Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Resolution: I only added two new articles to my blog in 2011. Promise to self: in 2012, I plan to post at least 10 new articles.

Let me illustrate with examples from my circle of friends. One 25-year-old man with cerebral palsy has no functional hands or legs, is fed through a stomach tube, and can’t talk – but laughs a lot. Another 21-year-old man died from Friedrich’s Ataxia after losing his ability to walk and the strength in his hands by inches from the time he was about 10. He was an accomplished graphic artist. I wrote earlier about the ripples from his short life. Another 23-year-old man has Muscular Dystrophy. He made his first unsupervised friends in his late teens when he became able to play games over the Internet. Up until then, his disability meant he was under constant adult supervision – not conducive to close relationships with peers.

So some ideas from these friends:

Companion dog

Make virtual contacts with others. Human relationships matter and can be hard for some people, for example disabled veterans, to manage in person. My friend with Muscular Dystrophy uses virtual forms of human contact — in his case gaming. He very much appreciates the evolving technologies since things keep getting easier as the strength in his hands declines. For those who aren’t into games, there are Blogs, Facebook, and online discussions. Computer companies have invested a lot in “accessibility” enhancements for software. For example, if a person can’t type well, there are trainable voice readers that can ‘take dictation.’

Find a hero — in a story or reality — who has struggled with a similar disability and somehow won through to a strong life. My friend with Friedrich’s Ataxia used Steven Hawkings for his hero and received considerable comfort from remembering that someone so disabled could still contribute so splendidly. That appealed to him because he had a similar kind of brain, so could picture himself making contributions in the same vein. Physical exercise of whatever form if still possible can also be important. So how about a hero such as the man who joined a fund-raising bike ride from Seattle to Portland in his un-motorized wheel chair, pushing all the way — and kept up.

So I guess I’m suggesting that we search among people – many of them quietly getting through difficult lives – who can provide examples of ways to find meaning in very circumscribed lives. I thought about nominating my friend with Muscular Dystrophy for one of Robert Biswas-Diener’s Courage prizes. But he declined, not perhaps seeing the courage that is very apparent to me.

Marian

Two of her children were with her at the end, the other two spoke to her via cell phones that we held to her ear. One drove for more than 4 hours, never expecting to reach her in time, but she kept on breathing quietly, as if she were asleep, for hours after the ICU doctors expected, so he arrived in plenty of time.

Marian with Starkey

Finally at 4:38 in the afternoon with her two sons, me, and another extremely close family friend sitting around her, she took one long breath. Her son said, “Come on Mom, you can make it just a little longer.” He was thinking about his daughter who was on her way by train, due to arrive in about an hour. Then she took one more breath and was gone. Her face instantly looked different, I speculate because all the little muscles relaxed.

Marian knew how to laugh, here with my mother

In the program for the Memorial Service, the family included a letter that Marian had written my daughter Laura five years earlier, after Laura asked her for stories about her long life. That letter, especially the last long paragraph, has an important message for those of us still marching on, especially young people.

Marian with her daughter on her 40th birthday

Here’s the letter:

Dear Laura,

Marian with Laura at my MAPP graduation - when Laura made the request

It was wartime when I emerged from college — as it had been throughout my college career. Pearl Harbor was attacked my freshman year at the University of Idaho, Hiroshima was bombed during my honeymoon in 1945, just after I had graduated from the University of Chicago. Besides the fact that women’s liberation was just beginning to take form, the chaos of wartime cultivated a lemming-like move to the altar: we all wanted to get married, have children, have homes. I had had the dream of becoming a journalist, but I quickly traded that ambition for the security of marrying Bill when he returned from the European front. He had a 45 day furlough before he would be sent on to Japan. What I want to convey to you is the chaos of world events and the unpredictability of my own world when I was at the point of my life that you are now.

So it was make-shift time for me. Instead of looking for a newspaper job, I became a receptionist at the University of Chicago Press, commuting on weekends to Camp Campbell, Kentucky, where Bill was waiting for release from the army. By March, when he was again a civilian, we headed for New Haven where he resumed the first quarter of his junior year at Yale. I learned to cook, our apartment was a way-station for returning former students, we spent weekends exploring New York City and going to Dodger games, we often saw your grandparents who were living in New London, Conn. where Lou was stationed at the submarine base there. It was a carefree time and we made the most of it.

