has been the freedom to reconfigure our spaces without worrying what others might think. It seems lots of us are pulling stuff out of our storage cupboards, digging out paint cans, and finding ways to make our spaces more colorful, more cozy — more us. I certainly can’t claim to have done anything close to those spectacular DIY projects. (Did I mention Rich installed new gutters?) But their creativity is heartening, and possibly a reflection of our times. As Orson Wells’ character said in The Third Man, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” We don’t get to choose the era we live in, but we do decide what to make of it. Living in chaotic times has upended everything, including our dwellings and who we invite into them. But if Kate’s quote is true, it may have also brought depth and breadth and vigor to our souls. And isn’t nurturing our souls what life is all about?  Here's Rich's secret for getting through pandemic rough spots. How's your home weathering the pandemic? Have you done any DIY projects or made any other changes to it? Let me know in the comments below. YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY Click here to STAY CONNECTED! Send me your email address and I'll drop you a note whenever I publish new stuff. Feel free to share this article with family and friends. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/ready-to-leap-from-solitude-to-socializing
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 In the memory course, Rich learned to attach numerical significance to symbolic objects, such as these two beauties he met in Chania, Crete, in 2019. “So he says, ‘Try to remember these twenty words, in order, with their numbers.” Rich was describing Jim Kwik’s online course Improve Your Memory Now from the Omega Institute. “He said he could teach us to recall them so well that if he said ‘eleven’ we’d immediately respond ‘skis.’” “How’d you do?” I asked. “At that point, I could barely remember three.” “And now?” “One, the sun. Two, socks. Three, traffic light. Four, searchlight. Five, star. Six, soda. Seven, rainbow. Eight, octopus. Nine, cat. Ten, toes. Eleven, skis…” He rattled off all twenty, but I lost the thread because I was completely gobsmacked. This was last Sunday, weeks after he’d finished the course. How did he do that? “What we think of as memory loss is really mostly distraction,” he said. “We spend 45% of our time mind-wandering: thinking about the past or imagining the future. In those moments we aren’t really paying attention to others or to the mental notes we’re making about picking up milk at the market. It’s even worse when we are multi-tasking — something Kwik says is a myth. We’re not actually doing many things simultaneously, we’re shifting rapidly back and forth, doing one thing after another in short bursts, undermining the quality of our work and accelerating the distraction.”  The fact the real culprit is distraction was excellent news. Why? Because we can do something about it. “Kwik says your memory is actually better than you think it is,” Rich told me. “We get into trouble because we keep trying to recall words when our minds are designed to capture images. He showed us how to attach symbols to things we want to remember: One, the sun; there’s only one. Two, socks come in pairs. Three, the traffic light, which has three colors. Four, the searchlight, found on cop cars with four wheels. Five, a star. Six, soda in a six-pack. And so on. You carry those numbers in your mind and use them to construct images that are much easier to recall than words.” Keep forgetting your friend’s address is 25 Eighty-eighth Street? Think of a pair of socks draped over a star followed by a pair of octopuses. “You can create your own images,” Rich said. “Say you’re food shopping and need two avocados, a basket of blueberries, and some salmon. Kwik suggested visualizing yourself with two avocados on top of your head, blueberries coming out of your nose, and a salmon wrapped around your throat.” My mind’s eye instantly saw Rich standing in the middle of the produce aisle, a whole salmon draped jauntily around his shoulders, balancing avocados on his head. Would he, I wondered, have time to shove blueberries up his nose before store security showed up to escort us off the property?  Incredibly, Rich refused go down to our local supermarket and let me photograph him wearing any of these food items to illustrate the concept I'm discussing here. “Want to hear how I remember pretzels?” Rich asked. “Nope.” How powerful is symbolic recollection? In the Netflix documentary The Mind, Explained, I watched Yanjaa Wintersoul memorize 500 three-digit numbers in ten minutes. How? She converted the digits to sounds then images using her own personal code. “So 5 is an S, 3 is an A, and 9 is a G, just because of the shapes. So basically it’s like reading something instead of looking at all these numbers.” The next number, 166, converts to TBB. Wintersoul then turned SAG TBB into a vivid, offbeat image: “This saggy, half-naked person is covered in, like, tabouli.” Her imagination placed 500 such images in order throughout a familiar location — what some call a memory palace — and then she mentally strolled from room to room identifying the numbers.  