Post meltdown blog fodder

Yeah, so after I had my mini meltdown the other day, I read this over at Fugitivus and I really liked it.

It hit me like a thunderbolt: “No wonder I’m depressed if I keep telling myself that 90% of my life doesn’t count.” When I get fed up with having to eat, shower, work out, travel from one location to another, clean, dress, do laundry, I’m getting fed up because these are all the things I have to do before I can “live.” So maybe, I thought, I should change my definitions and my expectations. Maybe I should consider every moment that I am alive to be a moment where I am living. It sounds really simple, like, “The snozzberries taste like snozzberries,” but it hit me with a force that helped jar me out of my self-pity cycle.

I so, so, so relate. That grinding drudgery of the everyday often gets to me and I often neglect to be grateful for the things that I do have.  I don’t believe there’s  an external cosmic force that’s going to take care of my most basic needs, because I know that that being is me. I do need to learn to appreciate the things that I achieve, from the food that I have cooked and eaten tonight to the clean kitchen that I’m about to manifest (maybe).

and I LOVED this article, I don’t know, I just found it fascinating… go have a read.

The idea that a simple scent can influence behaviour to this degree may be surprising to many people, but I’ve blogged about many such studies before. Social exclusion can make you feel cold, a warm cup of tea can make people behave more warmly or charitably to others, and holding heavy objects can make us see things as more important. All of these are examples of a fascinating concept called “embodied cognition“, where many of the abstract concepts we use daily, like virtue, are related to concrete parts of our environment, like smells.

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