Marian hosted Kathryn's wedding reception

The landscape where you stand, at the brink of your adult life, is so very different from mine. Women have been liberated, not just the exceptional ones but across the board. The choices and opportunities may be overwhelming, but at least you can’t feel limited. A few years of free fall are probably not a bad idea — just savoring life (as I would describe my early years of marriage in New Haven and Paris). Jumping from college into career or into marriage-with-children might prove too confining, even a mistake as you look backwards — as I am doing here — from your eighth decade. These are your luxury years, if you have enough money to give yourself freedom, when you can keep sensitive and searching for what your inner self really is trying to tell you. Pause and smell the roses. But don’t become passive and let the years roll on and over you. A few false starts aren’t necessarily a disaster.

It has been great fun to write all this down.

Love,
Marian

Marian had a beautiful end, but that doesn’t mean we were ready to let her go. Ah, grief, sadness, the feeling of a hole in one’s life. But also humor, love, and sweet memory. When I lost another friend recently, I found comfort in George Bonanno’s research on bereavement, summarized in Grief is Part of Life. He found that resilient people get comfort from remembering. Perhaps that’s why we all get together after someone dies, to enrich each other’s collections of memories with our own particular stories. I’m richer for knowing that Marian sent her children out to play in the rain because she thought it was sensuous, even as all the other mothers were calling their children in. I’m richer for her granddaughter’s story of taking a raft trip together down the Grand Canyon when Marian was 82, with the guide calling out, “Better wake up your grandmother, we’re coming to another rapids.”

I’ve been reading about gratitude again because that’s the topic of the second book in the Positive Psychology News Daily series. We’ve selected more than twenty articles. We’ve started editing. Kevin Gillespie has started drawing pictures. We’ll have it ready by Thanksgiving at the latest (cross fingers).

Earlier I posted my notes for the talk on gratitude that I gave to a Sunday School class at a local church. In particular, borrowing from some of the experts in the field, I wrote:

Cultivating Gratitude involves…

1) Acknowledging good things that happen – major and minor. Be mindful of present benefits; enhance the ability to remember positive events.

2) Recognizing the sources of goodness that are outside us. Much goodness happens to us independent of our own actions. What if we said, “Why me?” when good things happen to us?

But what if we also kept in mind gratitude that we owe our former selves?

Just to show what I mean, here are some of the things for which I can thank Kathie Sugg (baby name), Kathy Heninger (after adoption by step-father), Kathryn Heninger (chosen name at college), and even Kathryn Heninger Britton, looking back over the years.

I thank you, Kathie, for the picture of you holding your father’s thumb when you were tiny. That picture has created a strong sense of connection to my father who died when I was about 2 years old. It’s actually the only picture I have with both of us in it.

I thank you, Kathy, for your love of reading. You filled my head with stories of people I admire. These stories often return to me when I feel challenged. These stories remind me of duty cheerfully performed, of self-sacrifice, of courage in the face of fear, of taking the long view, of the impact of love on life.

I thank you Kathie, Kathy, Kathryn for building friendships all along the way. I have close friends from early childhood, from high school, from college from graduate school, work, child rearing and graduate school again. Thank you for being so curious about people and for exchanging the words and deeds that made lasting bonds.

Learning how to snorkel

Thank you for the adventures you’ve had with friends — such as the trip to Bora Bora with friend Pam to stay on friend Sue’s catamaran, making new friends of Sue’s family.

 

I thank you, Kathryn, for always finding something to do with your life while you tried to figured out what you wanted to DO with your life. Yes, it took about 30 years for you to find a vocation that is also an avocation. But in the meantime, you gained experience with a lot of different people, different technologies, and different business considerations.

Thank you for taking care of my body, so that I enjoy good health now in spite of 30 years with Type 1 diabetes. I know it wasn’t easy.