Yanjaa Wintersoul is an international grand master of memory. (Wondering about the name? She's Mongolian-Swedish.) For those of us who can barely remember if we're out of avocados, Wintersoul's feat is dazzling. But the real challenge comes in trying to recall life events. The process is piecemeal and slippery at best, sometimes leading to false memories, unreliable eyewitness accounts, and stories that conflate separate memories into one seamless tale. The Netflix documentary asks: Why would Mother Nature give us such faulty recording equipment? It turns out the survival value of recollection doesn’t lie in accurately preserving the past but in storing images that help us envision the future and take appropriate action. I grew up watching my mother race around the house looking for her car keys and glasses muttering, “I’m losing my mind. I’m losing what’s left of my mind.” Vivid images of her frustration, and my own during similar frenzied hunts, motivate me to keep my keys, glasses, phone in assigned places. Sometimes our unconscious mind merges separate memories to make a point. As a kid, Melanie Mignucci vividly recalled 9/11. “I remember my mom was working in the city. I remember smoke billowing out over the water of the Long Island Sound behind the building where I went to elementary school.” There are just a few, tiny holes in her story: her mother was working in Connecticut at the time, her classroom windows didn’t face the water, and smoke from the World Trade Center was 40 miles way and drifting in the opposite direction. According to neuroscientists, Mignucci blended memories with screen images to create a narrative that was less technically accurate but better expressed the day’s staggering personal impact.  As a seven-year-old, Melanie Mignucci conflated her memories of 9/11 with what she'd seen on TV. Today, as a health editor at Bustle, she has a more nuanced understanding of how memory works. That got me thinking about our memories of 2020. I know, most of us would pay good money to acquire a case of total amnesia around the whole grisly year. But someday we may need to draw upon those experiences to cope with other disasters that knock us sideways. Among its many other lessons, 2020 taught us about the fragility of memory itself. Throughout the pandemic we've all commiserated with each other over brain fog and memory lapses, which are a common result of long periods of isolation and loss of the structure that once defined our days. Beyond that, we’ve all been living under the knowledge that a killer virus is rampaging across the planet, possibly heading directly towards us; distractions don’t come much bigger than that. It’s a wonder any of us can remember our own names, let alone whether we need those blueberries Rich has up his nose. The good news is we can retrain our brains to retain the memories we care about. Yes, no matter how old we are. “It was once believed that as we age, the brain's networks became fixed,” explains Neuroplasticity: Rewire Your Brain for Learning, Memory, and Mood. “But now, an enormous amount of research has revealed the brain never stops changing and adjusting. Connections within the brain are constantly becoming stronger or weaker, depending on what is being used.”  I saw a meme today that said, “Not only is my short-term memory horrible, but so is my short-term memory.” If you’re having days like that, maybe it’s time to start visualizing a better future. Creating mental images of yourself wrapping fish around your neck and slathering a flabby friend’s half-naked body with tabouli may be just what you need to re-energize your brain, live more fully in the present moment, and create memories that will last forever. This post is part of my ongoing series of articles on surviving the pandemic and, with luck, emerging from it with some remnants of our sanity and good humor intact. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE HERE if you'd like more of my free stories in your inbox each week. Feel free to share this post link with family and friends. www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/richs-memory-course-and-wait-what-was-i-saying YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY "Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window." — Peter Drucker  Lately I’ve been having disturbing dreams about doing dangerous, forbidden things like shaking someone’s hand or entering rooms crowded with people whose identity and vaccination history are unknown to me. Weird, right? Why am I tossing and turning about this stuff when other people are happily spending their nights dreaming about diving into pools of chocolate while winning the lottery and having sex with movie stars? Apparently, my subconscious is feeling a bit jittery about the prospect of rejoining the human race (or at least the vaccinated portions of it) after a year of socializing almost exclusively with Rich. I’m getting my second injection on St. Patrick’s Day (rumor has it they’re dying the vaccine green for the occasion), and I’ll be cleared to interact with other vaccinated folks starting on April Fool’s Day (and yes, I’m really hoping there won’t be any practical jokes revolving around that!). I’m profoundly grateful for my good fortune; friends in other countries don’t expect inoculations until September, maybe Christmas. This week brought disheartening news of Italy’s resurgence and return to lockdown and Europe’s suspension of AstraZeneca inoculations. Despite such setbacks, it’s likely everyone reading this will have the opportunity to get vaccinated this year, and life will be upended yet again. Living in such flux sometimes