Tag: new year

Hope

Start the day with hope. Spring will come! Collective positive energy can make things better.

All people matter!

Embrace a new year and each new day with hope!

The road is before us!
It is a new day, a new beginning,
And it is filled with hope.” Walt Whitman

Start each day with hope!

2025 has been a hard year. Wars are raging, too many die from gun violence, democracy is threatened, ICE is threatening communities, climate change brings storms, fires, drought and flooding. But we must move forward toward a new world. Our mental health is so much better if we start each day with hope and positive energy to make things better.

Below is from the NYT today:

While optimism is the belief that the future will be better, hope is the belief “that we have the power to make it so,” said Chan Hellman, the director of The Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma. It is “one of the strongest predictors of well-being,” he said. It helps improve the immune system and aids recovery from illness. More hopeful people may actually grow taller than less hopeful people.

To cultivate hope, people need three things. They first need to be able to envision a better future, either personally or collectively. Second, they need the willpower or motivation to move toward that future. And third, they must be able to chart “a path from where they are to where they want to be,” he added.

How to be more hopeful
There are a few ways, experts say.

People can set specific goals and then “begin brainstorming the pathways or road maps” to achieve them, ideally by writing them down, Hellman said. That can start small. “It is much better to set and focus on short-term goals rather than long-term, abstract goals,” he added.


That can often mean speaking more positively about other people. People gossip three times as much about the selfish things others do than about the generous things they do. To address that, an expert suggested “positive observation.”
Share one story of something positive that you observed or did that day. The research finds that when you know you’re going to have to share something, you pay a lot more attention to it.

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and Heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise,
High as The list’ning skies,
let it resound loud as the Rolling sea

James Weldon Johnson, 1900

Sing for Our World!

community

Wishes for Hope, Harmony, Joy and Community

Come and Sing  
People who make music together cannot be enemies;
At least while the music lasts.
We are friends forever when we sing together.
The whole world is better when we sing
So let’s sing forever, hold our hands together
Make the whole world better, come and sing! Song by Wallace Hornady

And thoughts from Bill Bryson in “The Road to Little Dribbling”

“Why can’t we have the best public schools?

May I tell you what I would like to see? I would like to see a government that said, “We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic grow at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. So were going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, and cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies!”

 

Four Powerful Things You Can Do

Individually we are a drop, together we are an ocean.

As 2017 rolls out and 2018 rolls in, remember to set some environmental goals for the new year. As people of this planet earth we all should be aware of our warming climate, and how we are causing it!  Yes, it is very cold in many places this new year, but it is the over all tend that our planet is warming, not just one or two events, that we need to worry about. Extreme weather events, warming and rising oceans, and drought should not be ignored. CNN has an easy list of things you can do. Read it here.

Climate Reality, https://www.climaterealityproject.org/   has a more serious and difficult list, things most of us just don’t want to do, but should seriously think about! This is their list:

The four most powerful things you can do to fight climate change:

  1. Eat a plant-based diet
  2. Fly less, or not at all
  3. Drive less, or not at all
  4. Have smaller families