HP- Week 31

[AnnieClaus]

This month in The Happiness Project we are working on:Contemplate the Heavens. Corresponding reading pgs: 194-220.
Last week we worked on Keeping a Gratitude Journal, this week we add: Read Memoirs of Catastrophe. Corresponding reading pgs: 196-202.

Gretchen felt this was important to do for one simple reason: put her life in perspective and remain unruffled by petty annoyances and setbacks.

Great religious and philosophic minds urge us to think about death.

Gretchen didn't know how to go about meditating on death so she decided to read memoirs by people facing death. From these she gained profound wisdom that she (of course) would hopefully not have to learn from going through the experience herself.

People thought she would be depressed reading these but she actually found them quite uplifting.

Reading these books also made her and her husband realize they needed to put some things in order in their lives- like update their wills.

This Week's Challenge: Read Memoirs of Catastrophe.

This Week's Thought: There are times in the lives of most of us, when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.
- William Edward Hartpole Lecky

 

[Ahorsesoul]

I think the observation about climbing the stairs was right one.

 

[AnnieClaus]

I have read books of Catastrophe: I read Gilda Radner's book long ago and I also read Death Be Not Proud (A mother's story about her son having a cancerous brain tumor).

I tend to mull and obsess over these types of books. I do want to re-read the Gilda Radner book because of what I went through and also because I only remember snippets of it.

I think also, you can accomplish the same thing by watching a movie.
I'm trying to when watching the news and I see a terrible story, take a moment and be grateful that I'm not in that situation.
For ex: When I watch the news reports of the famine in the Sudan, I say a prayer of gratefullness for my over filled fridge, that I live in the U.S.A. and that I'm a woman in the U.S.A.

Annie

 

[Ahorsesoul]

While in nursing training I was lucky enough to attend one of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross seminars. It was very eye opening.