Peggy's Musings

Announcing Changes in this Blog

This is my last posting for this Blog of my “Musings on Life.” But it’s only a break for a few months. This Fall I expect to start a new Blog (with a slightly different focus) called “Peggy’s Perspective” where I will tackle a variety of big issues and offer my perspective on them.

I’ve written these “Musings” for the past four years, organizing the first two years of writings into a book called Musings on Life. Now I’ll be organizing the past two years worth of Blogs into a new book to be called “MORE Musings on Life.”

In the meantime, I will keep these Archives of about 50 of the Blogs so they can be read by anyone who wants to review them. I’ve enjoyed this writing and expect to come back with a fresh approach to addressing issues that affect all of us.

You Can’t Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe’s novel “You Can’t Go Home Again” presents a nostalgia for things of past times – including “home.” This longing to go back to some past time or past experience is quite common. Even if we don’t literally want to go back to an earlier time in our lives, we’re still likely to want to re-visit some of the positive experiences from our past.

This past weekend I personally experienced the disappointment that can come from expecting to relive a previous positive experience. Of course, things constantly change (like the flowing river that makes it impossible to step into the same water a second time), so that we can’t really step back into the same experience. But that was my expectation when I went to a performance by a group I had seen “live” many years ago. I still fondly recalled my feelings in attending their earlier performance and fully expected to feel that way again.

With the (perhaps false) memory of the earlier time I saw them perform, I was deeply disappointed. It’s not just that they were older - and so was I. It was more of an awareness that memory has a way of playing tricks on you so that the “real thing” is seldom like the memory of it.

I’ve had this same experience with hearing the sales pitches on TV for collections of CD’s with music from the 50s or 60s or 70s. The clips they play during the commercials sound wonderful and inevitably trigger a nostalgic feeling for the past when the music was “new.” But I once made the mistake of actually purchasing one of these collections – and it was awful. I wished I had just left my memory intact of how much I enjoyed the music at an earlier time without polluting it with this new experience.

Another illustration of how memory tricks us is how dramatically different it feels to go back to your old home town after many years. For instance, I grew up in a small town, but in later years when I went back for a visit, I was amazed (and somewhat disappointed) to realize how VERY small it was. A bike ride over to “the lake” used to be a great adventure. Later it seemed so close that it was hard to imagine it ever felt like a “trip.” These little experiences can add up to the point that you no longer trust your memory of “how things used to be.”

Memories of people can also be challenged by time and distance. Although I couldn’t attend my 50th high school reunion, I saw photos of my class – and could recognize only a couple of them that I’d kept up with through the years. (I’m sure the others wouldn’t have recognized me either.) But again I realized that it was preferable to maintain my “memories” of these people without this brief experience of seeing them as strangers.

So we would be wise to recognize that time changes everything – including our memories of the past. And it’s better to honor the old memories, and (rather than trying to re-visit them) to embrace the idea of having NEW experiences that can eventually become positive memories as well.


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NOTE: If you enjoy these blog posts, please check out the list of 107 similar 'musings' (and read 8 of them) included in my book Musings on Life.

What’s going on now?

The dawning of a new year (and new decade), is a good time to reflect on your life and see what, if any, changes you might want to make. Lots of people make New Year’s resolutions, setting goals at the beginning of the year. But all too often they fail to do a good assessment of the current conditions of their life.

It’s fairly simple to come up with some particular goal in one area of life, often related to losing weight or being more successful in our work, but what’s really needed is to look at ALL the various aspects of our lives to see where we stand and where we want to go. It’s the accumulation of our degree of satisfaction with a wide range of things that makes the most difference in our lives. However, it’s hard to accurately determine your goals for the future unless you’re clear about where you are now.

So below is a thought-provoking set of questions that may help you get more clarity about what is working in your life, what needs tweaking, and what needs major work. These questions are excerpted from our LifeDesign Workbook.

NOTE: You can download a Free Digital Copy of the Workbook by clicking on "immediate download" on the above page. (Also, at the bottom of this page is a link for reading the Table of Contents and Introduction - as well as a link to an online "Quality of Life Checkup" that you can submit to receive scoring results.)

WHAT’S GOING ON NOW…

1. With time?
Are you in control of your time or controlled by schedules?
Are you pressed for time or have time on your hands?
Do you think most about the past, the present, or the future?

2. With people?
Are your family relationships satisfying or strained?
Are your friendships meaningful or superficial?
Is your social life a pleasure or a burden?

3. With places?
How do you feel about your physical environment...
—at home?
—at work?
—geographically?

4. With things?
How important are material things to you?
Is your desire for things in balance with your ability to acquire them?
Do you spend more time maintaining your things than enjoying them?

5. With ideas and information?
Are you in touch with what’s going on in the world?
Are you stimulated by new ideas?
Do you make use of books for ongoing intellectual stimulation?

6. With your sense of yourself?
Do you mostly praise or criticize yourself?
Do you feel in control of yourself or a victim of circumstances?

7. With your responsibilities?
Are you in conflict over your various responsibilities?
Does one part of your life dominate the others?
Do you do some things just for yourself?

8. With your activities?
Do organizations and institutions play an important part in your life?
What do you do for “fun?”
Do you choose your own activities or go along with whatever comes your way?

9. With your body?
Do you take care of your body and feel good about it?
Do you live in a basically “healthy” way?
Do you take the time and energy needed to stay physically fit?

10. With your spiritual life?
Do you allow enough quiet time to reflect on what’s meaningful to you?
Do you feel a gap between your internal life and the life you’re living?
Are you at peace with your core values and beliefs?

Get a Quality of Life Checkup:

To do an online checkup on your current life satisfaction (which will be scored and the results sent to you), go to: Quality of Life Checkup.

You can learn more about the LifeDesign Workbook by reading the Table of Contents and Introduction.

Note: You can get a Free digital copy of the LifeDesign Workbook (or order a printed copy from Amazon.com) by going to: LifeDesign Workbook.

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NOTE: If you enjoy these blog posts, please check out the list of 107 similar 'musings' (and read 8 of them) included in my book Musings on Life.