makes me wish I could consult a crystal ball and get a few hints about the future. Then again, maybe not — as Canadian comedian Julie Nolke demonstrates in this engaging skit about her future self going back in time to give her pre-pandemic self a heads-up about what’s coming. If your future self could pay you a visit right now, what do you think you’d learn about the next phase of the Covid crisis? For clues, I consulted the article After coronavirus: Australia offers a strange glimpse of life post-pandemic. “I'm writing from Sydney in the state of New South Wales at 7 p.m. Friday, March 12, 2021," reports Jackson Ryan. "For the past 54 days, New South Wales — Australia's most populous state, with 8 million residents — has recorded zero new cases of coronavirus. Zero.” Constant daily reports of 0, 0, 0 cases caused the folks Down Under to nickname them “donut days.” With a population of 25 million, Australia has had fewer than 30,000 Covid cases (about half the US daily average) and a total of 909 deaths (our toll is 531,766). How did they do it? “Superb management by our state-based health services in containing and tracing outbreaks, plus a stringent quarantine policy for those returning from overseas.” However, Ryan notes, “The crisis isn't over, and we haven't even agreed on what ‘The End’ really means scientifically or socially. But in Australia, the end feels as close as it ever has. In this pseudo-future place, we've found some semblance of normalcy.” He then describes an evening spent in a packed movie theater. Aaughhh! He's living my nightmares!  When Jackson Ryan recently entered a crowded Australian movie theater, he found the scene surreal and disconcerting. “The normality of it all weirds me out,” he says. I feel your angst, Ryan! I get twitchy just watching crowd scenes on Netflix. For a year, pundits have been discussing “the return to normal.” But is that possible? Or desirable? We tend to view our pre-pandemic lives through a rosy glow of nostalgia, as if it consisted of nothing but Instagram-worthy good hair days with congenial companions in glamorous locales serving phenomenal food with lavish amounts of wine. “I firmly believe most nostalgia for the glorious past is delusional thinking,” says A. J. Jacobs in Thanks a Thousand. “I used to write a magazine column in which, each month, I would research just how horrible past centuries were — disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous... We have huge challenges now, no doubt, but the solution doesn’t lie in a return to yesteryear. Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly annoyed about something — the rattle of the air conditioner, say — I’ll repeat a three-word phrase: ‘Surgery without anesthesia.’ It’s a helpful little mantra.” OK, we'd gotten past anesthesia-free surgery by 2019, but let's not forget that the pre-Covid-19 era was “disease-ridden, dangerous, cruel, racist, sexist, smelly, superstitious, and poisonous.” Just think about HIV, opioids, babies in cages, the spike in hate crime murders, Harvey Weinstein, gas station rest rooms, QAnon, and the chemicals in junk food. When “all this is over,” all that will still be with us. Except for Harvey Weinstein, whose earliest possible release date from prison is November 9, 2039.  March 11, 2020 In my rosier moments, I believe we’ve learned a lot in the past year and will hold onto the most vital skill we honed during the pandemic: adaptability. As we face new challenges, will we study and adopt smart ideas that proved useful in other countries? Next time around, could innovative approaches prevent half a million American deaths? Of course, what works in one culture may be a hard sell in others. For instance, in The Finnish Way, the author describes moving from Canada to Helsinki, where she cured her depression and revitalized her life by adopting the Finnish custom of taking a daily morning dip in the Baltic Sea — yes, even in winter. “I climb down the metal ladder leading to a large hole of about three by three meters cut into the thick ice,” writes Katja Pantzar. “When I lower myself into the water, the cold shock — about 1 degree Celsius (34 degrees Fahrenheit) — hits me. During the first few strokes it feels as if hundreds of pins and needles are pricking my body. The pricks are soon replaced by euphoria: ‘I’m alive!’” She goes on to describe the many medical benefits of her daily dip, but while I caught a few words like endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin, mostly my mind was reeling from the thought that anyone would voluntarily submit their body to such torture. Yet apparently ice swimming is popular in Finland, the happiest country on Earth. Somehow I doubt ice swimming will catch on here in California, where we weather wimps won’t dip a toe in the Pacific when the air temperature falls below 70. Of course, if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that we really don’t know what we’re capable of until we’re tested by events — the kind that were unimaginable five minutes ago and now define the shape of our world. “Our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told an earlier generation, and his words ring true today. I cling to the knowledge that not all change is for the worse. Chances are we'll somehow distribute vaccines worldwide. The US may one day achieve donut days with zero Covid cases. I might even stop having nightmares about crowded indoor spaces. Could happen! There’s only one certain prediction that my past, present, and future self would absolutely agree on: I am not taking up ice swimming under any circumstances whatsoever. This post is part of my ongoing series of articles on surviving the pandemic and, with luck, emerging from it with some remnants of our sanity and good humor intact. I'd be happy to send you a quick note when I publish new stuff. SUBSCRIBE HERE to get free stories in your inbox each week. Feel free to share this post link with family and friends. