[2023-08-26] Saturday Synopsis #58
My favourite role at the various music festivals with which Chris and I volunteer is Volunteer Check-in. All the volunteers at the festivals cycle through this stop to check in for their shifts, so we see most of them at least once, if not multiple times, over the course of the multi-day festival. Tonight, at the Nostalgia Music Festival, I met a fellow cancer survivor whose story I have followed on social media and who has followed mine. It was such a treat to meet her face to face. She is incredibly inspiring and generous.
I also connected with a friend tonight (she managed to find me in Volunteer Check-in) and a different friend last night (I found her in the VIP section). During our four shifts, I had amazing conversations with fellow volunteers, felt the love of our area leaders, and enjoyed spending time with my husband. Volunteering at music festivals is a great way to meet people, listen to music and make a contribution that has a definite start and end. I highly recommend it.
3 (+1) Ideas From Me
I also learned over the years that with blogging, there's a sort of boomerang effect. Share a favourite quote, book, song or movie, and multiple recommendations come back. Tell a story about losing a brother, and receive several touching stories of grief and love lost. Share a health challenge, and get numerous suggestions of how others dealt with the same thing or something similar. All as interesting as the original.
The BRCA2 gene change affects not just women but men too. Men who carry the BRCA2 gene change are at a higher risk of developing prostate cancer and breast cancer. Moreover, they can pass the gene change on to their children, as occurred in my case. Carriers of the BRCA2 gene change—both male and female—also face a slightly higher risk of pancreatic cancer and melanoma. And, of course, the risk of ovarian cancer increases significantly in people who are BRCA2 positive.
Someone who was tired of stories about COVID, looting and brutality and who was convinced that this was the new normal said to an 87-year-old man that 2020 must have been a particularly challenging year. The elderly man—who had lived through polio, diphtheria and Vietnam protests—said no; he learned long ago to not see the world through the lens of daily headlines. Instead, he related that he sees the world through the people around him. "I just choose to write my own headlines," he declared. He offered these examples: "Husband loves wife today." "Family drops everything to come to Grandma's bedside." "Old man makes new friend."
Provide a memory jog to your referee. Create a brief document that specifies when you and your referee worked together and summarizes the achievements you had and the competencies you demonstrated during that time. The best such document I received as a referee was from a former employee who took each of the competencies the hiring manager was looking for and provided concrete examples of how and when she had demonstrated these. This made it easy for me to provide details to the hiring manager about my former employee that I might have otherwise forgotten.
2 Quotes From Others
Look at how mindful we are of our smartphones. People have little recharging shrines all over their houses, with a cord permanently attached to an outlet right by the door or by the bed. For many of us the first thing we do when we get home is make sure our phone gets recharged.... We're all exquisitely aware of the recharging routine of our phones: how often we need to do it; how long it takes; how long we can go without recharging it; where the nearest outlet is. And yet, on the flipside, with our bodies and our minds and our souls, we'll run them right into the ground until they shut down.
~ Arianna Huffington
To use your breathing to nurture mindfulness, just tune in to the feeling of it…the feeling of the breath leaving your body. That’s all. Just feeling the breath. Breathing and knowing that you’re breathing. This doesn’t mean deep breathing or forcing your breathing, or trying to feel something special, or wondering whether you’re doing it right. It doesn’t mean thinking about your breathing, either. It’s just a bare bones awareness of the breath moving in and the breath moving out.
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
1 Question For You
Tonight, while volunteering at the Nostalgia Music Festival, several of us volunteers took turns asking each other questions during lulls in our shift. The first question I posed was this: "When have you felt most fulfilled?" So that's this week's question.
