Cooling Down
After a high-stress period of time, it is healthy to have a cooling-down period. I have learned that it’s not good to stop suddenly, you have keep walking to avoid a muscle cramp. (read emotional breakdown)
Have you come off a project lately that you needed to process before you moved on? Do you do that with every project or just “the big ones”?
I tend to keep the heart rate (read schedule of activities) up too long and can crash into a burn out mode if not careful. To avoid burn out or emotional muscle burn I decided to issue a cooling down period for myself.
It seems to have worked, in the last week I’ve been able to rest on what I’ve learned but move forward with new plans and vision without a sudden stop and crash.
What do you do to cool down?
You’re never going to be caught up .. it’s okay
I don’t know when it happened, maybe in my radio training? I used to love, as a DJ, to walk right up to the beginning of a song over the intro. I was thrilled to finish a PSA announcement timed just in time for the top of the hour news feed.
In my professional life after radio (I used to actually cue up vinyl. It’s been a while), I have always set up projects with last minute deadlines. Or, worse, created fake last minute deadlines that only existed in my head to just have one.
I’ve come to realize that I actually never will be “caught up”. There will always be one more call that needs to be made, one more email that needs to be sent, one more blog that needs to be read, you get the point.
My wife Joan brought to my attention that these self created deadlines are movable! It’s true, things do have a finish date, just like they have start dates. The real peace comes in knowing that they will start and stop and start over again without my panicking over it. My friend Linda Mcfadyen-Ketchum, told me calmly, “You won’t ever be done so just do what you can.”
So that adrenaline I get from the words to the song starting just I complete the tag is cool and everything. However, I have learned that I may be stepping all over a really great intro.
Let the music play.
Rooms ... to go or not to go
Back at the kitchen table.
It seems the thing to talk about this week is Rooms from Facebook. I gotta tell ya, I don't see much innovation here. It's pretty. A little complicated. A little gaming happening, You have to figure it out to get in the room, to get your prize, as it were.
I don't know, maybe I'm missing it here but finding another spot where you can post messages and pictures to people that have the same interests? I think we've already done that. Am I missing something? Is this the latest greatest and I missed it? I don't think so.
Wait a minute -- Rooms is Prodigy from 1996 ... it is anonymous - is that the point? To have a place to by anonymous and talk about the things that you like? Davey Alba of Wired writes about this.
Rooms isn't new - Page Six is reporting that there is a claim that it was created as Room and released in September! The intellectual property attorneys at Facebook are not having a good day.
Front Porch or Back Deck?
Recently, we have been spending a bit more time on the front porch instead of always on the back deck. Have you noticed how some people are all about one or the other but not so much both? We have noticed a trend and it got me thinking about just why we nest in these different ways. The porch is a place of meditation and the scene of drama, conflict and nostalgia. National Public Radio presented a series on the topic in 2008. I've looked for the link but it seems no longer available. Please let me know if you find it.
The official slogan for the National Porch Sitters, yes there is one, is “Sit down a spell. That can wait.” Many people paint the ceilings to their porch a blue or periwinkle to use color to cool the space down. I grew up more of a backyard girl and thus am convinced that it makes me more of a back patio or deck person. Our garden is in the back and we like to sit and look at it. The back is for long talks with friends and for solitude and for meditation. The front is for gossip and nosy neighbor time. However I do sit there in the morning sometimes to write and our dog likes that time of the day most of all.
In one of the NPR stories we meet Douglas Kelbaugh, professor of urban planning and dean of the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is a proponent of New Urbanism — and of porches. In a world highly mediated by technology, face-to-face, Kelbaugh says that live interaction between people is “important glue in building community and sustaining it.” Porches help facilitate these exchanges. Also featured in the series is a book titled Out on the Porch, a slim picture book that collects photographs and memorable literary passages about porches by authors. The book, published originally in 1992, proved so popular that it’s still in print and has led to an annual porch calendar.
I believe part of living an artful life includes the discovery of your preference to front porches or back patios/decks. Understanding what both places are to you and why they are important to you, or not important to you, may tell you quite a bit about yourself. What of that space between indoors and outdoors do you find significant to you? As the weather changes our yards become welcoming again its time to come out and enjoy the conversation!