Month: April 2017

4 Ways To Inject Some Variety In Your Life – Without Giving Up Your Routine!

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Some people would tell you that in order to break the monotony of your life, you will have to give up on your routine. They say that variety is the opposite of routine and in some ways, that’s true.

But, just like everything in life, you need a healthy balance of both in order to get the most out of them. It’s like yin and yang, good and evil, and black and white. Neither should dominate your existence.

A life without routine can and will get chaotic. Life on its own is already a chaotic mess.

Because of this, we need a sense of direction to keep ourselves from going overboard. Routine is what we use to keep everything organized.

We set an alarm not to purposely disrupt our good night’s sleep, but to make sure we wake up on time. We go to work not because we want to slave our lives away, but because we want to feel fulfilled. Plus, it helps that it gives us money to pay the bills.

Without routine, we could find ourselves lost and unmotivated. Unpleasant as it may seem, it’s actually something we need in order to survive.

Unfortunately, all work and no play will make you a very dull person. You may also find yourself very unhappy.

So, today we are going to discuss four easy ways to inject just a little variety into your life. You don’t have to give up on routine, but you don’t always have to stick with it.

There are a few changes you can make here and there to keep you inspired and keep you going when life is just too boring. Here are some interesting things to do to add spice to your life.

Update Your Wardrobe

wardrobe update

It’s time to pass on those hand-me-downs (to the next person, probably).

When we say “update your wardrobe,” that’s just a simple way of saying give yourself an upgrade. You don’t have to be vain just to love yourself.

Sometimes, taking care of your body is the best way to cleanse your mind and calm your spirit. We often feel like we’re dragging ourselves through the mud, and the reason is because we are letting ourselves go. When you’re feeling down for no reason, perhaps it’s time to take a look at yourself and see what’s going on.

Go buy yourself new shoes. Your old ones may have already been worn out. Go to the mall and get yourself new office clothes, casual wear, and even accessories. You don’t need any reason to try and look better.

And while you’re at it, make more changes in yourself. It could be something as small as changing your style or something as big as readjusting your life goals.

Maybe you’re getting so bored with your routine because you no longer believe in the goals you are chasing. It’s okay to switch plans if you are no longer happy. Make small steps toward your new goals, and you will get acquainted with the new rhythm.

Listen to Different Music

Yes, you feel nostalgic when you listen to your old tunes. But, has it occurred to you that you’re getting bored and monotonous because you haven’t introduced a new song to your playlist?

Trust me, one new song can change your mood, especially if you like it a lot.

You can try out a new genre if your old ones aren’t appealing to you anymore. You can delete those songs you always skip if you don’t have enough space on your phone.

Aside from that, you can start introducing other new things into your life. Learn a new skill, play a different game, or try out a new hobby. If you’re feeling pumped up for some change, try something new every week!

See Also: Hack Your Soundscape To Boost Your Productivity

Go visit the neighbors

visit the neighbors

Here, we don’t just mean your literal neighbors who live across or beside your home. You can visit neighboring countries during your vacation or just visit a neighboring town you’ve never been to. The world is a large place, and there’s always somewhere to go and something to do.

You don’t have to travel every day. You can do it when you have the time and money. Keep in mind that every single adventure is a life-changing experience that can alter your perspective regarding the world around you.

You might even meet new people and friends which can widen your circle!
Don’t limit yourself to your immediate surroundings. And, if this proves a bit too challenging, just go visit your literal neighbors if you think it’s a good idea to do so.

See Also: 10 Wonderful Benefits of Traveling

Push Yourself to the Limit

Sometimes, the best way to confront routine is to push it around, alter it, and show it who’s the boss. You made the routine, you can change it any way you like. If that’s not plausible, you can at least switch things up or make things more challenging.

If your work is boring you, maybe you should try to beat your deadlines by more than a week. If your day-to-day cycle is too much of a drag, mix things up just for the heck of it.

And, if you think things are getting a little too easy, make things more difficult! Your brain loves familiarity, but it hates monotony. Do yourself a favor and live life a little more spontaneously. You don’t need to go overboard with it—just remember the balance of routine and variety.

