playing in the park

Tags

blue sky grey, children, miscellaneous, old playground, outdoors, palying, photography, plato, playground, quotes, random, weather

After sulking around for a while I decided to pick up my camera and let the sun tempt me out into the park. As it is only across the road getting wet, when one of the inevitable showers turned the blue sky grey, wasn’t such a bad thing, after all a hop skip and a jump away was home and dry clothes.

Not sure of what kind of photos to take I wandered down the main path and let an old playground lure me over. Lucky for me the rain had kept most kids away and I didn’t have to maneuver around screaming toddlers and running kids.

As I stood, camera in hand, I just saw all the colours and shapes and decided to see what I could capture by going up close. Not sure if my artistic attempts are any good but some shoots turned out alright. And even though a big shower did interrupt my wanderings and forced me to wait under a tree, I did enjoy my little, wet trip to the playground.

Maybe I didn’t play on a the climbing-frames, took a swing or a slide,  but I did have fun experiment and playing around with my camera. As the oh so clever Plato put into words so well:

Life must be lived as play.

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original thought

Tags

antioxidants, ‘The Uninspired Chronicles’, blog, brain, children, creative, exercise, food, health, ideas, random, science, thoughts, writing

For the first time since I started this blog I have no idea what to write about. As I sit and stare at both the screen and the keyboard I can’t help but wonder where do ideas come from, what makes them and where can I get them?

There seems to be a misconception that there are creative and non-creative people in the world. The one group have this unexplained power to see the world from a slightly different angle and create things that weren’t there before, the others only standing by in awe.  But that is not true, everyone can be creative if they let themselves.

Although scientists have been trying to figure out how ideas are made inside our brain they haven’t really been able to figure out too much. They know that dopamine is a main contributor to the process and that certain areas of the brain tend to be more active than others, but they also know that being intelligent and being creative are not necessarily linked, so no excuses if you were bad in school.

The chemical dopamine is vital for people to actually get up and do things. Without this neurotransmitter we would all feel hungry, but not do anything about it and possibly starve to death.  But Dopamine has been proven to also play a vital role when it comes to learning and remembering things, moving our body and naughty thoughts. This is possibly the reason why opiates (high levels of dopamine) are so highly addictive, not only do they make us feel fantastic but we seem to be able to do things better, faster and have wonderfully creative ideas.

A healthier way to help the flow of dopamine in your brain is listening to music. Not only does our favourite song make us emotional, kick start our memories or inspire us to jump around the living room as if we were a possessed prima ballerina but it also increases the levels of dopamine produced, encouraging our bodies and minds to do and feel things.

Of course there are foods that can help us along too. Sunflower seeds, whole grain and foods high in antioxidants like berries, tomatoes, broccoli and garlic (maybe not all at the same time) are perfect but ripe bananas seem to be the best. Caffeine can give us a quick push but it doesn’t last long. And again (and I hate having to type this as lazy as I am) exercise seems to help too.

When all of that fails, and you still have no ideas, there is the simple trick of bringing your seven-year-old-self out to play. All children are incredibly creative and like anything else creativity needs practice. What we did so instinctively as kids we forget as adults. We stop picking up sticks and turning them into wands and swords, we don’t linger and watch as a spider spins her web or stand in awe as a butterfly opens up her wings and flies away. As adults a box is a box, not a time-machine or a typewriter or a hat, for a child a box is something of endless possibilities. And don’t be afraid to try something and fail, if it doesn’t work try again, maybe a little different and who knows what you will discover. After all children constantly fail at things but they change the rules and discover new possibilities, never lost for ideas and full of surprises.

So now I have to put on a CD,  eat a banana, do a few jumping jacks and turn my cereal box into shoes so that I can come up with ideas of how to fill my day.

To read more on how others try and inspire themselves check out  ‘The Uninspired Chronicles’

Music makes us happy

It takes a long time to become young

Lives of the brain

 

stuck in the middle

Tags

children, families, family, Middle Children, miscellaneous, psychology, ramblings, random, thoughts, wednesday

I quite like Wednesdays even if I don’t really know why.  I think it may have to do with the fact that I like things in the middle. I like licking out the center of Ferrero Rochers, twisting cookies apart and eating the filling first or nibbling the top off of chocolate bars to get at the caramelly goodness inside. And since Wednesday is neither the beginning nor the end of the week I think it’s undefined status makes it a day that can surprise you.

Studies have shown that Wednesday is the best day to ask bosses for a raise and for singles to have their first date. Funnily enough this makes the best day for dating the day stuck between Tuesday, the day you are least likely to have sex and Thursday the best day for sex.