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/its-tricky-making-predictions-especially-about-the-future YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY  The closest I've come lately to packing a suitcase was painting "Armchair Travel." “We are getting crazy travel bug,” my friend Lonnie wrote me this week. “Don’t know when but we are talking. Would love to pick your brain.” My emails and Zoom calls are humming with fresh possibilities now that the vaccines are making many Americans feel, as my pal Pete puts it, “completely bullet proof.” Or at least sufficiently Covid-proof to consider a future that includes a destination further away than the local supermarket. For the last year Rich and I have avoided even discussing travel. Bringing it up seemed as foolish as someone in a WWII foxhole saying, “When all this is over, I’m going to buy a farm.” Way to jinx yourself! But a few weeks ago, when I’d had my first shot and Rich his second, an idea popped into my head. “When it is safe to travel again,” I said, “what would you think about visiting the happiest places on earth?” “Disneyland?” “No, seriously. I’ve spent the last year writing about surviving disasters, packing for catastrophes, and stocking the Apocalypse Chow Food Locker. You’ve spent months studying the science of happiness. Wouldn’t it be fun to visit lighthearted places — you know, the countries that always top the World Happiness Index? See what they’re like?” Rich got that I-think-we’re-on-to-something gleam in his eye and said, “Where’s the map of Europe?” In moments we had the map spread across the table and the World Happiness Index rankings onscreen.  This map, the most recent I can find, shows the 2019 rankings, which are very similar to the 2020 data released last March. The World’s Happiest Countries
“Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, and the Netherlands,” Rich read. “So a summer trip then.” “Definitely.” I recalled our visit to Helsinki in July of 2016; in every photo I’m wearing at least two layers plus a jacket. And, come to think of it, smiling. They say it was the King of Bhutan and his famous slogan, "Our gross national product is happiness," that inspired the UN to start publishing the World Happiness Index in 2012. The rankings alerted the world to the peculiar fact that the Scandinavian lands — despite being as cold, bleak, and remote as Winterfell in Game of Thrones, known for high suicides and taxes — consistently took the prize for wellbeing and contentment. “Clearly, when it comes to the level of average life evaluations, the Nordic states are doing something right,” states the latest report, released in March of 2020. “But Nordic exceptionalism isn’t confined to citizen’s happiness. No matter whether we look at the state of democracy and political rights, lack of corruption, trust between citizens, felt safety, social cohesion, gender equality, equal distribution of incomes, Human Development Index, or many other global comparisons, one tends to find the Nordic countries in the global top spots.” So their happiness ranking reflects a society based on fairness, stability, and trust. What must that be like?  “80% of Danish citizens trust each other,” says Malene Rydahl, author of Happy as a Danes. “In most countries it’s around 5% in the worst cases, and the average in Euope is 25%. In Denmark, it gets summed up in one image: babies sleeping outside a restaurant. Now, you would say, ‘Nobody’s watching the babies.’ Well, I would say, ‘Everyone is.’” The video Why Finland and Denmark Are Happier Than The U.S. explains some reasons why those two countries trade off the top spot on the Happiness Index every year. Their citizens enjoy free education and health care, gender and income equality, and work-life balance that’s taken so seriously everyone has reasonable schedules, five-week paid vacations, and the right to “stress leave” if the job becomes overwhelming. So why all the suicides? “The higher the level of life satisfaction, actually also the slightly higher the level of suicide rates,” says Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute, a quality-of-life think tank in Copenhagen. “And the theory here is that it might be more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society. Because it creates a stronger contrast to how you are feeling if you are surrounded by very happy people.” Since 1980 those rates have plummeted by about 75% and are now similar to those throughout Europe and the US. “But still it’s not zero. So we still need to reduce that even further.” Wiking is doing his bit to spread Nordic happiness, not only in his own country, but around the world via The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living. Hygge, pronounced roughly like HUE-guh, comes from the Norwegian word for wellbeing and defines that delightful cocoon of tranquil contentment that comes from being comfy, cozy and safe, usually in the company of congenial companions. “Hygge,” Wiking explains, “has been called everything from ‘the art of creating intimacy,’ ‘coziness of the soul,’ and ‘the absence of annoyance,’ to ‘taking pleasure from the presence of soothing things,’ ‘cozy togetherness,’ and my personal favorite, ‘cocoa by candlelight.’” As you can imagine, I am in love with this concept. In these challenging times, clearly we need all the hygge we can get. