Something in the Air

This morning I woke up feeling absolutely marvellous - full of energy - good humour and feeling physically very fit - wonderful feeling!  Yet some mornings I wake up feeling 100 years old , full of aches and pains and really just want to sit beside the fire - why the difference?  No obvious reasons, no changes in food or sleep or alcohol consumption - so it has to be something in the air - right?

Actually I thought the idea of something in the air sounded a little far fetched so I tried to find some practical, physiological answers to my question - why the difference? What I found was a lot of interesting facts about energy but nothing particularly relevant to my question. What stood out was the emphasis on the different cycles our bodies go through, the different developmental stages - Shakespeare's Seven Stages of Man, the sleep cycle where we pass through five stages of sleep each stage lasting 90 minutes which research now shows is continued in our waking hours where we oscillate every 90 minutes from high to low alertness - many people relate this rythmic process of life to something like biorythms or the affect of our star sign.

                          "We're physiologically designed to pulse, to move rhythmically 

                              between spending and renewing energy" Tony Schwartz - NYT  
         
But none of it seemed to relate to those high energy days which just seem to come out of the blue.
Now I may have to keep an energy journal to see if I can identify any sort of pattern in my good
day/bad days and if there was - what would I do - sit around and read a good book when I thought it might be a bad day?                                 

                                                                                 

So what did I do with my marvellous morning?I blitzed through virtually everything in my 'to do' list and had a most enjoyable, productive day - thank goodness for whatever was in the air!

Too Busy!

When I was working I used to meet retired people who kept telling me how busy they were.   They would list all the things they had done in a day and I would think "so...????? I do that plus work". So I made a resolution, when I retired, not to be 'busy'.  I spent my first year of retirement refusing to join anything or take up a hobby and the result was that I sat around doing nothing and getting depressed.


  Gradually I became  involved in things which interested me - Oral History Interviews for the local Historical Society and volunteering at the Aged Care Facility, book clubs, Writing Groups  plus of course garden, family, reading, writing.


Now I'm  'busy' - I frequently find I haven't got time to do something I really want to do or time to do nothing.  This lack of time got me wondering if it really is true that time passes  more quickly when you are older.

Apparently not! Recent research involving people aged 18 - 80 across two continents  showed almost no difference in their perception of time, the only slight difference and it wasn't considered a significant one, was in the perception of how quickly the last ten years had gone by, there older people felt it had gone past much more quickly.

So why do older people feel that for them time passes more quickly? One researcher suggests that people report what they think they are expected to feel but the more likely explanation is that they forget just how busy they were when they were young!   Also time does fly when you feel rushed and can't get things done. Now that makes a lot of sense to me, as we get older it often takes us longer to get organised and longer to to finish a task hence the feeling of being rushed.

But perhaps  the other explanation is simply that everyone feels more rushed nowadays!

Happier Older Wiser - A Community of Minds.

When I retired we moved to a small town, a town I had always wanted to live in, and I am happy to be here. However I found it difficult to settle down to being retired, struggling with the feeling that I was being a dilettante, playing at life.  After a while I worked out that what I was missing was a Community of Minds, being  involved with a group of people able and willing to discuss books, philosophy, politics,  spirituality, the whole wonderful world of ideas. 

I thought a blog would help  to expand my life, the range of people I communicate with and my writing skills.  The internet is a marvellous tool for each of these. So I decided to put myself out there and see how many likeminded people I could meet. That’s not to say people who think the same as me, just people who are prepared to think.

So here I am with my first blog post, hoping to make contact with other of the same ilk.  I have lots of ideas on what I would like to include, sections for people to contribute their writing, topics for discussion, book reviews, and the opportunity for others to contribute their ideas. So please do – share your ideas on additions to this blog or what you think about the possibility of a Community of Minds.