Meg Evans

Sometimes it gets kind of scary in our fast-changing world. Even when we just keep on doing the things that we enjoy and are good at doing, all kinds of doubts pop up. Jobs can disappear, skills can get obsolete, and the culture can change so much that others no longer appreciate our talents or see us as being useful. There’s no way of knowing what might happen.

Even though the future is uncertain, we shouldn’t let ourselves get overwhelmed. The world is full of amazing possibilities too, and changes that seem scary can end up opening doors for us that we never imagined. Instead of letting those doubts get to us, we need to trust, and just keep on.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

With so many things changing around us in today’s world, sometimes we can feel unsettled not because of any problem in particular, but just because it seems like there’s no way of knowing what might happen next. It’s hard to imagine what the future might look like when living in the present is so complicated already, and getting more so all the time.

But the upside of all this complexity is that we have more options than at any time in history, and every few years they increase exponentially. Even if we haven’t yet discovered what many of them are or will be, somewhere in that ever-changing future, if we keep an open mind, we can expect to find creative ways to shape our lives into new and wonderful patterns.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Although I’ve been contributing to the Nurturing Thursday blogging community for the past three years, I have to admit that there are days when I don’t feel as inspired to create nurturing posts as I would like to be. Maybe it’s the weather (the seasonal blues got to me this past winter) or maybe it’s other distractions. Random stuff happens, and we don’t always know why.

But, even at times when I feel low on creative energy, putting together a short post for Nurturing Thursday generally leaves me feeling better. After all, it doesn’t have to be perfect—or even particularly inspired—to be much better than the alternative of not doing it.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Sometimes when I feel like I am wading through a bog of dull adult practicalities, I lighten my mood by rereading stories that I loved as a child. That’s easy to do with my Kindle because e-books don’t take up storage space in the house and many of them are priced at only 99 cents. I keep a velvet-covered print copy of “The Secret Garden” on a little shelf in the kitchen next to the Kindle, to set the right ambience.

Reading grown-up fairy tales can be fun too. At present I’m reading “Fairy-Struck” by Amy Sumida, an urban fantasy romance in which a thoroughly modern heroine discovers she is a long-lost fairy princess, although she never wanted anything of the sort and has no intention of giving in to her attraction to a handsome fairy lord. That’s about as far from practical as a book can get—which is, of course, the whole point. Wishing all my readers a fun, lighthearted Thursday too!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

I hadn’t yet gotten around to writing my Nurturing Thursday post by late afternoon when I went to get groceries. While I was in the supermarket, my thoughts started wandering along self-critical paths such as that I’d been writing these posts for three years and working on self-nurturing and positivity in general, so I really ought to feel happier than I was, and what had I been doing wrong to mess myself up?

Then I walked out to the parking lot after sunset, under a gorgeous deep blue sky. The blue reflected so beautifully from the metal on my car that I was just standing there thinking, “Wow, this can’t be my car, I don’t have blue trim.” And all those pointless other thoughts drifted away.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Waking up on a sunny morning toward the end of winter, when the sun already is well above the horizon and the birds are singing cheerfully, leaves me feeling that the day has gotten off to a good start. Even if the outside air is still quite chilly, spring is not far away!

Of course, the birds will sing anyway, even if it is cloudy and rainy, because nobody ever told them that meant it was dreary. They’re just happy that it is nest-building season and the earth is bustling with new life. Those birds could teach us a useful lesson about starting the day on a good note!

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Although having so much access to information in the modern world can be a wonderful thing, one of the drawbacks is that we’re always seeing media stories about people who are more successful in one way or another. That can leave us feeling unsure of ourselves and doubting our abilities. If we took the time to look back over the years and list all our accomplishments, then we might realize that the list looks pretty good; but instead, we’re likely to read stories about celebrities that leave us wondering why our lives are not as glamorous, even if we wouldn’t really want to be them anyway.

Rather than worrying about how we measure up to all those totally unrealistic cultural standards, we’d do better to reflect on how much we are actually capable of doing—which is, in truth, far more than we know.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

Although I don’t work in a scientific field, I enjoyed this amusing bit of word-art sent to me in a coworker’s email recently, so I decided to share it for today’s post:

And while we’re on the topic of atoms, I couldn’t resist adding a music video of “Atomic Dog” to this post. Just go ahead and sing along with that old-school funk, and forget all about being a responsible adult; that’ll give you a smile for Nurturing Thursday. Bow wow wow…

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

I had a conversation with my manager this afternoon about the company’s plans to encourage employees to develop more skills. She said that because of automation and other rapid changes in the workplace, people will need to be more flexible in moving to new tasks and positions, instead of expecting to do the same job every day for years.

Of course, that wasn’t really news; it has been going on for a while now, all throughout the economy. Millennials change jobs all the time and think nothing of it. For those of us who aren’t quite that young, it can be more of a challenge to picture ourselves in a different work environment. Either way, we’re likely to end up in a future that is very far from what we imagined. The most important skill for this uncertain future may simply be the ability to live in the present and take one breath at a time, without fear.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.

It’s not easy to keep a cheerful outlook when it seems like we are constantly surrounded by news about political chaos. Still, I would say that in such times, society can benefit the most from our efforts—however small—in simply going about our lives and letting go of the drama. That does more good than we know, helping the many people who feel afraid and overwhelmed to get their minds in a healthier place, so that they can begin to do something constructive.

That’s not to say we should pretend everything is perfectly okay when it isn’t. We all have a responsibility to work toward a better society, however we might define that. But the key word here is WORK. It is not, as the prevailing narratives in the media would have it, “fight” or “war.” We are not literally on a battlefield, or anything close to it; and if we really want to solve our problems, we can’t keep on going through life with all that overblown drama getting in the way. It’s time—and past time—to let it go.

Nurturing Thursday was started by Becca Givens and seeks to “give this planet a much needed shot of fun, support and positive energy.” Visit her site to find more Nurturing Thursday posts and a list of frequent contributors.