More than 30 years together

I also thank you for finding Edward Britton to marry and then for building up more than 30 years of shared experience with him. I don’t think you understood that marriage at my age would be even more rewarding than it was at yours. Thank both our earlier selves for all the little acts of warmth and appreciation that must have added up to more than 5-to-1 one positivity ratio between us — but who’s counting?

Thank you, also, for deciding to have children, one of life’s greatest adventures.

And so on. Who would I be if it hadn’t been for you?

My initial impulse was to argue with her. The job gives her the flexibility she needs to take prerequisite courses for applying to nursing school. The things that were bothering her didn’t seem that overwhelming to me, and I knew she didn’t have the time to look for another job.

Maternal Instinct

But instead of arguing, I just sat down beside her and put my arms around her. If I said anything at all, it was something low and vague and sympathetic.

Pretty soon, she was up and moving around again, only this time she was working out the details about how to deal with the day’s challenges.

What did I learn?
I already knew that arguing with myself when I’m upset doesn’t help. The first step toward a resilient response is for me to calm myself down.

The experience with my daughter helped me extend that learning to the way I operate with other people. The first step to help someone else be resilient is to help them calm down. When I saw my daughter unhappy, I felt an urge to do something, but I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut. Only afterwards did it occur to me that the maternal instinct that led to gentle touch was just the right way to help her calm down.

We recently published a little book of edited articles from Positive Psychology News Daily called Resilience: How to Navigate Life’s Curves. Most of the chapters are about ways to become more resilient yourself. My chapter explains why it is important to calm down first before trying to argue with yourself.

Perhaps we’ll publish a second edition some day with new articles about how to help others be resilient. I’d love to hear about your experiences.

The year has flown by since last Thanksgiving. This year, we had a very quiet Thanksgiving Day with a placeholder meal for the Thanksgiving Feast. At my son’s suggestion, we decided to delay the turkey dinner until my daughter moved back to North Carolina in early December. Having her move back to North Carolina is truly a cause for thanksgiving. Perhaps when she has completed all her studies to be a nurse, she will settle not too far away. At least the probability goes way up.

Farmers' Market

There’s a big movement to “buy local” when it comes to food and other products. I think there could be a similar movement to “settle down local” to family.

When I ventured out from my home in my twenties, I moved across the continent, from left coast to right coast. I love living here in North Carolina — for me, the trees are right, the climate is right, friends are close by. I never could get used to the drizzle in Seattle or the eucalyptus and palm trees in California — or the lack of trees period in Idaho. I like to visit friends and family in all those places. I especially enjoy the summer mildness, Puget Sound, and Mount Rainier in Seattle and the incredibly wide-open sky in Idaho. But here’s where I’ve wanted to put down roots.

 

Speaking of roots, I have found hundreds of acorns sprouting in our walks through the woods this fall — more than I ever remember seeing. I’ve heard that it’s a bumper crop of acorns this year. I wonder if they have also been sprouting earlier than usual as well?

Array of Sprouting Acorns

The saying is that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. I did, and now I find it makes it difficult to be there for my mother when she needs me. I hope that my children can both settle down close by — so that I can be there for them when they need me, and later, perhaps, they can be there for me.

Images:
Farmer’s Market Image courtesy of BaylorBear78
Sprouting acorns courtesy of Edward Britton

We’ve branched out, reading books about social history and biography as well as science. Right now, we are in the middle of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quite a change from physics and geology.

Reading out loud together is a way we exercise our brains together – something recommended by Nancy Andreasen in the book listed below.

