Image by EssjayNZ via Flickr
I'm coming off a pretty rough three day holiday weekend, spent mostly in bed with the stomach flu. Thankfully, since it was the weekend, my husband was home and able to help me out. Which got my thinking about all the things in my life that are real lifesavers in terms of helping me get through each and every day with chronic illness. Lifesavers like:
- Making sure I have fun each day, which helps me feel happy every day.
- Engaging in pleasant and distracting activities, which helps me get my mind off my chronic pain and chronic fatigue.
- Growing a garden, which encourages me to get out of the house and into nature every day.
- Parenting pets, which makes me feel unconditionally needed, appreciated and loved.
- Focusing on what I can do each day, which makes me feel productive.
- Letting go of unrealistic and unreasonable expectations, which helps me feel better about myself and my circumstances.
- Interacting with my friends and family, which helps me feel connected to community and support.
- Living in the present instead of worrying about the past or future, which helps me enjoy today.
2 comments
What a great topic! There are so many days when it is easy to just try to GET through the day and not focus on what brings us joy.
Some of mine would be...
Writing something. I love to write and always have a pen and notebook with me. If I forget and have to be somewhere for awhile, like my son's karate lesson, I will write on any scrap of paper or end up at the store nearby. People say "don't work all the time" but it's not work for me. There are so many areas of writing, it all brings me joy.
Spending some time in the Word or at the very least a devotional book to see a perspective that is positive, not negative. Devotional books can be "odd" in a way because we sometimes can flip to today's reading an assume that God has planned in advance for us to read it.
Checking in with the world. Whether it's online, on TV, some days it's just Facebook, I like to see what people are talking about and the news. I record the Today show and usually try to watch the first 15 minutes or see what is on Fox news with my itouch and check out the headlines.
I like to water the few flowers I've not yet killed (I don't like to water) and I am watering a huge tomato plant I am so excited is still alive and actually producing tomatoes.
This was a good reminder. I am part of the online "patient community" as someone with a Christian chronic illness organization, Rest Ministries, but am also part of the "mom world" with a "Scrapbook my adoption" site, and then I also do blogging on how to sell more books. In my world, these all overlap, but it is interesting to see how often they do not online. As you stated, the site design, the banner appearance, the style of comments people leave, the blogrolls are all their own universe. I think that I have benefited a great deal in designing my own sites and being exposed to the many different angles writers take in these styles of blogs (for example, patient blogs are much different than medical blogs, mommy sites have even a lot of differences from "waiting to adopt" sites.) What works for me as far as marketing in one area, does not work well at all in another.
I recently taught an internet marketing workshop at a authors/speakers conference and was giving them some short cut tips. They asked, "yes, but does it sell more books?" I said, "For my scrapbooks for adoptive moms, yes, I can see a direct correlation between a marketing effort (like writing articles) and the purchase of books increasing. But for my nonprofit organization, it's harder. My goal there is to introduce our organization to someone, have them find comfort, receive daily devotionals via email, become a part of our community... and then they may buy a book and become a donor. but with this audience, who is largely on disability income or limited income, it's harder to track how a marketing effort works because it may be months before the purchase takes place."
Excellent post and great food for thought. Thank you!
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