Tag: adventures

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men -or- Exceeding Expectations

“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
adapted from “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns

-Date Nights
-Book of the Month
-Monthly Project

What happened to my goal of trying a new hiking route once a month? When did an Official Date Night get dropped from my monthly calendar of new stuff? The Monthly Project fell by the wayside, too, disappeared around the same time as the Book of the Month I hoped to read. I could do one, but not both.

By the time this school year picked up steam (which, in my defense included not only moving an international student into our home, but also my own teen moving north about 1,200 miles), the well planned months of new things to do seemed to go from a fun challenge to fit in everything… to darn near impossible.

Daily new things happened though, just in a slightly different way  for the second half of 2015. Even though “Date Night” never seemed to materialize, The Husband joined me in close to half of the new adventures this year. We spent the better part of the year finding new restaurants, breweries, and touristy outings, most without any teens to accompany us. What a strange occurrence this was, as for about the last 18 years nearly every activity has been a family activity. We all went to sporting events, concerts, work parties and vacations together. Now our life is different, with two freshman- one in high school and one in college.

And so, with my family growing up and away in the best ways possible, I am very glad that I started this adventure to find new things to do in 2015. Just for me. Myself. I had forgotten how much fun comes with novelty and curiosity and exploring. I really needed this project!!

What will 2016 bring?

 

Why Challenge Yourself? (Book and Project of the Month Pep Talk)

March Read: The Mistaken Wife

March Project: 5K and The Only Two Reasons I Run

The month is halfway over. I am more than halfway through my book, but failing at this running challenge. I won’t give up, though. I have friends who have gone back to college and set far higher fitness goals than I have- out of respect for them, and myself, I’ll keep plugging away. They truly inspire me!

Need a reason to challenge yourself with new projects, plays, and books, recipes, etc.? Go online, look up “neural plasticity” and follow links on reputable websites. (here’s some!) Even better, enter “neural plasticity” into the search bar on Pinterest… now sit back, and start reading. In a nutshell: when you experience new things your brain is energized.

Doing something new every day and going out on a limb is my way to help get over years of anxiety.

If I also end up expanding my cognitive abilities, broaden my perspectives and become more creative, even better!

“Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something,
they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it,
they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while.
That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had
and synthesize new things.
And the reason they were able to do that was that
they’ve had more experiences
or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity.
A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences.
So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions
without a broad perspective on the problem.
The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
Steve Jobs

Read the whole WIRED interview here: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html