POSITIVELY PANDEMIC: Fall Down 7 times. Get Up 8. Do the Hokey Pokey …

March 1, 2021 by the sibyls Leave a Comment

by The Sibyls

The PANDEMIC has battered, bruised, and derailed all of us. The pain and challenges are not evenly spread yet the core resilience of survivors has some common elements.

This blog too was interrupted by the Pandemic. But it is time to return to the vitality of The Sibylesque ethos.

Midlife can involve many stresses including career demands, difficult teenage children, divorce, lack of time, lack of fitness, parents’ failing health and money worries with no simple solutions in sight. But one of the BIGGEST issues of midlife is accepting that you are not always in control. Unexpected things can happen to you despite the best plans. Like, say, A PANDEMIC!

An article by Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times (How to Build Resilience in Midlife) gives some pointers that could equally apply at any age and any time.

Life, or so it seems, was simple once. Now it is so complex.
Here are some of the ways to build resilience:

Practise Optimism
Rewrite Your Story
Don’t Personalise It
Remember Your Comebacks
Support Others
Take Stress Breaks
Go Out of Your Comfort Zone

We, the Sibyls, would add:

Seek joy

Joy will not just arrive on your doorstep. You have to seek it. Find out what makes you happy and what makes you laugh. Then do this every day or, at least, when you can.

Fall Down 7 times. Get Up 8. Do the Hokey Pokey …

July 28, 2017 by the sibyls Leave a Comment

by The Sibyls

An article by Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times this week (How to Build Resilience in Midlife) gives some pointers that could equally apply at any age.

Life, or so it seems, was simple once. Now it is so complex.
Here are some of the ways to build resilience:

Practise Optimism
Rewrite Your Story
Don’t Personalise It
Remember Your Comebacks
Support Others
Take Stress Breaks
Go Out of Your Comfort Zone

We, the Sibyls, would add:

Seek joy

Joy will not just arrive on your doorstep. You have to seek it. Find out what makes you happy and what makes you laugh. Then do this everyday or, at least, when you can.

Sibling Rivalry: It’s what happened when we stopped sending kids down the coal mines!

May 15, 2015 by the sibyls Leave a Comment

by Penny Cook

At what point did sibling rivalry become 2 separate words? Anyone with 2 or more children knows it’s actually one word….because as soon as you have a sibling, there is rivalry. All our good intentions in planning the ‘best possible’ age gap between children goes to play dough as soon as there is a second child and is there to stay for subsequent additions to the clan.

Sibling rivalry is one of those primitive dispositions in children’s lives that we don’t like to deal with, let alone acknowledge as a normal and healthy part of socialisation. I’m not saying physical abuse is ok but when children ‘rival’ with each other for the same amount of dosh for pocket money or who’s done the dishes more times or had more turns on the computer, they’re actually exploring ‘fairness’, which is a concept we would like them to know about. Our struggle as parents and grandparents is how to teach them understanding and negotiation for equitable outcomes, compromise, empathy and generosity in sibling rivalry, cos God knows, often it’s easier to send them all to their rooms!!

When we stop and talk children through what they’re experiencing and how it might work for them and others we are doing the whole of society a big favour. Now, this isn’t going to be possible with every squabble but acknowledging and naming feelings and being a fair arbitrator not only builds trust but let’s children know that situations can be solved and builds their skills in doing so. They will learn far more about equity from watching and experiencing the actions of the trusted adults in their lives than any social learning program. So grown ups, when you feel disempowered by the ‘rivalry’, remember, there’s a learning opportunity and a purpose in all of it.

Of course, at times, the darlings may just be being little so and so’s. That’s what bedrooms are for. If they won’t go there, you can!!

Penny Cook has been an early childhood educator for over 30 years. She loves to travel – anywhere. Penny is a mother and ‘Nan Pen’, who is continuously fascinated and amazed by her two young grandchildren. She has always wanted to live in a tree house by the beach …..it’s never too late!!…….

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Photo source: Awkward Family Photos

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If you learn how to die, you’ll learn how to live

April 29, 2015 by the sibyls Leave a Comment

BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End

By Atul Gawande

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2014.

Review by Kerry Cue

Atul Gawande

The reason this book is so meaningful, so compelling and why it ranks as a rare must-read is because, in telling the story of how to die a good death, it slowly addresses an equally important question namely ‘how are we to live a good and meaningful life?’

Atul Gawande, surgeon and writer for The New Yorker, dreams of new ways of caring for the frail and old. He questions the bureaucratic nature of aged care institutions where the elderly are kept ‘safe’, but hardly ‘alive’. And he rails against the invasive, painful and ultimately futile medical procedures inflicted on the dying. Yet this book is no dry academic tome. Gawande tells the storxy of dying and death of his father, also a surgeon, from first discovering the tumor in the spinal column, through the family’s struggling with medical options – operate? His father might become a quadriplegic. Don’t operate, he may become a quadriplegic! – to his father’s final days.

There is one strong and clear message from this thoughtful exploration of the end stage. Patients could have good days even when dying. But to achieve this goal they must be asked, or think about, at least, ‘what are your greatest fears?’ and ‘what are your current goals?’ Simple questions but from the answers patients discover how they are to live in their final days and, eventually, die.

Gawande has managed to take the fear away from our modern, Western view of dying, which, in many aspects involves, an impersonal, sterile, ICU bed intubated with a tube down the throat and a total loss of control. Dying need not be like this. Gawande shows how the human spirit can flourish and life can be fully lived to the very end.