Daily living

Little Life Lesson: Winsome Witness

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: Helena Lopes (freely available via Unsplash)

While on a lovely walk this afternoon with some friends around a local lake, we were rather rudely interrupted by a lady’s asking us if we were signed up for a rally.

The curtness of my immediate, “No” in response caught even me by surprise, and I’ll admit that it was perhaps too brusque. However, as I continued to ponder over this brief exchange throughout the day, I began to feel more convinced that my response corresponded appropriately to the disruptiveness of her interruption. And I began to realize why it was so off-putting.

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The Happiness—and Holiness—of a Life Lived Joyfully

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: cmophoto.net (freely available via Unsplash)

“Don’t try to add more years to your life. Better add more life to your years.”
Blaise Pascal

With no disrespect to Pascal and his genius, while I agree with the latter part of his above assertion, I don’t agree with the first part. Yes, it is far more important to fill our years with life than it is to fill our life with years, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to add years. There are lots of things we can do to promote longevity, and, by all means, let’s do those things; let’s do what we can to live longer. But we must beware of confusing quantity with quality. We mustn’t focus so much on lengthening life that we forget to enjoy life for however long we have it.

After all, joylessness might just be the most innocuously damaging sin we didn’t know we were committing.

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From the Heart No. 2: Heart-Healthy Eating (or, Freedom from Food)

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: Julian Hanslmaier (freely available via Unsplash)

There’s so much information available on the Internet about what healthy eating looks like; so, being no nutritionist, I’m not going to presume that I have much to add to that discussion (though I might relay some of that discussion some day). But, having a background in psychology and a nearly lifelong, unhealthy relationship with food, I do have something to add to the discussion of what a healthy approach to eating looks like—at least for me.

In line with that, this post is about having a heart-healthy diet not in the literal, cardiovascular sense of “heart-healthy”, but in the metaphorical, emotional sense of the term—which, I would argue, is the more important of the two. After all, having an emotionally healthier attitude towards food can make it easier to have a nutritionally healthier diet, whereas changing what you eat may not as potently affect how you feel about what you eat. At least that’s been my experience.

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From the Heart No. 1: On Goals (Or, Great Expectations II: The Problems and the Pitfalls)

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: me

I’m going to do something a little different in this post, what I intend to be the first of many such occasional posts: rather than talk about science and connect lots of interesting facts and findings together, I’m going to speak from the heart and use anecdotal experience rather than empirical evidence to make my points. (Wow, and even in that disclaimer, I still sound like scientific fact man. So on with it already!)

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