	Lightman, A. Ed. (2005). The Best American Science Writing 2005. New York: Harper Perennial.Greene, B. (2006). The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 (The Best American Series) . Houghton Mifflin. Kolata, G. (2007). The Best American Science Writing 2007. Harper Perennial.
	Winchester, S. (2003). The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press.
	Sacks, O. (2008). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Vintage Books.
	Quennell, M. & C. H. B. (1918). A HISTORY OF EVERYDAY THINGS IN ENGLAND VOL. I 1066-1499. Originally published by B. T. Batsford, Ltd. London.History of everyday things like clothes, how houses were constructed, how windmills worked.
	Quennell, M. & C. H. B. (1919). A history of everyday things in England, done in two parts of which this is the second, 1500-1799. London, B. T. Batsford.
	Andreasen, N. (2005). The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius. New York: Plume Book.
	Taylor, J. B. (2009). My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. Plume.
	Ruse, M. & Travis, J. (2009). Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. Belknap Press.
	Hazen, R. M. (2005). Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins. Washington, D. C.: Joseph Henry Press.
	Chown, M. (2001). The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms. Oxford University Press.This book was a complete delight. Not only did we learn about how atoms were formed and dispersed, from hydrogen to iron to uranium in the two furnaces of the big bang and very hot star interiors and supernovae, but we also had a tour of the science in process, personalities, life histories, deadend ideas, breakthroughs, politics, and all. It also read out loud well, which is not always true of books about science.
	Stewart, Ian (2007). Why Beauty Is Truth: The History of Symmetry. New York: Basic Books.This was a challenge for me to read. It explored the mathematics of symmetry from its roots in the Babylonian solutions for quadratic equations through Galois and Group Theory through Lie Groups through dimensions and string theory. I don’t know how much stuck, but I have a new respect for creativity in mathematics.
	Atkins, P. W. (1987). Atkins’ Molecules. W. H. Freeman & Co.
	Carroll, Sean (2010). From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. New York: Dutton.
	Holmes, G. (Ed.) (1997). The Oxford Illustrated History of Italy (Oxford Illustrated Histories). Oxford University Press.Political, economic, and cultural history of Italy from Augustus to the present.
	Fairbanks, J. K. (2006). China: A New History, Second Enlarged Edition. Harvard University Press.
	Pesic, P. (2005). Sky in a Bottle. MIT Press.
	Sobel, D. (2004). The Best American Science Writing 2004. HarperCollins Publishers.Several interesting articles, especially William Langewiesche’s discussion of Columbia’s last flight. It read like a mystery novel.
	Lane, N. (2009). Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
	Rose, Steven (1992). The Making of Memory. New York: Anchor Doubleday
	Feynman, R. P. (1995). Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher. Perseus Books.
	Carroll, Sean B. (2009). Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species. Mariner Books.
	Dreyfus, H. & Kelly, S. D. (2011). All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press.
	Weaver, K. (2005). The Violent Universe: Joyrides through the X-ray Cosmos. The Johns Hopkins University Press. X-Ray observations of the universe. Many picture,
	Villard, R. & Cook, L. (2005). Infinite Worlds: An Illustrated Voyage to Planets beyond Our Sun. University of California Press.
	de Botton, Alain (1997). How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Vintage International.
	Greene, B. (2011). The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Knopf.
	Petroski, H. (2004). Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering. New York: Vintage Books.
	Cairns-Smith, A. G. (1996). Evolving the mind: On the nature of matter and the origin of consciousness. Cambridge University Press.This book traveled all over the place, from quantum mechanics to brain physiology.
	DeHaene, Stanislas (2010). Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. Penguin.
	Blackmore, S. (2006). Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human. Oxford University Press.Contains 20 somewhat structured interviews with researchers interested in the phenomenon of consciousness, from philosophers to neuroscientists, from Patricia Churchland to V. S. Ramachandran.
	Ramachandran, V. S. (2011). The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: W. W. Norton.
	Bellos, A. (2010). Here’s looking at Euclid: From counting ants to games of chance– An Awe-inspiring journey through the world of numbers. New York: Simon and Shuster.
	Smith, John Maynard & Szathmary, Eors (1999). The origins of life: From the birth of life to the origins of language. Oxford University Press.
	Sacks, Oliver (2001). Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Vintage Books.
	Levi, Primo (1975). The Periodic Table. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken Books
	Wolf, Maryanne (2008). Proust and the Squid. Harper Perennial. This one didn’t have as much detail as Stanley DeHaene’s book, but one of her facts really stuck with me: that disadvantaged children may hear up to 23 million fewer words before entering kindergarten then children from other backgrounds. Wow!

