This is a part of a series of photos of objects that have meaning to me. Want to know a little more about the origin of this project? Have a read here.
Fellow magpies, what objects have meaning for you? would love to hear all about them in the comments below.
Like what you see? I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.
I started doing this series of line doodles after dumping my thoughts about gratitude into this post here. Have a read if you want to know more.
Like what you see? I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.
This is a part of a series of photos of objects that have meaning to me. Want to know a little more about the origin of this project? Have a read here.
Fellow magpies, what objects have meaning for you? would love to hear all about them in the comments below.
I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.
A few years ago I took a whole heap of photos of objects that had meaning for me. I had a conversation with a guy I was seeing at the time about minimalism and how he had thrown away all his childhood soft toys, which I just found really, really sad for some reason.
I am slightly suspicious of wholesale minimalism. I feel that some objects come with important emotional meaning attached, and they form part of our emotional memory. Our emotional story. What looks like simple clutter to some people, is for other people an anchor to an important moment, good or bad, in their past. I am sure that sometimes getting rid of those anchors can, in it self, be a very psychologically healthy thing to do. But I am not an advocate of throwing things away simply for the sake of being tidy, of creating a clean, minimalist environment. So (in a grand romantic gesture) I made a digital film for the guy.
It totally wasn’t worth it. I mean super duper wasn’t at all worth my effort. But there we go.
Looking at them again now, I think they made a nice little project. I wanted to share them with you, Fellow Magpies. I will post them over the next few weeks and months, and maybe add in a few new ones along the way.
I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.
I’ve been thinking a bit more since I wrote about gratitude last week. I feel like a lot things I have seen written about gratitude have a focus on what being grateful will do for you, i.e. how it will make you feel better. How and why we express gratitude to other people is often not really spoken of, but it is potentially far more important.
Wellbeing is closely related to the quality of our connections or relationships with other people. I feel like over our culture has become very focused introspection, on the me, and that can make this easy to forget. We are pushed to think about questions like: How do I make myself happy? How do I improve myself? Our interdependence is not always that evident to most people, and it can be easy to take the things that other people do to help us for granted. It can be relatively easy, in our increasingly individualistic culture, to forget that humans are social animals. We are biologically rigged to work together. None of us every really achieves anything alone.
One of the things I have been thinking about is being mindful of expressing gratitude to other people. In particular in trying to make sure that I am thankful to the people close to me, like when my boyfriend makes me buttered crumpets, or when my sister buys me pink swim fins for my birthday. I think that taking the time to show people you appreciate the small everyday kindnesses they may pass your way is possibly the best form of gratitude practice I can think of.
I wanted to write a quick post about something that has been troubling me for a few days. I was watching a YouTube video the other day that I thought was on personal finance but turned out to be on ‘manifesting wealth’ using the law of attraction philosophy popularised by the book The Secret (have not read it, and I don’t plan to). In this video, (which I cannot find the link to and don’t want to promote anyway) a very attractive wealthy looking woman explained that you needed to behave gratefully and respectfully towards the universe if you wanted to be successful in life. The Universe is basically an authoritarian Victorian patriarch handing out sweeties to the most pious and well behaved among us. Apparently.
For some reason this just really annoyed me. Most of the people I know who are successful have got there through differing combinations of luck, various forms of privilege, and hard graft. Many of them (but not all!) are very grateful for their success, but it was, for most of them, the work that got them there. I think the universe, in it’s infinite beauty and chaos, (and working on the unlikely assumption that it has some form of unifying consciousness) has better things to do that to check in which my savings rate and make adjustments according to my gratitude. I just don’t think it cares. It has better things to do. Like build planets and ignite stars. To scatter about the raw materials of life itself.
Having worked in both psychology and mental health I have also been aware for some time of positive psychology idea that keeping track of the things you are grateful for may help ameliorate symptoms of anxiety and depression. This was also something I was uncomfortable with because when you have anxiety or depression that is disruptive of your ability to do or enjoy things, I think you legitimately have a something to be really pissed off about. Telling people in that situation to sit and count their blessings feels patronising and a failure to grasp the severity of the situation.
That said, since the beginning of January I have actually been making more of an effort to take stock of the things I am grateful for. Things like having a boyfriend who cooks me lovely vegan food when I am sick, or being able to swim outside in the silvery UK sea. I can afford to reduce my hours at work in order to indulge my creative parts, when most people cannot. I have been having fertility treatment for about 5 months now (which is kind of rough) and I have just found out that I have access to more options than I expected on the NHS, and I am grateful for that too. And you know, I have been feeling kind of better lately….
The Magpie at Midnight 