Month: October 2023

1st Photo: @madison.lecory

Originally posted at: Madison LeCroy’s Red Confessional Dress

How many times a day do you catch yourself multitasking? Talking on the phone while watching TV and cooking is not uncommon for many women over 60. But is it efficient?

Allegedly, Leonardo da Vinci had been able to write while drawing. Some documents of his backwards writing (right to left) remain to this day, although, based on how difficult they are to read, I suspect that even if he could write with one hand and draw with the other simultaneously, neither was very good.

This is an example of multitasking that does not work. But to hear people say that we are generally incapable of multitasking is a very limited view of our brain’s capacity.

You Can Multitask Efficiently When You Mix the Right Activities

Not only can we multitask, but some tasks are performed better when we do multitask. Try riding a bicycle and only peddle but not steer or only steer but not peddle. Clearly, riding a bicycle works better when we do both at the same time.

Your brain is processing more than one thing at a time every minute of the day.

So, when does multitasking work?

When You Mix the Tasks

An interesting thing about the brain is that it has areas of specialization. Our brain isn’t just one big grey mass but is divided into distinct parts that specialize in different functions. By engaging in tasks that employ different areas of the brain, we can easily do those tasks simultaneously.

For instance, while doing your daily exercise program, you can count your reps. Already you are multitasking. Then you could also plan what you are making for supper or think about who you are going to invite to your dinner party. Further multitasking.

However, you would not be able to count how many people are on your invitation list because you are already counting your reps, and you would surely get those numbers mixed up.

Try this: Next time you are working on a hobby, put on some music. Or go for a walk and listen to a podcast.

When One Task Is Well Practiced

We all have things that we have done so many times that we could practically do them in our sleep. Perhaps you make a cookie recipe that is your family favourite or you style your hair a particular way.

Whatever it is, you sort of go on auto pilot while performing that task, providing free time for your brain to work on something else. My mother would knit and carry on a conversation or watch TV at the same time.

Have you watched a child learning to tie up shoes? You will see complete focus and concentration on that task. Nothing else enters her mind. Once that task becomes routine, she can tie shoes and chatter away through it.

Try this: While you are folding your laundry, make that phone call that you have been putting off.

When One Task Includes Physical Movement

This one is really the most exciting for us 60-somethings. When we combine movement and thinking we can often see an increase in efficiency!

When we are deep into a project, all of our focus is on that endeavour, and other departments in our brain take a break, so to speak. However, when we start moving our body, we engage those other areas of our brain, and that somehow improves the brain’s activity around the primary focus.

Standing desks or even treadmill desks have started becoming popular in some offices. Originally developed for people wanting to increase their physical health, users now find that there are cognitive benefits as well. Mature women can definitely benefit from it as one more way to prevent dementia.

Try this: While you are doing housework, you could be mulling over how you could handle a sticky family situation.

When One Task Involves Creativity

Another way that movement improves the efficiency of multitasking is in the area of creativity. One of my favourite definitions of creativity is “bringing together two previously unrelated ideas.”

A famous example is the man that got cockleburs stuck on his clothes and thought of making fasteners using the same concept. Now we all know that as Velcro.

Two unrelated ideas will never collide in our brain if we focus on or think about only one thing at a time, all of the time. For example, you might not be sure how you want to redecorate a particular room.

After looking at what feels like thousands of pictures and hundreds of samples, one day you might find yourself strolling through an art gallery, driving into a parkade or visiting a friend in the hospital and an idea comes to you. Your creative brain has been at work all this time.

Here is a 4-step process for multitasking that involves creativity:

• Think of a problem you want to solve.
• Give it some thought, maybe brainstorm on it, consider possible solutions.
• Then put it into the back of your mind, but not out of your mind.
• You’ll be surprised how often, out of the blue, when you least expect it, an idea will come to you.

Conclusion

We live in a time when so many of us seem to be in a hurry. Hustle and bustle define our era. We attempt to keep up with the flow of information and demands on our time.

Multitasking isn’t always the answer. Done incorrectly it can leave us disconnected and frustrated. There are times that multitasking does not work, and there are times you will want to give something your full attention.

A simple tip for deciding if multitasking is appropriate is to consider if one of the tasks involves physical movement. If so, this might be a good opportunity for multitasking.

Don’t sell your brain short on multitasking. There are many times when we can use multitasking to our advantage. When combining the right tasks, not only can we be as efficient, but, in some cases, even more so.

