All of us have some special location that speaks to our hearts. A field of corn as far as the eye can see. A mountain that draws our eyes upward. A beach or seashore where we gaze toward a far-distant horizon. A valley of wildflowers. An old homestead where even the footprint of an old structure stirs warm memories.

All of us, too, have had the experience of watching a place change in a way that destroys its specialness for us. A highway comes too close; toxic waste clogs a stream; developers cut off the top of a beautiful hill; smog obscures a distant vista. Something very important is lost to us. We feel sad.

Researchers in Australia assert that this is a new type of sadness. When parts of our landscape change in detrimental ways, we lose the sense of “home” that these locations provided us previously. A name has been coined for this phenomenon: solastalgia. Solastalgia comes from the root word that means comfort: solacium and from the root word that means pain: algia. Solastalgia is the condition when we long for a natural setting that is now changed forever. As one researcher put it, this is a form of homesickness we experience even while we are still “at home.” (more…)

A while back, right before the holiday season, a member of the national staff at AARP called to ask me to write a special column for their website. “Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas…all these special occasions are coming,” Susan said, “Since this is such a difficult time for those who have experienced loss, we would like you to write a piece that might be useful to people who are grieving.” I was happy to say yes to AARP’s request because I knew, both from my own personal experience and from the research I had done for my books Seven Choices and Tough Transitions, that the holiday season is a specific kind of challenge. All of these holidays celebrate family, togetherness, light, peace, joy, and miracle…and for those of us grieving it is the very absence of all these things that make the days especially long and the nights empty. (more…)

Inspiration and insight come, sometimes, from the strangest places.

Yesterday I was reading an article on trends in the creation of new scents in perfume. The article ended with instructions on how to wear perfume. (New instructions that I had not read before: put perfume on upper arms because that’s the part of your body you move the most, on neck so that people smell the scent when they hug you, and a big quirt down your back so that perfume lingers!)

The author instructed that spraying perfume in the room and then “stepping out into it” is definitely not the way to put perfume on. I smiled about this because it would never have crossed my mind to spray something as expensive as perfume into the room and then to try to “step into it” as a way of wearing the scent.

I suppose the discussion about “stepping out into a spray of perfume” was still resonating somewhere in my consciousness this morning when I got up. I looked outside into the spring-green tree tops around the back side of our house, saw the sunlight dappled in lovely patterns on the wood planks of the deck, and heard the birds sounding out into the breeze.

My next thought?

“I’m going to take every opportunity I have this morning to step out into the day.” Then I wondered, “What do we mean when we say step out into the day?” Is the day an envelope of beauty to step into? A bubble of light and pattern? A contained space of some sort that is filled with temperature and color and sound? (more…)

When I did the research for my book, Tough Transitions, I enjoyed learning about all the investigations that are going on to try to determine how people can increase their experience of happiness.

There’s a lot of information to read on this subject, and all of it is fascinating.

One thing that some researchers have suggested is that each of us has an individual “happiness thermostat” and that each person’s thermostat is stuck at that person’s basic setting. What this means is that when both good or bad things happen in an individual’s life, the individual will eventually adapt to both kinds of events and return to the same basic happiness thermostat setting that the person is accustomed to.

But some studies disagree with this assertion. These studies suggest that we can get our personal happiness thermostat unstuck by thinking particular ways and doing specific things. We can increase our experience of happiness by the thoughts we focus on and the actions we take. (more…)

As a transplanted Texan, I keep a special play list of singers from the area of the state where I live: Los Lonely Boys, Mary Gauthier, Lyle Lovett, Eliza Gilkyson, Marsha Ball, The McKay Brothers, and many more. Recently a friend introduced me to Darden Smith, who performs here in Austin from time to time. One of Darden’s songs was on my mind this morning as I sat down to write this March newsletter to share with you. The song is called “Drowning Man,” and this line especially resonates with me today: “As long as there’s hope, it’s like a rope thrown into the hand of a drowning man.” Not only does the sentiment of this particular lyric strike me today, but also the whole idea that we all have statements that stick in our minds in a way that we can pull them out and use them as a life line for ourselves. I have a friend who has a statement that she says every time her life is thrown into chaos by some unwanted surprise…”I’m going to make a plan.” Another person I know who works in high tech has lost a job four times in the past eight years. He says, with each job loss, “I can always go lay block at a construction site,” something he did to put himself through college. A dear friend who has had a health setback this past year with two major operations and numerous other procedures lives by the words, “I know the Holy Spirit is with me.” Another person I know reminds himself and his wife when they have unexpected troubles, “We have to have radical trust.” Many statements that we call clichés became just that because they are used so many times by so many of us to buoy ourselves up: This too shall pass… Sleep on it and you’ll feel better tomorrow… Love conquers all… I am not alone… One step at a time… Life is not a bed of roses… (more…)