Creativity

Q: Came across this on Jacqueline Sullivan's blog and thought you might like it: How You Can Cultivate Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Try to be inspired by something every day. Try to inspire at least one person every day. Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it. Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to. If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity. Take charge of your schedule. Make time for reflection and relaxation. Shape your space. Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate. Develop what you lack. Shift often from openness to closure. Find a way to express what moves you. Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible. Figure out the implications of the problem. Implement the solution. Produce as many ideas as possible. Try to produce unlikely ideas.

A: I feel like I missed a couple of messages after reading Karen's, but that seems to happen once in a while. Today I finally get a much needed haircut. I had to reschedule and then there was a mixup when the shop entered my new appointment in April instead of May. At some point I had a feeling it hadn't been done right and called to check, discovered I had NO appointment at all and the next available time was bumped ahead to today. When it starts getting this long, I begin to wonder if I shouldn't grow it out since I'm already in the middle of that in between stage that you have to get past in order to have it long, but I think I'll stick with short. All sisters but one will be here tomorrow, as well as Zo?. There will be fishing for the guys this weekend, and I expect my sisters and I will be visiting Mom and working on disposing of the rest of her stuff at Berwick. We got rid of a lot of it using Craigslist, but everything has to be out by the 29th. Mom seems to be settling in to her new place, asking less often about going back to Berwick. Jeff went to her new place for the first time yesterday and gave it the thumbs up--I think he was worried it might be like the first nursing home his mother was in--not good. Pine Grove seems very attentive and caring--very humane. I like the people Mom usually sits with at mealtime--her new friends. Jeff and I watched part of the HBO show on Alzeimer's a few days ago. It was interesting and very well done, but it was a bit of a downer to think of my Mom declining in the way that some did in that show. Karen, hope your back gets better soon. Karry didn't recommend Quicken, but I do use it and like it--of course, it's all I've ever used. My current version is 2006--maybe later versions are glitchy with Macs. I don't use a lot of the newer features that allow for paying bills and downloading transactions, so that may explain why I'm fine with it. I use my bank sites to pay bills and Quicken is more like my place for check registers and doing reports for taxes, but it was all I needed for both home and Jeff's office record keeping. I really like Pages, the word processing component of iWorks. You can save and read Word documents with it, so I have never felt the need for Microsoft Word or Works You'll be glad you got the 250G hard drive, especially if you use it for photos and music as much as I do. I also bought extra memory for my iMac--I think my laptop came with plenty, but you'll be a lot faster with more memory. This is getting a little long. All for now!

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