Footnotes to a Conversation, October 21, 2024

“Worry is a cycle of inefficient thoughts whirling around a center of fear.” – Corrie Ten Boom

Two or three days a week, I go out for a walk by the water before the sun comes up. The quiet and simplicity of the early-morning world is the highlight of my day. It can be difficult to find those moments of quiet when you don’t feel you’re racing to beat the clock. Here are 3 articles that I found helpful.

The Quiet Art of Living Well

My brain often resembles a hamster on a wheel. Racing to nowhere, repeating the same thoughts over and over again, looking forward and back but rarely around me. This article helped me to recognize what was going on and try to address it.

“Life is not meant to be rushed through. It is not a race, nor is it a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be lived, and living well requires presence. To focus on one thing deeply, to give it your full attention, is to experience it fully … This is the quiet art of living well. It does not demand that we abandon the world, but that we engage with it more mindfully. It asks that we slow down, that we look more closely, that we listen more carefully. For in doing so, we discover that much of what we seek—clarity, peace, even strength—was always within reach. It was simply waiting for us to stop, to pay attention, and to begin again with intention.” [Stormrider]

Six Steps to Calm

The BBC is offering 6 weekly emails with science-based anti-anxiety exercises. The first week’s exercise uses breathing to calm the active mind. [BBC]

A Good Night’s Sleep

I spend far too much time obsessing about how much sleep I did or didn’t get last night. I was intrigued to learn that “that groggy, tired feeling may not just be down to the quantity, or perhaps even the quality, of your sleep – it can also depend on your mindset. Because what you tell yourself the next day about how you slept, and about how much it matters, can make a difference to how you perceive your tiredness.” Rather than focusing on the lack of sleep as a problem and cancelling activities, I’m planning to remind myself about the times when I didn’t sleep perfectly but still had a good day. [BBC]

Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.

If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.