“Let your mind start a journey thru a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be…Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.”
With every nonexistent aspect of yourself stripped away, only essence remains. Essence is the precious stuff from which the soul is made…the purest form of Being, & the ultimate mystery…
“Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso
“It takes a long time to grow young.”
“The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”
As creative souls, we have the gift of taking all of our experiences, embracing them, and using them as a source for our work. The things in your life that you have struggled to overcome and deal with enable you to see the world differently from others. Your multitude of experiences and perceptions has never been reproduced by any other human being.
Because of this, your knowledge and vision are different from everyone else’s — Use this to your advantage.
“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”
“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God.
Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.
As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be.
And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”
– Anne Frank‘s Diary of a Young Girl
John Lennon (Photo credit: Pedro Netto)
“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.” – John Lennon
“I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be”
A ‘ Note-Worthy Article:
Bob Dylan – Reigning in the Sunshine (3songsbonn.com)
The experiences of flow lead to elevated levels of happiness by transforming the formula of:
“No Pain, No Gain” to –>
“Present Gain, Future Gain”
According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a state in which one is immersed in an experience that is rewarding in and of itself…a state in which we feel we are one with the experience…in which action and awareness are merged.
When in a state of flow, we experience pleasure + perform at our prime…and when performing at our best (filled with zest):
* We Learn * We Grow * We Improve * We Advance Toward a Future Purpose…a clear destination in mind liberates us to enjoy the journey 😉
Research on flow unveils that pain is not the optimal condition for peak performance.
Instead, there’s a specific zone: the line between overexertion and underexertion, where we not only perform at our best, but also enjoy what we are doing.
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“The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one’s relationship has a growing depth, beauty and joy as the years increase.
This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it.
It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.”
– Hugh Walpole, Sr.
The best approach of maximizing our degrees of happiness is trial and error – paying attention to the quality of our inner experiences.
As Thoreau once said, “Life is too short to be in a hurry.”
Abraham Maslow maintains that a person “cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment in life.”
Each of us enjoys and derives meaning from different activities, and to varying degrees…Identifying the right activity, and then the right quantity for each of the identified right activity, leads to the highest quality of life.
I believe that we must truly listen to both our hearts (our emotions) and minds (our reasons).
High on the Happy Side (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
To be Idealistic is to be Realistic…
Being an idealist is being a realist in the deepest sense. It is being true to our real nature.
Without a higher purpose, a calling, an ideal, we cannot attain our full potential for happiness. Being an idealist is about having a sense of purpose that encompasses our life as a whole – we need to find meaning on a specific level of our daily existence.
Peak Shift:
We find deliberate distortions of a stimulus even more exciting than the stimulus itself – which is why cartoon caricatures grab our attention 😉
It feels nice when the distinct parts of a picture can be grouped into a pattern or form. The brain likes to find the signal amid the noise.
LIVING OUT LOUD: Creative Playtime 