Two friends of mine, Abe Crystal and Rick Cecil, are building ruzuku.com to be an online system for helping groups of people to work together on desired changes. According to their research, many people make resolutions that fall by the wayside because they find it hard to persist on their own. With ruzuku (which means ‘support’ in Swahili), people can post status and receive comments and questions from others in their social network, helping them stay motivated.

This reminds me of the numbers I recently heard about membership attrition from fitness clubs.

• From people who join individually, there is a 50% attrition rate. That means half the members fail to renew after one year.
• From people who join as couples, the attrition rate is 26%.
• From people who join as entire families, the attrition rate is 22%.
• From people who join with inter-dependent exercise needs — for example, to play a sport together — the attrition rate is 6%.

Of course there are many reasons for attrition, but there does seem to be a strong element of social support that helps people continue with gym membership.

You might find ruzuku.com useful if you are organizing a group to work together toward some goal — as a teacher, coach, team leader, or friend. You can set up a challenge and send the link to the people you want to participate. Once they join the challenge, they can then post updates about their own progress, see the updates posted by others in the group, add comments, and otherwise use social networking to stay motivated. I think ruzuku links to twitter already — with Facebook linkage on the way.

Resilience: Blooming in the Snow

As part of the ruzuku.com beta, I created challenges around the four steps for building resilience that I described in an article for the Anita Borg Institute earlier this year. Each challenge was set up to last 5 days starting on Monday November 2, 9, 16, and 23. The first 3 are closed, but if you happen to be interested in trying out ruzuku, you could still join the one that will start on November 23 on taking inventory of personal assets.

If you read about this later and wish you’d had an opportunity to participate, let me know. I’m running it now as a way to help Rick Cecil and Abe Crystal with their beta. But perhaps we could try something similar in the future.

Image credit:
Signs of Spring courtesy of Reenie Just Reenie

Tea Chest

My mother has moved remarkably smoothly from Independent to Assisted Living in her community in Seattle. A lot can be said for the community itself that has both types of living in the same building, one on the 12th floor, another on the 3rd. They had maintenance people who moved the furniture that she decided to keep in place of the more institutional furniture originally in the room — 2 book cases,

Bear Chair

her Bear chair, the tea chest she uses as a jewelry box, her dresser, her little marble-top table where she has worked crossword puzzles for years. The maintenance people also hung up her pictures, so she had lots of reminders of her children, grandchildren, and trips all around her. She was a world traveler in her time — visited all continents except for Antarctica, and came very close to it.

 

But now that I’m back in North Carolina, 3000 miles away, I have many opportunities to observe the truth of a saying I heard recently, “If you want to get old gracefully, make young friends.”

My mother has several friends who are my age plus or minus a few years. They have banded together with my siblings and me to create a caring web around her. I can’t list all the things they’ve done for her. One spent a morning cleaning out her kitchen so she could turn over the keys to the apartment. When she has a doctor’s appointment, there’s likely to be a friend or even two available to take her. People come by to visit, to go out for walks with her, and to take her to dinner. One couple remembered how much she likes mussles and found a restaurant with mussles on the menu. They all send emails when they’ve seen her, letting us know how she seems — are her spirits drooping, or is she her usual feisty and entertaining self?

Schipperke courtesy dbzoomer

My godmother recently hurt her back tipping water out of one of those enormous plastic garbage cans that people roll out to the street. It was too heavy to roll back, and, as she put it, she could have done it easily 5 years ago (when she was just 80). With her back hurt, she couldn’t drive and she couldn’t take her young dog, a 2-year-old Schipperke, for walks. So how did she manage to get by without calling on me or her children? Her neighbors. Every day neighbors dropped by to see what she needed. Groceries? They brought her more food than she could eat. Walking the dog? Various neighbors came by in the morning and the late afternoon to give him energetic runs. My godmother thinks everyone should have a little dog, which my mother thinks is crazy. But the little dog has not only given her something to care for, it has also made her meet all her neighbors, so they had a chance to experience her warm, witty, graceful self before she had the accident. It has certainly paid dividends in the last week or so.

This is a thanks to the young friends of my mother and grandmother — and all the other young friends out there.