Finding Beauty

Listen to Nancy Adler talk about finding the activities that give us energy, and focusing on the beauty of everyday life.

Often times when you look at stressors, and all of us have lots of stressors, we have mores stressors than we’re willing to admit to ourselves most of the time, let alone to anybody else, if our only focus is on recognizing the stressors and then trying to figure out which ones we can let go of and which ones we might change, what we miss is asking the question of what brings me energy? Not, what do I have to do to get energy, but what brings me energy in my day? What brings me joy? What brings me happiness? What brings me optimism? And then to be even more concrete, to go back, not in general, but just over the last 24 hours and think about, what were the moments out of the last 24 hours that brought me the most energy? What was the moment out of the last 24 hours that I felt most alive? What allowed that to happen? Is it that I had to walk outside and actually be in nature? Was it that I had to not respond to my iPhone, iPad or anybody else, and just listen to me for a moment and discover that I actually was joyful? But I was going so fast that I didn’t even notice it? Was it that I needed to take a step back and ask what had I done the rest of the day? Or was it that I just noticed that the soup that I thought that I had piled all together at the beginning of the day because it was really easy, it could just cook by itself, smelled really good? And reminded me of a bunch of dinners where we had had good conversations, and my hope that maybe tonight would again be one of those nights?