That makes me so sad.....I saw a report by a psychiatrist that states it is from High expectations and lots of guilt because of organized religion. Wow, are we good at "should'ing on ourselves. I should do this. I should do that, I should have done this....Many years ago I heard a phrase "I shall not should on myself today." I am trying to use that in my life. I try not to use should in my vocabulary. I can use the word could, because that allows for choice.
I thought I would take the time while Larry is out of town to do an update. If I did it each time he was out of town, our entries would be much more often. It has been a busy last 6 weeks for Larry. He has been to Germany twice, Brasil twice and to Minneapolis sometime in between. He also got his million mile status notification and is very tired of the travel. His back is still very sore and we hope that it will get some rest while he is home for the month of December.
I am sitting in my basement, while up above me my living room floor is being installed finally. Hopefully my hardware will be next and then the trim and finding someone to do the backsplash. My living room furniture will be delivered somewhere around the 12th of December. I'm not sure how the furniture wil look with the paint and so may end up doing some type of treatment over the yellow paint. The temple has been closed for the last two weeks and so I have been busy cleaning out closets and drawers, going through the last 5 or 6 boxes in the basement that are left from the kitchen. I really need to decide what in those boxes will be going up into the kitchen.
I loved our Thanksgiving Holiday. It was wonderful to spend time with my extended family. I think that my daughters gained some very valuable insights into family dynamics.
Our first Christmas party is coming up on Saturday. The ward is having its party the first Saturday of the month to avoid all the other conflicts. It will be a very pain free party. We have divided things and each of us have a fairly short list of things to do for it. We hope to set a wonderful tone for the Christmas season.
I have Christmas cards to get out. I think I will do some type of photo montage of what we have done throughout the year. However, since my computer crashed, I have very few of the addresses of friends that I used to send cards to every year. I keep hoping that somehow I can get them all back, but some only send cards every other year. And since they haven't heard from me for a few years, they may not send them at all. I miss my friendships that I ahve formed over the years, but am grateful for those who keep in touch. I told my kids that all I want for Christmas is a work day where they can all be here to work on things in the basement room. I have a ton of books that we will need to go through.
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2 comments:
It sounds like we all need a trip to Orem to see the furniture and floor in addition to your kitchen. How exciting.
I have often thought I could write a book entitled "Guilt, the Great Motivator". I agree that we spend too much time on the "shoulds" (or at least worrying about them).
Hi Diane and Larry.
I was checking out your blog and saw this report. Somehow I missed it when it came out, so I did some searching. While I do not disagree with your sentiment, I thought I would add some thoughts.
One, the study numbers show that the least depressed state reported 7.3% of its population having a depressive episode (in the last year), while in Utah it was 10.1% of pop. From least to most is less than 3% of pop difference, so I'm not sure this means a whole lot (similarly, in the least depressed state, people on average had 2.4 bad mental health days a month compared to 3.27 for those in Utah).
I also found this study (http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/49696>) that looked specifically at LDS women and found some more hopeful results (not saying it is a perfect study--it is hard to tell--but something of interest).
I also recall recent news on the "happiest" places in the world, and the happiest country was Denmark. Interpretations offered by scholars were that the people of Denmark have pretty low expectations from life, and not a ton of individual freedoms (a pretty socialist government), so the people are pretty content because they don't expect much and thus are hard to disappoint. Contrast that with the USA, "the land of opportunity" at #23 (not bad, overall), where (in my opinion) with relatively high standards of living, education, and freedom, one might have unrealistically high expectations that are not easily met, and may feel regret when can't/don't take advantage of such potential, and thus more easily disappointed.
I think it is all quite interesting, and I think LDS culture has to be cautious because we have incredibly high expectations for ourselves and high standards, and if all your neighbors are LDS, it gets very easy to play the comparison game and start to feel worse about one's self (or feel better by putting someone else down who then might feel worse). I also think the simple fact is that there are larger families in Utah and frankly raising children can be very tiring, frustrating, and discouraging (at least that's my experience).
Thanks for the space.
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