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us all to become hyggespreders, people who spread hygge around our homes and communities. Hygge is associated with soft lighting, relaxed clothes, cozy furniture, and familiar, sweet, comforting foods. Ideally it involves lots of candles, the crackle of logs in a hearth, and the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking. Obviously, that’s a shoot for; I have no log-burning fireplace, can’t bake chocolate chip cookies every night, and rarely light candles as I usually have to get out of bed at least once to reassure myself I remembered to blow them all out. But I have spent a fair amount of time making our cottage cozy. Right now Rich and I are still hunkering down in the comfy safety of our California cottage. I don’t know when it will make sense to hit the road again, but in preparation for that joyous day, we’re busy researching our Happiness Tour. There are a few tiny obstacles. The pandemic is far from over, especially in Europe. Our Spanish residency cards have expired, so we can’t return to Spain until it reopens to American tourists. And to move freely around Europe for months on our Happiness Tour, we will need to renew those residency cards — a daunting task at the best of times, now complicated by massive backlogs due to the pandemic and Brexit. With luck, we’ll eventually get all that sorted and take off on a long railway journey from Spain (28th in happiness ranking) through France (23rd) and ultimately to the Nordic countries. There I hope to experience hygge in its native habitat, learning first-hand what it’s like to nestle in a warm, cozy, firelit place wearing thick socks and a wooly sweater, savoring a steaming cup of cocoa by candlelight, even if it is the middle of July.  YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY This post is part of my ongoing series of articles on surviving the pandemic and, with luck, emerging from it with some remnants of our sanity and good humor intact.
I'd be happy to send you a quick note when I publish new stuff. SUBSCRIBE HERE to get free stories in your inbox each week. Feel free to share this post link with family and friends. https://www.enjoylivingabroad.com/my-blog/is-it-time-to-start-thinking-about-travel-again  I savored every sip of this cup of coffee, my last in a Seville café before Spain went into lockdown a year ago. “In my default mode, I’m mildly to severely aggravated more than 50 percent of my waking hours,” writes A. J. Jacobs in Thanks a Thousand. “That’s a ridiculous way to go through life. I don’t want to get to heaven (if such a thing exists) and spend my time complaining about the volume of the harp music.” This is just one tiny example of the abundance of wisdom that has come my way since I wrote last week about Rich’s happiness course. It turns out friends, relatives, long-time readers, new readers, total strangers, and authors both ancient and modern all have juicy stuff to share on the art of living. My friend Sandra sent me a quote that resonated with a lot of us: “Be content to seem what you really are.” Yes! Kudos to second century stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius for that one. He also said (as I learned from Googling the guy), “The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing,” and “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” Words to live by!  Many thanks to my long-time reader Faye for reminding me of the wisdom of Harold Kushner. I’ve spent much of the last week following up on quotes and suggested readings, and it’s been, frankly, pretty wonderful. I learned that the Science of Happiness course Rich just completed was inspired by positive psychology, which suggests that instead of constantly focusing on society’s scariest minds (serial killers, psychotics, the Kardashians), maybe we should start studying the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive and enjoy themselves. What a concept! “The ultimate source of happiness is simply a healthy body and a warm heart,” said the Dalai Lama in the conversation with Desmond Tutu chronicled in The Book of Joy, recommended by my friend Alice. “If you have an open heart and are filled with trust and friendship,” said Archbishop Tutu, “even if you are physically alone, even living a hermit’s life, you will never feel lonely.” Encouraging words for those of us who have been living in a state of isolation that would have been unthinkable a year ago.  I was lucky enough to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala, India in 1995. He's there in the upper left, bowing more deeply than anyone else. My friend Alice and I, along with our husbands, were in the far back in the tiny section reserved for foreigners. Even surrounded by all this wisdom, living rich emotional and spiritual lives isn’t easy. How do we open our hearts? I found some ideas in a book my sister Kate told me about: The Joy Diet, by Oprah’s life coach, sociologist Martha Beck. Disappointingly, this isn’t a primer on eating more chocolate, drinking more red wine, and chomping on more deep-fat fried pasta (yes, it’s a thing). Beck explains, “When the word diet first entered the English language, back in 1656 when I was just a girl, it didn’t refer to food intake. It meant ‘a way of living or thinking.’” And that’s the real challenge. Because, as she points out, “The typical human mind is like a supercomputer possessed by the soul of a demented squirrel.” Boy, can I relate.  “The components of the Joy Diet,” I read, “create a direct connection between your conscious mind and your deep self, the part of you that knows the purpose of your life and how to achieve it.” Well, that sounded promising. Beck strongly, STRONGLY recommended working with each of the ten “menu items” for at least a week before going on to the next. I decided to give it a try and started with the first, deceptively simple one, at six o’clock Thursday morning. I spent 15 minutes doing nothing. OK, that’s not 100% true; I sat in a big comfy chair and sipped coffee. The idea is to create distraction-free time, detached from busyness and devices. While some might turn to meditation or prayer, others find that quiet walks or simple actions, like folding cloth napkins or sipping tea, bring stillness to the soul. “Perpetually doing,” says Beck, “without ever tuning in to the center of our being, is the equivalent of fueling a mighty ship by tossing all its navigational equipment into the furnace.” The results? I haven’t achieved nirvana, but my days feel a little more spacious, and I appreciate my coffee in new ways. Which is why I was overjoyed to discover my next hot read: Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey, in which author A. J. Jacobs set out to thank every single person involved in producing his morning coffee, from his local barista to Colombian growers.  Here's Jacobs expressing his gratitude to a member of the staff of La Marzocco, which makes espresso machines. Photo by CBS Jacobs discovered coffee is “one of the most mind-boggling accomplishments in human history … it makes the Panama Canal look like a third grader’s craft project.” He thanked a thousand workers, interviewing many, learning why the wrong shaped lid can make your coffee “taste like cat piss,” what makes New York’s water so delicious (low calcium), and how delicate you have to be processing coffee beans (very). He became astonished by the level of interconnectedness and cooperation required. “Almost everything good in the world is the result of teamwork,” he notes. “Consider the polio vaccine…” Or the Covid-19 vaccine, which took approximately every PhD on the planet to develop, and many thousands of others — including chemists, lab techs, truck drivers, refrigerator manufacturers, nurses, and pharmacists — to deliver to my left shoulder. I am grateful to each and every one of you!  THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU ALL!!!!! (Me, after receiving my first Covid-19 vaccine.) Every morning, when I sit down with my coffee and do nothing for 15 minutes, I am awed by the small miracle filling the warm cup I’m cradling in my hands. “Gratitude has a lot to do with holding on to a moment as long as possible,” says Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of The Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s closely related to mindfulness and savoring. Gratitude can shift our perception of time and slow it down. It can make our life’s petty annoyances dissolve away, at least for a moment.” In a couple of days, I’ll learn what Beck has in store for me in Step 2 of the Joy Diet. I’ve heeded her warnings and resisted the temptation to skip ahead. If Rich and the other great minds I’ve encountered lately have taught me anything, it’s the importance of slowing down and appreciating what’s in front of me before rushing on to the next thing. Gratitude needs time and space to flourish. Shéa, one of my long-time readers, puts it this way: “Gratitude lists and learning to view 'difficulties' as challenges and learning experiences literally changed my life. I was such an unhappy person and never seemed able to accomplish what I wanted to in life. But then I stopped worrying about being happy and focused on being grateful, learning, experiencing, and growing. I started pursuing my goals instead of happiness itself. And guess what? BOOM! Happiness. I am a genuinely happy person and I am living the most amazing life I never could have dreamed of. Okay, yeah, there's stress now and then, of course. Injustices infuriate me. But I face the world with determination and joy every day, because I freaking LOVE being alive!” And isn't that the whole point? YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY This post is part of my ongoing series of articles on surviving the pandemic, if possible with some remnants of our sanity and good humor intact. Each week I provide tips, strategies, and reasons for hope.
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Karen McCann
I'm an American travel writer based in Seville, Spain and my home state of California. Right now I'm on a Nutters' World Tour seeking eccentric people, quirky places, and wacky food so I can have the fun of writing about them here.
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Winner of the 2023 Firebird Book Award for Travel
#1 Amazon Bestseller in Tourist Destinations, Travel Tips, Gastronomy Essays, and Senior Travel
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