Blog Memory Keeping Blog
With our thoughts, we create our world.
I’ve just returned from a neighbourhood walk with my daughters’ two dogs – Mags and Mapes (aka Maggie and Maple) – and stumbled across three little worlds at the base of three different trees. Tiny scenes of wonder: bunnies, mushrooms, miniature houses, animals, all carefully arranged beneath shaded canopies. Who created these little worlds? What…
Memories, Self & our Higher-Self
If we are always cultivating our past as a means of predicting who we will be in the future, then there must be some connection between our memories, perceptions or emotions (depending which of these we choose to focus on) and how we see our “self”. Lisa Feldman Barret, a scientist who has studied the…
Memories and Mindset
Where would be without memories? Very confused I imagine! How are memories formed and recalled and how can they help us as we navigate life? Whether or not something is helpful, depends on what we are trying to do or what we are trying to be. This will depend on our world view. My world…
Capturing Your Family’s Story
I was not someone who was inclined to ask a lot of questions about my parents’ lives, nor that of my grandparents. I knew bits and pieces and this seemed enough. However, on reading through a copy of my paternal Grandfather’s life story which he had penned in his own hand-writing, I felt a connection…
Something to Own
Michelle Obama in her recent biography “Becoming” talks about the importance of knowing her story. She writes of her parents: “Together they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. Even when it is not pretty or perfect and when it’s more real than you…
How we empower kids with self-awareness
A series of books I recently read talks about the fact that our education systems often fail to teach “wisdom”. I distinctly remember thinking when I was about 30-years of age, “If only I had the benefit of the wisdom accumulated at age 30 when I was much younger.” Surprisingly, I find myself thinking the…
How to make our memories more tangible?
I love listening to people recall memories from their childhoods. Their memories are a bit of nostalgia, a feel-good recall of their favourite meal or teacher and so on. However, memories are much more than this. Interestingly, when I surveyed people in my local shopping centre about what they do with all the images they…
Becoming – What I am going to be!
An on-line course I recently undertook [1] says that the important question is not really “Who am I?”, but rather “Who am I becoming?” While there might be merit in better knowing who we are (along the Shakespearean lines of “Know thyself” or “To thine ownself be true”), the latter is a healthier question to…
How we reminisce affects our kids’ narratives
Interestingly, research into the way kids remember shows us that the way parents reminisce affects their child’s memory. Heather Turgeon notes that in the preschool years, children start to be able to put together narratives – thinking about the world in terms of who, what, when, where and how all these things fit together, which…
Encouraging high performance through motivation
While it is probably premature to talk about “high performance” for younger children, it is a concept that becomes more evident for parents of teenagers, especially as they near the end of their school years. However, the importance of instilling behaviours in the very early years is now well recognised. So what does the research…
Being fully present with our kids
Parenting style is such an individual thing. I think we all know what being fully present with our kids looks like. The question more is what we need to do to make it a habit that we ensure surfaces enough and at the right times. But just to start with a picture of what it…
How can we teach our kids courage?
Building character in our kids will give them the resilience to handle life’s ups as well as its downs. One important character trait is courage. Let’s start by saying what we understand by courage. A speech by a past principal at one of my children’s schools explained it this way: “Courage is not about a…