A Few of Your Favorite Things

This week I’m inviting EVERYONE to “lighten up” a bit with Better Endings. Our topic is CHILDHOOD MEMORIES.  Let’s use this week for us to review and recover some of the happier moments of childhood. That’s not to say that children’s lives are always happy, of course. But “to look through the eyes of a child” is to discover …well… IS TO DISCOVER!!

I’m going to jump-start this week by posting what is normally a Tuesday’s writers’ prompts list today. I invite you to remember this week, whenever you can, to look at life through the eyes of a child—your own Inner Child, or if you prefer, one of your own or known children.  How would a situation look differently to you as a Child? What would matter, more or less?

So, here’s a list of topics that you can write about, talk about, or use for active contemplation/ imagination. Poems, artwork, photographs and music are also very welcome! I invite all comments or insights, and I will publish your stories or artistic expressions if you’d like to send one in! With my own childhood heart and eyes “Wide open”, I’ll share EVERYTHING (within polite reason) that you would like to pass along!

• Friendships
• Pets
• Trips
• Family
• Creative play
• Places:  woods, derbies, horse farms,  trees
• Bicycling    (or: tricycles, pogo sticks, go-carts, stilts, skateboards…)
• Reading (favorite characters, favorite series)
• Writing (diaries, poems, Mother’s Day cards)
• Movies
• Plays
• School
• Scouts
• Music
• Sports
• Clubs
• Treehouses
• Horses
• ANYTHING ELSE that comes to you!

Since those of us now adults sometimes are forgetful of what we knew so much better as a child—how to exercise the Imagination with Freedom and how to Explore EVERYTHING–then remembering our Child’s viewpoint can definitely bring Better Endings to us Now!

Have FUN!

************

I offer my deep gratitude to Brenda Davis Harsham for yesterday’s stellar story that I simply re-blogged here, Choices for the Soul. This site reached a record of Likes yesterday due to Brenda’s generosity. Thanks to her and to everyone who has chimed in! I hope you might enjoy the focus here with our theme of Better Endings!

Realize Your Goals!

Connecting with this week’s Better Endings focus on joblessness or underemployment, our Life Mapping tool for this week can be used to envision a pathway to manifest a desired goal. As you engage with this GOAL-CLUSTER mind-mapping activity, I invite you to approach it with a childlike perspective, allowing “playful” ideas to emerge from your unconscious sandbox.

Using the template shown above, you can start by placing either a word, a phrase, or an image icon that represents a meaningful, desired goal (with perhaps a photo of yourself, smiling!) into the center of a page, with an X that segments the page into 4 quadrants around this GOAL-center.

Next, starting with the top/RESULTS quadrant, you can use free association to place words or phrases that represent what you will gain or how you will benefit  with your goal ACHIEVED. Where these benefits or positive outcomes are meaningfully interconnected for you, you can draw lines or off-shooting branches showing these connections.

Next you can start filling in any of the other three quadrant sections, again using playful free association to ‘draw connections’ between ideas either within a quadrant or migrating across them.

For example, let’s say your goal is to take a trip to visit Ireland. RESULTS might include: “touching base with my heritage”; “expanding my horizons”; or “slowing down for awhile/ getting away”. Then branching off from one of these you might add, “gold at the end of the rainbow”, and off from that: “retire there?” [okay, now I am getting my own ideas; I love Ireland!].  Now under OBSTACLES, maybe you would write: “Money?” That may lead you to the RESOURCES space, where you can brainstorm how you might afford the trip; if so, you can connect this resource to the obstacle statement. Envisioning Resources might lead you also to think of some very real Solutions, see?

After filling in this GOAL-cluster mind-map so that you feel you have fleshed out all four quadrants with meaningful and helpful ideas,   I invite you to go back and circle or use color to highlight those specific Resources and Solutions that can help you to actualize the RESULTS you desire to create in your life. You can also start a new page, placing any of the specific Results or Resources or Solutions (or Obstacles) you generated with the GOAL cluster into the center, and explore that aspect with its own, freestyle cluster mind-map.

Approaching this technique as a playful game will facilitate emergence of a mindful awareness that can stimulate “out of the box” solutions.  Remember from Denise’s Guest Blog two weeks ago: “There IS NO BOX!”