Take this 20 question self-assessment quiz to see if your lifestyle supports brain-healthy habits.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you found tasks that you can do well together? When was a time when your efficiency improved by doing two tasks at once? Please share your multitasking experience in the comments below.

It is universally agreed that parents possess an elemental instinct to protect their children. Even before the moment of birth, and thereafter throughout their lives, children animate this instinct, which over time settles so profoundly in parents that it unconsciously becomes a default response long after children have entered adulthood.

As young children reach maturity and assume greater personal responsibility, active parental protection naturally wanes, as it should. To be sure, finding equilibrium in the parental protective instinct is critical to maintaining a healthy relationship with your adult children.

Mothering Our Children

We would all concur that the suffocating (hovering) attention of a “mother hen” is detrimental to a child’s development and has the effect of establishing a relationship of harmful psychological dependency.

When parents do everything for their children, regardless of the fact that the children are quite capable of independent agency, children have little opportunity to test their limits and build self-confidence.

It is important to intentionally determine when parental assistance is truly needed and when it has become habitual. A friend once joked, “I spent 20 years telling my son what to do and the next 20 learning how to not tell him what to do!”

As parents, we would love to jumpstart our children’s learning by being able to directly transmit our greatest insights to them so they don’t make the same mistakes we did, but as wisdom would have it, some life lessons need to be viscerally experienced to be truly integrated as deep knowing.

On the other extreme, while children are still growing mentally, emotionally, and physically, it would be a form of neglect to leave them entirely on their own to figure out the complexities of life. After all, a manual of operating instructions was not provided to any of us!

Looking for Balance

Where does parents’ desire to protect their adult children find a healthy balance? How you respond to these two questions will shed some light on the answer.

Will Your Protective Behavior Complicate an Already Stressful Situation?

As a hypothetical, let’s suppose that your daughter is having difficulty in her marriage. When she confides in you (assuming you’re one of her parents), you react by giving a barrage of gratuitous advice and your opinion on how to fix it.

While she’s struggling to decide whether to divorce or stay in the relationship, in this scenario she’s also sensing your stress at the possibility of a breakup in the family. Being hyper-attuned to your reactions, her problem has become weightier because now she feels the need as a daughter to alleviate your apprehension as well, which is one reason adult children often don’t open up about their troubles: they want to spare their parents worry.

On the contrary, if you can remain calm and learn to be an effective active listener – joining the conversation with a desire to understand how she’s feeling and putting yourself in her shoes in order to relate empathically – you will be providing a place of refuge where she can sort though her emotions candidly in an atmosphere of love.

No judgment, simply listening and asking questions that rephrase what she’s said for clarification or inquiring how she feels about what she’s conveyed.

Will Your Protective Help Deprive Your Children of Personally Experiencing an Important Life Lesson?

Another hypothetical. Your son is very good at what he does and is succeeding financially, but he’s overworked and unhappy. In exasperation, he conceives the idea that becoming an artist (with no art background) and living off the grid in a remote area (with no previous experience of what that might mean) will change his life for the better.

Making such a move could bring with it a number of significant changes, potentially expansive or depressing: good fortune or impoverishment, the uncovering of a hidden talent or failure, new-found courage or loss of self-respect, peace of mind or loneliness. He’s increasingly adamant about actualizing his plan notwithstanding the acknowledged risks.

How Will You as His Parent Respond?

Again, with active listening. When he expresses his current frustrations, you might ask if he’s thought about taking a respite – is he suffering from burnout? Has he considered taking a leave of absence for a trial run with his new idea? Has he entertained enrolling in art classes to test the waters?

What you would do in his situation is irrelevant unless he asks your opinion. Your help in exploring possibilities will be beneficial only if you are not pushing your own agenda. The final decision will be his – you respect his right to self-determination – as will its denouement.

Though you may have doubts about the direction his life is taking or quietly be cheering his departure from a profession that never suited him, you cannot direct or control his choices, but you can offer your love, a listening ear, and your wisdom in trusting the perennial value of lived experience.

Your Own Life Balance

Finally, maintaining a place of balance in your own life that puts your adult children at ease will be a source of comfort for them. Being that haven of good sense, compassion, and emotional support that all families need creates an atmosphere of security and reinforces the understanding that they can share their lives with you willingly and freely.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Which type of parent are you – the overbearing or the empathetic? Is it easy or difficult for you to hold your advice and just listen? Has there been a situation where you really wanted to provide advice but thought better of it? Are there life lessons you would have rather saved your children from?