The post 4 Ways To Inject Some Variety In Your Life – Without Giving Up Your Routine! appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

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mikenudelman:The designs of the Tesla Model 3 and the Chevy Bolt…

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Perkins + Will Design the Kawartha Trades and Technology Center for Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

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The Kawartha Trades and Technology Center is located on the campus of Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. It offers training in fields such as carpentry, welding, plumbing, and machining. It was designed by Perkins + Will, a world-renowned firm. The new center was conceived as a gateway structure that aligns with other buildings on campus. In its spectacular exterior, the most striking feature is the modern wooden design of..

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Chicago – Illinois – USA (by Robert Lowe) 

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Chicago – Illinois – USA (by Robert Lowe) 

American War

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A central conundrum of our constantly connected moment is the crisis of empathy: we are witness to incredible suffering and yet often unmoved by it, especially in comparison to the anguish we feel over events of far smaller scale. We mull over this inequity every now and then — when the inequities present themselves in some glaring fashion, as when five deaths in France garner greater concern than five hundred in Baghdad. More often than not we skirt the issue, never quite perusing the cruel alchemy of distance and detachment and the cool and nefarious dehumanization that is born of it, never quite understanding why we cannot mourn certain deaths or distant misfortunes.

It is this very question of who can be mourned, and what losses feel proximate and poignant, that lies at the core of Omar El Akkad’s novel American War. The book, set in a dystopian future America, where fossil fuels are banned and bits of the continent have fallen into the ocean, is proof of the premise that while philosophy can urge contemplation, it is fiction that can lure us into compassion. Akkad, who has in his career as a journalist covered the surfeit of conflicts that make up our bloodied present, does this via a grand and panoramic inversion. The jumbled jargon of war that contemporary Americans attach to other lands — the ones that produce refugees, endure the buzz and blasts of surveilling drones, and try to preserve their children from recruitment as suicide bombers — are in this deftly constructed novel-scape the realities of a future America. Splintered by a second Civil War, this America is divided between the Blues of the North, who have claimed Columbus, Ohio as their capital, and the Southern Rebels, who have chosen secession instead of abiding by the ban on fossil fuels. The war between these jaggedly ripped halves of America begins in 2074 and continues until 2095.

At the center of American War is a woman, the fighting half of a pair of twin girls whose father is murdered when he tries to get a permit to migrate to the safer Blue North. The twins, Dana and Sarat, their brother, Simon, and their mother, Martina, are all refugees, vying for space on a bus with others who have lost children and homes and lives to “the Birds,” unmanned drones that rain down death on the territories controlled by the Southern Rebels. Their place of refuge is Camp Patience, a sprawling complex where the forlorn eke out an existence: lines of tents ringed by a river of excrement “which produces a stench so overwhelming that the refugees refused to live in any tent within fifty feet.”

The camp’s name is freighted with meaning transported from our world: “Patience” is the English translation of the Arabic Sabr, which in turn lends its name to the Beirut neighborhood and the adjacent refugee camps Sabra and Shatila — the site of a grotesque massacre of Palestinians in the 1980s and the venue of ongoing conflict. Here again are the cruel contours of faraway lands affixed to an American landscape; it is Sarat’s sister, Dana, a beautiful child who becomes the subject of photographs taken by journalists who come to see “refugee children” and “will pay all kinds of money to film themselves a pretty little Southern refugee girl.” Sarat’s brother, Simon, runs off to fight, while their mother worries about the children she is raising in and amid such hopelessness. The young Sarat runs around with a ragtag team of misfits, her daredevil energy leading her to jump into the excrement-filled moat on a dare. Not long after, she becomes the target of a recruiter for the Southern Rebels who wheedles her with books and (literally) honey sandwiches, both delicacies amid the deprivations of the camp. As in the actual Sabra and Shatila, there is a massacre, and not all of Sarat’s family survives.

