If you read my blog on the website, I always post a photo. I looked at heaps of photos for this month’s blog and settled on one I used last April. When I look at it I feel peaceful and happy. I also played with a few titles before settling on one:
- Time Out
- Don’t forget to breathe
- Don’t feed the monsters.
Look up here, Bob is an old family joke. A hotel room where someone was fiddling with the remote on the TV while someone else was checking out the bathroom. The person in the bathroom suddenly heard a booming voice say Look up here, Bob and freaked out. The person testing buttons on the TV remote had flicked sound to the bathroom speakers. Who even knew they had speakers in bathrooms? But Look up here, Bob is a favourite phrase to flip the conversation.
So, where is this conversation going?
We need laughter more than ever. We need some very influential people, and you can guess who they are, to start thinking of us and little people everywhere, rather than making money on the side or pretending their troops are the godly, moral ones. That can take us down some strange rabbit holes. Better to seek out things that make you smile or laugh out loud. Watch a bunch of kids in a water playground—they love it, and their antics and joy make me laugh.
We need random acts of kindness. The phrase apparently comes from a writer called Anne Herbert, who, according to the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, published the first known account of Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Acts of Senseless Beauty in a Co-Evolution Quarterly in 1982.
We can all recognise a random act of kindness when we see it; someone paying for coffee or a meal for a stranger in a café or on the street; someone handing you a sunflower or a daisy and saying yellow is their favourite colour; someone who stops to talk to you, and listens, when you’re crying alone on a bench. Even remembering these acts that I’ve witnessed lifts my spirits.
Some observers see the second part of Herbert’s quote as incoherent or hard to unpack—acts of senseless beauty. The key word is senseless, because hey, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? My idea of a hunk might not be your idea of a hunk. Synonyms for senseless include: pointless, absurd, irrational, foolish or stupid. I’ve seen absurdist sculptures and paintings that make me want to laugh out loud. Maybe René Magritte’s surrealist paintings can be called senseless acts of beauty? They make me smile, make me think and take me out of my everyday.
We need to be in a different physical space, essentially outdoors without any kind of device, looking at the sky or the world around us, looking at green and blue. There’s a sizeable body of evidence testifying to the healing powers of nature. Japan is a huge proponent of forest bathing and has incorporated it into their healthcare system.
“Research has demonstrated that this nature immersion can lower stress and anxiety levels, reduce blood pressure, improve confidence and mood, as well as support the immune system, improve sleeping patterns and aid recovery time from physical injuries.”
Because I’m Australian, check out the Parks Victoria website for steps to get the most out of forest bathing, although I have to say just walking in a park or looking at the sky, or at flowers displayed at a market all improve my mood.
We need to stop feeding the monsters. I’m just putting it out there, but some of those monsters are our favourite social media apps or games and we spend increasing amounts of time on them. This sits alongside the increasing evidence suggesting that many of our favs are designed for addiction, built on deliberate misinformation, designed for maximising clicks, because hey, clicks make money, especially clicks on pages or items that enrage and incite us to act in ways we otherwise wouldn’t. The freedom to be anonymous and say what we like to who we like is encouraged because it’s a money-spinner for someone else—usually a tech bro, while it can leave us feeling depressed and filled with self-loathing. And don’t get me started on some of the malignant uses of AI!
I could feel my pulse rising just writing that last paragraph, whereas I’d been smiling beforehand, thinking of kindness, laughter and acts of senseless beauty. So, I’m off to sit in my local park and look at some clouds for a while. I might also take a romance with me—reading uplifting stories of people finding love is another way to escape for a few hours. You could try one of mine.
Find me on:
- Instagram https://www.instagram.com/romanceauthorjen/
- Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/jenniferrainesauthor
- Goodreads—https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/22577889.Jennifer_Raines
- Bookbub – https://www.bookbub.com/authors/jennifer-raines
- Diana Kathryn Penn’s Indie Reads Aloud podcast has recordings of me reading the opening 20 mins of my books:
- Betrayal—Choosing Family Book 3 (episode 212)
- Quinn, by design—Choosing Family Book 2 (episode 208)
- Masquerade—Choosing Family Book 1 (episode 188)
- Lela’s Choice (episode 143)
- Planting Hope (episode 101)
- The Anderson Sisters (episode 54 Taylor’s Law and 80 Grace Under Fire) http://www.dkpwriter.com/indie-reads-aloud-podcast.html
You can also contact me directly via the contact page on my website if you have any other questions.
Jennifer Raines 