Things to give up if you want to be happy...

I love this, words to remember and a state of mind to strive for...

15 Things to Give Up If You Want to Be Happy

1. Give up your need to always be right

When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind. - Wayne Dyer

2. Give up your need for control

By letting it go, it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. When you try and try, the world is beyond winning. - Lau Tzu

3. Give up on blaming others

A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else - John Burroughs

4. Give up your self-defeating self-talk

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. - Eckhart Tolle

5. Give up your limiting beliefs

A belief is not an idea held by the mind; it is an idea that holds the mind. - Elly Roselle

6. Give up complaining

You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses. - Alphonse Karr

7. Give up the luxury of criticism

Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticise others. - Christian D Larson

8. Give up your need to impress others

Don't try to impress others. Let them have the fun of impressing you. - James R Fisher Jr

9.Give up your resistance to change

Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. - Joseph Campbell

10. Give up labels

The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don't know anything about. - Wayne Dyer

11. Give up your fears

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

12. Give up your excuses

99% of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses. - George Washington Carver

13. Give up the past

Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. - Christian D Larsen

14. Give up attachment

The wise individual doesn't get too attached to any of life's pleasures, knowing that wonderful science is hard a t work proving it's bad for him. - Bill Vaughan

15. Give up living your life to other people's expectations

The world is a mirror and reflects back your expectations. What you get is what you see. You create your own reality. - Denis Waitley

Original article by World Observer Online

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Finished Reading - Snuff by Terry Pratchett

39th book into his Discworld series and Sir Terry is still going strong.

His Grace Commander Sir Samuel Vimes of the Anhk-Morpork City Watch has been dragged on a holiday to the country estate of his wife Lady Sybil and he's really missing the city. He doesn't like the countryside, can't get on with its folk and they all seem to know something that they don't want him to know about. Soon enough he finds himself investigating a brutal murder and unearths some very, very bad things that have been going on...

I love all the Vimes and City Watch stories, my favourite being Night Watch, but I like the whole series. If you're not acquainted with Disworld, it is a flat planet carried on the backs of four elephants who are on the back of a giant cosmic turtle. It's a place strangely similar to our own but there the humans rub shoulders with all the denizens of the fantasy/science fiction realm.

I started reading the Discworld stories in my mid-teens after going to an open air production of Lords and Ladies for a friend's birthday party. I love the mad-cap whirlwind story telling and the often laugh out loud humour: the quickfire dialogue, clever wordplay, in-jokes and astute observations, satire and parodies.

It does seem that Sir Terry has become more serious in his recent books: the raw, mad energy of the earliest stories reigned in, the visual gags toned down, but the sharp humour is still there. And there has always been a moral thread in his tales; he's talked about Death, social injustice and ethics many times before.

Snuff isn't one of the strongest stories, there are some loose threads in the subplots, but it's a good romp none the less. It's always fun to revisit this world that is so well imagined now after nearly 30 years, to see old characters and meet new ones. I'm looking forward to the next adventure!

Made a babushka doll

It was most definitely love at first sight for me with this adorable babushka doll keyring kit that came with issue 11 of Mollie Makes.

Quick and fun to make, doesn't she just make you smile? So cute!

Finished reading - Castle in the Pyrenees

Jostein Gaarder is one of my favourite authors. I've read almost all of his works and I love the way he weaves philosophical ideas into his stories. I often have to re-read paragraphs, and I like books that challenge me to stop and think as I'm reading.

He is most well known for Sophie's World but I felt the story there was used to to soften the long sections of philosophical exposition rather than being the main focus. I prefer his other books where the narrative element is stronger and philosophy is explored through ideas in the stories, like in Maya, The Solitaire Mystery and Through a Glass, Darkly.

In his most recent The Castle in the Pyrenees, we meet Solrunn and Steinn, two people who were once deeply in love back in the 1970s. A terrible event caused them to go their separate ways and after 30 years without contact, they meet again in a hotel by a fjord in western Norway, a place they once spent time together. They both have their own families now, but the meeting rekindles many memories and buried feelings. They start an email correspondence and reminisce on the hopes and dreams they once shared, discussing philosophical questions about life and death, and bringing up once more the terrible incident that drove them apart.

The story is told entirely through their email conversation. It is an interesting format and is used to present two very different viewpoints on life and beyond - one that is scientific and rational against one that is a spiritual and romantic. I didn't find the story of the two past lovers particularly gripping and nothing very much actually seems to happen. The plot twist at the end, though clever, felt rushed. But perhaps that detachment would be true for any outsider looking in on the reminiscense of two people who were once in such an intense relationship. There is certainly a feeling of sadness and a sense of lost naivety. The existential questioning also weighs rather heavily. Gaarder has explored fate, death and loss before but this had a more melancholic tone in comparison. I didn't like this one as much, but it is certainly worth trying, though perhaps not the first one to know his work by.

Finished reading: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood's classic novel from 1985 about an imagined future, a dystopia called the Republic of Gilead in what was formally the USA. Women have been forced into subjugation by the new military regime. Offred, our protagonist, is a Handmaid whose sole purpose is to get pregnant or else be turned out to die of radiation. Through her narration we learn about the events that led up to the founding of this totalitarian theocracy and the social hierarchies, laws and practices that it establishes.

Have you read it? Maybe age affects my reaction to it but I found its ideas even darker and more disturbing in tone then William Golding's The Lord of the Flies or George Orwell's Animal Farm which I read in my teens when we studied them at school.

Atwood's depiction of the treatment of the women in the story, by men and by other women who are in power, I found really shocking. Although I guess taking away women's rights, their choices and even their identities, using them only as breeding machines, controlling what they wear and what they say or enforcing sterility and pushing them into prostitution are not new or even just fictional ideas. Exploitation and subjugation of women has always happened and still happens. Maybe I was shocked at the way it was made lawful by the story's regime and the women broken gradually through subversive psychological abuse. A thought provoking read.

Pillars of the Earth

How is it that I missed all these great stories when I was growing up?

Michael Morpurgo's Warhorse - which, incidentally, is being made into a film by none other than Steven Spielberg because he fell in love with the story after seeing the amazing play, and now Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. The TV mini-series is being shown on Channel 4 after its run on Starz in America and I am hooked after the first 2 episodes. Ridley Scott is executive producer (!) and the amazing cast plus the complex story set in 12th century England with its court politics played out alongside the human stories makes for riveting TV. It could only have worked as a TV series, film would not have done it justice.

Warhorse

Went to see Warhorse at the New London Theatre yesterday. It is absolutely stunning. It's based on the book by Michael Morpurgo about the First World War as seen through the story of a horse called Joey who is sold to the cavalry and shipped to fight in France, and Albert, the farm boy who raised Joey and enlists in the army to look for him and bring him home.

The horses are represented on stage by incredible life size puppets that feel very real and the story of friendship and the horrors of the Great War are truly moving. The charges across the battlefields gave me goosebumps.