The world of American War is a prophetic one, with loss and privation and conflict the cornerstones. It is also a compelling one, the warp and weft of its details constructing a universe whose internal logic is as convincing as any real-world account. All of it can be chalked up to Akkad’s mastery of detail, his depiction of an ecological collapse hastening the end of human compassion, filial feeling, normalcy, beauty, and possibility. The wry narrator of American War guides the reader through this devastated world; excerpts from bits and pieces of official documentation add depth, exposing piecemeal how bureaucracies paper over the bleeding actualities of war. As he tells us, “This is not a story about war. It is about ruin.”

Also included are excerpts from the “memoirs” of survivors and fighters. The eerily titled “Neither Breathe Nor Hope: The Untold Story of the South Carolina Wartime Quarantine” tells of a traitorous virologist responsible for the poisoning of an entire state. “A Northern Soldier’s Education in War and Peace: The Memoirs of General Joseph Wieland Jr.” presents the contentions of a man who wants Southerners to be compensated for “Un-Oriented Drone Damage.” The compensation is not given, but Wieland, as it happens, meets his death at the hands of Sarat, who has grown up to become an assassin for the Southern cause. The thematic inversion continues when we learn that the activities of the rebels are funded by the Bouazizi Empire, which controls from afar the happenings of a broken America. It is they and “the anonymous benefactors across the ocean in China” that insist on sending blankets to the camp, unconcerned with the fact that it’s the last thing the residents need. Martina Chestnut confesses that she cannot “imagine these benefactors as people.” For her and other refugees, they “exist in another universe, not as beings of flesh and blood but as pipes in a vast indecipherable machine.”

The challenge of a dystopian novel is to imagine that what we all feel is imminent but cannot, for want of imagination or articulation, envision as a whole. American War meets this mark and reaches further. The depletions being inflicted on the environment by fossil fuels, the sinking of coastal lands, the ascendance of a singular fervor for exclusion and intolerance, the killing of unknown others by remote control and known others by torture and targeting are all realities of our world that we have somehow accepted. It is the costly consequences of this acceptance projected into a distinctly American future that Akkad lays out for us in the novel-scape. If Butler, the philosopher, wished us to pause and balk at our crisis of empathy, consider the moral cost of not grieving for those whose lives remain too remote from our own, Akkad inverts and presents us with faraway sufferings now imposed on familiar faces, known geographies, resonant names.

There are no answers in war, and none therefore in American War. Killing a man, even a powerful one like General Wieland, does not grant Sarat reprieve from her demons or from all she has lost. War, American or otherwise, provides only this certainty: violence is premised first as an antidote to destruction, then as a temporary salve, and ultimately as a justification for itself. It is only in recognizing its circuitous truths that a possibility for reprieve can be conjured, a possibility that must necessarily be erected on the more fragile of human impulses. In American War, the battle-hardened, prison-leavened Sarat ceases to mourn, and it is this world, a world without grief, that American War exhorts us to urgently beware. It’s a species of fear we could do with more of right now.

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What You Need To Know About Teaching Children Values

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Supposing you found out that there is something you could have done for your children to make their life so much easier and save them years of angst.

How would you feel?

We all want to make sure our kids live a comfortable life as much as possible so we work really hard. We want to make sure they eat on time and that they have nice clothes to wear.

In our hard effort to provide for them, there’s one thing a lot of parents forget to give their kids.

Values.

Little word, but big impact on your life.

Values are the principles and standards of behavior that one feels strongly about. They are different for everyone, but everyone has his own unique set of values. This includes generosity, giving, kindness, compassion, integrity, and honesty.

teaching values

So, why do I think values are an important thing to teach your kids? Why do I think that knowing values is essential for kids to know?

Well, think about it.

1. Your child will know exactly why they feel good or bad about something someone is doing
2. Your child will know exactly why their or someone else’s behavior made them feel the way it did
3. Your child will be able to work out quickly and easily who to hang out with
4. Your child will be able to work out exactly who to avoid
5. Your child will know what’s important to him
6. Your child will be able to make decisions based on what’s important to him
7. Most of all, your child will be able to live in alignment with what’s important to him

As adults, we spend most of our lives trying to figure out what’s important to us. We try hard to work out why we feel bad or good about something and why people keep letting us down. We are often baffled whenever someone behaves “badly”.