But maybe my love for Wednesdays comes from the fact that I am a middle child, stuck between an older sister and a younger brother. I know that in psychology this make me the “mysterious middle child”, someone who is harder to define and more often than not has a rebellious streak. This probably comes from the fact that a middle child never receives the full attention of their parents. The oldest is an only child till the next one comes along, the youngest becomes an only child when the others have moved on. Middlelings are never alone, which means they never get 100% of their parents attention. The benefits of receiving less attention is that middle children tend to be more independent, the negatives are they have to work harder to be heard.

But being stuck in the middle also means that you get to try things out, you learn to think a little bit outside the box and can develop your own creativity. And like any good sandwich filling you tend to hold things together, as a mediator, even if it makes you the one to have the argument. Middle children are full of contradictions, the are laid-back yet impatient, they are very sociable but like solitude, the are rebels but good diplomats and always a little bit different.

So with Wednesday (named between two gods, the Roman god Mercury with his fetching winged sandals and the Germanic god Odin, Thors dad) stretching out in front of me, I think I will see what happens and enjoy the surprises it may hold. And since Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, JFK, Bill Gates, Ernest Hemingway, Barbara Walters and Julia Roberts are all middle children I think I am in quite good company.

Days of the week

point of views

Tags

butterfly, children, Dublin, fun, ghost, point of view, psychology, random, Van Gogh

Last night as I was rambling around Dublin in a Gothic ghost bus I saw things I have never seen before. No, not the fake tacky skeletons nor the supposed ghostly orbs in digital photographs, but a side of the city I live in that has always been hidden from me.

I loved the stories our nightly bard told, I enjoyed the quirky puns my companion made and even the slightly drunken visitors from England with their fake hair, tans and nails added an element of the bizarre. But while I wandered around an old ruin of a church in the dying light of the day, climbed a thousand year old steps in dusk and sat in complete darkness on a bus, I enjoyed the challenge of changing my point of view.

We all get so use to seeing things in a certain way, feeling a particular emotion and doing things in the same order that we forget  to use our creative side and mix up our perceptions. We have all built our own reality in which things are safe and comfortable, the problem is that we lose sight of how others could see things. Vincent Van Gogh saw 27 shades of grey and I’m always arguing with my mother about a particular shade of yellow, to me it is more orange! So who knows what the person next to you is seeing while looking at the exact same thing? After all even a butterfly has a different view of a flower than you do.

I sometimes envy how everything children see and experience is an adventure. It may take forever to walk a short distances but the fun they get out of picking up every stick, pointing out the different bugs and jump in all the puddles is undeniably more rewarding than the hectic walk most of us take to get from A to B. So maybe, like in that film The Dead Poets Society, getting up on a desk or chair to change the point of view of how we see things is the solution to more fun in life. At the very least it would give us a little bit of extra exercise and we might just spot the dust on the top of the cupboards from that angle, too.

So with lovely new memories of an old familiar city lingering in my mind today, I think I may just take advantage of the sun and find a few puddles to jump in, flowers to pick and a butterfly to chase. Just open up my eyes and see the world in a different light and point of view.

PS: For a certain someone who may be interested – The four steps to Sainthood: servant of god, venerable, blessed and finally Saint …

Changing the way you think

10 rules to change

street clean up

Tags

children, community, Dublin, families, friends, home, neighbours, random, society, thoughts

I live in a tiny little cul-de-sac really close to Dublin city center. With just 26 small cottages standing in neat rows on either side of a tight road the street I live on has a very old-fashioned feel to it. The wooden doors are painted in different colours, red and black dominating, and big bold door-knockers await to signal visitors. These houses were built around 1904 and have housed many families, couples, older people and singles like myself. But the really special thing about this place is the community spirit that seems to live on the road too.

Neighbours do still stop and chat or borrow milk, eggs and even bin tags (a Dublin bin collecting scheme)  from each other and children play ball, ride their bikes and generally just seem to run up and down the street. Every now and then a group of us will meet up in someones home, drink tea, wine and eat sandwiches or cake while chatting about this, that and not really anything too important.

Yesterday we brought out our brooms, rubber gloves and black bags to tackle the rubbish on our street. We do this once a year in an attempt to battle the city and its debris, pull out the weeds that grow in gutters, pavement crevices and pick up all the liter that dances around on windy days. Unlucky for us it started to rain but we made the best of it and had fun together, the kids joined in with their little plastic shovels, brightly coloured wellies and loving the action on the road.

It was a great atmosphere and it got me thinking about how important it is to have good community spirit. When children grow up in a place where they can feel safe indoors and out, it makes a big difference in how they learn to interact with people of all ages. And if neighbours look out for one another and help out when needed, it cements trust at the lowest level of our society. If the small communities work, the bigger ones will too, as it then is no longer about THEM but about US.

As we stood piling up the black bags we decided to get white paint and brighten up the wall at the end of the road and do some planting for the summer. It was as if everyone wanted to display how much they enjoyed living in this special little street, tenets and homeowners alike. And I personally can’t wait for the sun to come out and our street to look as beautiful as it feels living here.

Community resilience