Sunshine on Legs (SOL) would like to begin our very first communication by acknowledging and thanking all of the people we have met in our lives, each of whom have offered us pearls of life wisdom. As George Vaillant said, We are each made up of all the people we have come into contact with....without others we cannot grow beyond ourselves. We at SOL don’t know it all and we don’t pretend to. What we will share with you, today, tomorrow and in the future is a combination of the best insights that we have personally experienced or have come to us from others, via the sharing of joy, pain, life, be it spoken or written. The beauty about humanity is that we are a social and linguistic species and we can learn from each other. So, as you navigate the forest of your life, if you see footprints, that allow the strength and wisdom of others inside, step in them. This is our goal for you. Not to offer a panacea, but to give you footprints to step into (with a few signposts), to further enable your journey through life to be skilled and sustainable. The title for our first communication today is “Give Yourself Away”. Give Yourself Away is inspired by George Vaillant (Social Researcher/ Psychiatrist), who spent 30 years of his career supervising the longest running study of human development ever conducted in the world, unlikely to ever be repeated due to the cost, collectively called The Grant Study. We believe the wisdoms from the Grant study are analogous to the key insights we have learnt from the people we have collectively met in life. George’s analysis of the Grant study identified that we all ideally pass through various life stages in a chronological sequence, with the first half of life being devoted to making yourself and the latter half of life ideally focused on giving yourself away to the world. Giving yourself away is all about leaving others better than you found them. At SOL our hope is that via our regular posts, we provide you with more tools to enable you to leave others better than you found them. We encourage you to read more about the amazing study in Georges book Aging Well, which summarises the key insights learned from studying the 824 lifetimes examined in the Grant study. Till next week....Lite em up! David and Ken
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 05:12:58 +0000