Daily 5 - Year 3, Day 270

Today's Daily 5:

1. a breakfast date with a long time friend
2. walking together in Fish Creek park after breakfast
3. laughing over an inside joke on facebook with my closest friend
4. class ending early
5. crawling into a bed made with freshly washed sheets
6. booking airline tickets for a trip to Florida!
7. commiserating over workloads
8. laughing with a classmate
9. the value of honest communication (seen today in conversation and by email)
10. tackling a long to do list with some degree of success tonight

Friday Reflections, May 18, 2012

I'm back to Henri Nouwen again this week, talking about our tendency to live with a scarcity mentality.


The Temptation to Hoard 


As fearful people we are inclined to develop a mind-set that makes us say:  "There's not enough food for everyone, so I better be sure I save enough for myself in case of emergency," or "There's not enough knowledge for everyone to enjoy; so I'd better keep my knowledge to myself, so no one else will use it" or "There's not enough love to give to everybody, so I'd better keep my friends for myself to prevent others from taking them away from me."   This is a scarcity mentality.  It involves hoarding whatever we have, fearful that we won't have enough to survive.  The tragedy, however, is that what you cling to ends up rotting in your hands.

Daily 5 - Year 3, Day 269

Today's Daily 5:

1. Bus heaters on a cold, rainy, trying to snow sort of day
2. Getting my favorite seat on the bus and settling in with a good book
3. Having a student summer bus pass (a new feature, that's saving me about $300 over the course of the summer months)
4. A skype date with L. in New Zealand - nothing quite like laughing and commiserating with your best friend, who though on another continent is also a "mature" student, pursuing a new degree and career path
5. a really challenging conversation with my therapist in our session tonight

Currently...

It's been a while since I've done a post on the things that I'm currently reading, listening to, watching and so on, so I thought I'd share some of those here today.

Watching:

• Grey's Anatomy (always Grey's!)
• Smash (loving the whole musical styling of this drama)
• Last Man Standing (Tim Allen cracked me up in the Home Improvement Days, and still does)
• America's Next Top Model: British Invasion (almost done for the season, but cracking me up!)
• Just finished watching the first 5 seasons of 30 Rock on Netflix and loved it!

Reading:

• textbooks, textbooks and more textbooks (right now on family nursing and collaborative care)
• cookbooks (currently exploring Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes and Cooking Light's Cooking Through the Season)
• Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (by Novella Carpenter - listening to the audio book. I love the idea of the wholeness of food, of the interconnectedness of growing and creating food, and this is one of several books in the genre that I've enjoyed by audiobook on my long commutes to and from school)
• Lauren Winner's newest memoir "Still"
• a few novels when I have some extra moments

Listening:

• The Bethel Church podcast - love the sermons, especially from Kris Vallotton
• Ian Morgan Cron's podcast, "Listening In"
• Honeycomb Tombs - the newly released album from my friend Karla Adolphe
• Jack Johnson's "In Between Dreams" album - this one is a standard on my ipod/iphone, and is one of my go to's for when I need bubbly, happy, cheering up, makes me want to dance type music

And you? Do you have recommendations in these categories? What are you reading, listening to, or watching right now? I'm always looking for suggestions!

Daily 5 - Year 3, Day 268

Today's Daily 5:

1. A decent morning of classes
2. lunch with a good friend
3. an awesome conversation with a friend about reading scripture
4. mango bubble tea
5. the sudden finalization of plans to hang out with 4 soul friends (and 2 babies) in person, in Florida, in August!!! So excited that this is actually going to happen!