It all comes down to teaching children values.

The Importance of Knowing Your Values

If you know that honesty is important to you, you’ll know why you get so triggered when someone tries to manipulate you. The other person may not see it as manipulation, but it lands that way for you. It gives you a clear vision of what’s happening, why you’re reacting the way you are and why other people are reacting the way they are.

Knowing your values gives you an infinitely better control over your life and an amazing clarity and understanding. As a result, you make fewer mistakes.

Living with your values in mind means that you’re living in alignment with what’s important to you. Therefore, it allows you to be who you really are.

How do you think that’s going to impact you? Do you think you might find life more enjoyable? Easier? Happier?

Ponder for a moment on how much time we all spend with our kids trying to comfort them when they’ve been upset about someone or something they’ve done. Imagine the times we spend trying to explain to them why they shouldn’t have done something or they should have done something else.

Since your child knows their values and understands what their values mean, they’ll need very little of that support from you because they understand why they feel that way. Hence, they’re saved a lot of pain.

As a parent, the effort that you need to put into dealing with things that happen in your child’s life is cut down tremendously. As a result, they become way more independent and way more certain of themselves and life in general.

How To Work Out Your Own Values

Before you can teach your child their values, you’ve got to work out your own! Here’s what to do:

1. Write down a list of all the things that are important to you, like happiness, love, compassion, learning and integrity. You may find that there are things you don’t like that come to mind more easily and that’s okay. Just write them down and think about what they might be going against.

writing a list 2. Now, write a list of all the things that you need to have & do that are important to you. It could include financial freedom, engage in team sports, be successful in your career or go on holidays regularly. There are tons of things that can come to your mind so make sure you write everything down.

3. Next, write a list of the things that are important for you to be known for, like being known for always smiling or for keeping your word.

4. Go through each list and whittle everything you’ve written down to one word. Take, for example, the importance of being known for smiling. You can consider that as “love” or “kindness”.

5. Amalgamate all the lists into one big point. Consequently, you’ll find that there are lots of repetitions across the lists. That should be an indicator of how important that thing is to you.

6. Put the items on the list into an order of importance. It probably won’t be that easy so take your time assessing the list.

7. At this point, it’s crucial that you put them in actual order of importance and not the importance you think they ought to be in. I spent years thinking that family had to be at the top of my list because that’s where it would be if I was a good mother.

Don’t do it. Your list will only work for you if you’re being completely honest so don’t judge yourself.

8. Take the top 7-10 things on your list and write them on a new piece of paper. They’re your core values so they are the ones that should mean the most to you.

9. Pin the list up somewhere visible to you and hone it down over the next few days or weeks. Ultimately, things may change subtly and the order may change over time.

You may realize that some of the things you didn’t think were so important are actually crucial. That happens. In fact, it’s an ongoing thing.

10. Finally, do the same thing with your child.

See Also: The Problem of the Perfect Parent

Whenever something happens in your life that causes you to stop and think, assess it from the list of values. Get into the habit of relating what’s happening back to your list of values.

As a result, you’ll find your life becoming smoother because you’ll be making decisions from a point of alignment with what’s important to you.

Imagine how much easier a child’s life would be if they could grow up being able to do that.

See Also: Top 10 Tips to Help Children Develop Useful Habits

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Interior Design Christopher Ward Studio Designs a Contemporary Home in Reggio-Emilia, Italy

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This project, located in Reggio-Emilia, Italy, was carried out by the firm of Interior Design Christopher Ward Studio beginning in 2012 and ending in 2015. Its exterior, with walls of dark wood and stone, is set among beautiful tree gardens that give privacy to both the outdoor areas and the interior of the house. It has several terraces and rest areas in which comfortable outdoor furniture has been placed for..

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Officials confirm early rise in asylum seekers crossing border, but RCMP lay no charges https://t.co/QmRDVHsIYl

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April 20th

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I will drink life to the lees.

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#quotes #romancequotes #motivationalquotes #love #dailyquotes

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#quotes #romancequotes #motivationalquotes #love #dailyquotes
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