Once upon a time, Wise women were revered. They lived in thatched cottages deep within the woods tending their herbs, gardens, animals, milking their cow or goat, gathering nuts and berries from the forest, talking to tress and gazing at the moon. They also lead battles and nations.

Intuitive, disciplined and patient, Wise women were sought after for healing illness, birthing babies and holding the hands of those dying and journeying to Summerland. They eased humans passing in this mortal life and the next.

How do we go from this scenario to black pointy hats and brooms? How do we go to punishment for speaking out against abortion in Utah? Killed for not being modest and covering their heads in Iran? Skiing in long skirts because the Mennonite Elders deemed it so?

Women are still being burned in subtle ways, and the witchcraft trials are still with us. Just look at the gender of all the world leaders and politicians.

Baba Yaga

Baba Yaga might be considered the greatest witch of all for she follows only her own rules. The essence of the Slavic Baba Yaga is an archetype in many cultures and many stories, and symbolizes the unpredictable and untamable nature of the female spirit, of Mother Earth, and the relationship of women to the wild.

Interestingly, the word witch is derived from Wicca-to bend. So, women, connected to nature by their cycles, knew how to bend herbs, commune with animals, bleed without dying and lead with awareness.

Baba Yaga is a reminder that freedom lies a little beyond the border of social norms, and that we can learn as much from the dark as the light. For Baba Yaga’s house walks on chicken legs!

Baba Yaga may hide herself in the woods, but she is watching, and she is remembering. She can be feared because she is independent, and she is content and happy with her chicken leg house! 

The Witch Question

“Are you a witch?” he asked.

For a moment, the wind stopped blowing and my breath was caught in my chest as I looked at this suitor, my neighbor who asked me this question.

“If I was then my ex-husband would have been a toad,” I quipped. He laughed but his eyes held mine.

“Well, are you?”

“No,” I said quickly though the answer was most assuredly, yes.

How many generations of women have been asked the same question by men, knowing that if they were suspect, and the question raised, they were doomed regardless of the outcome?

What Makes Me a Witch?

In my rural Virginia town, I do not attend church, have lived alone without a full-time man for over 16 years, manage my farm and hike and ride my horses up and down the mountains without fear. So, independence makes me suspect.

This was true in the Salem Witch Trials. Lone women alone were targeted, and outspoken women were targeted. Martha Carrier was one of them. She was widowed, running her farm and telling her neighbor who was surveying the property line between them, “I’m going to stick to you as close as bark does to a tree.” Next thing you know, her neighbor comes down with corpuscles of the groin, cattle die, and he and his wife attest it is because of Martha, who owned some pretty desirable land next to them, and had no husband or son to protect her.

Before she was hung, her last words were, “I am not a witch.” Cotton Mather called her a rampant hag.

And the Earth Has the Last Laugh

A culture that fears, accuses, marginalizes and kills women is doomed. Matriarchal cultures, like the Cherokee and the Celts, seemed to understand the connection of women to the cycles of the moon, their symbolism to the earth and life. Mother nature.

The witch trials, which started in Europe during the Age of Discovery, colonialism and destruction of indigenous populations in the New World, perhaps were some phallic push to erase women and all things and people connected to the earth.

Eve, the seductress, Mahsa Amini, killed in the custody of the Islam morality police, the former old order Mennonite girl in my freshman class, confessing that her family left the religion because of the sexual misconduct and abuse of women, are reminders that misogyny is still with us but also women who say NO!

Yet, the earth is on fire, coral reefs are dying, drought and famine plague the entire world as Hamas, the Taliban, American political representatives, those spineless men, torture women and children, and feed their egos, rape the earth and crush humanity.

A Different World

It is my belief, that there is a land like Tir Na Nog, where the forests flourish, the warriors engage in battles of poetry and an enormous tree at the center of the land gives nourishment and life to all. There is a path across the sea called the Plain of Honey. It is the golden path made by the sun on the ocean, and to travel to Tir Na Nog is to travel “far over the green meadows of the waters where the horses of Lir have their pastures.” There are no witches in this place, just women who smile knowgly, are revered, and if feared, are also honored.

If you’d prefer a different perspective, how about THE AUTUMN QUEEN, A FABLE.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you ever wondered about the mythology of the witch with the black hat and Halloween? While maybe not being asked if you are a witch, have you experienced men questioning your independence? Can standing up for one injustice towards women, also save our planet?

Originally posted at: Olivia Flowers’ Tan Plaid Pleated Skirt