Let Love Rule

It’s time to Let Love Rule like the Lenny Kravitz song title tells us to do.

Dwelling on the negative and consuming a steady diet of horror stories in news articles and Op-Ed pieces only serves to harm your mental health.

There’s a lot of hate in the world coming from all sides. The haters have been given a platform in the media.

I have no doubt that hate corrodes the soul of the hater as much as it damages the person they hate.

In my blog I’ve decided to focus on what I’m for instead of preaching about what I’m against.

I take great inspiration from the Accidental Icon blogger Lyn Slater.

She marries her fashion philosophy with enlightened thinking about social issues.

If you ask me we need to position recovery as an act of mental health justice.

Other words have preceded the word justice: food justice, social justice, environmental justice, and so on.

While I’m committed to these other forms of leveling the playing the field in society my prime focus is on mental health.

You can find inflammatory click-bait writing in newspapers online if that is your think and thing.

Be a committed citizen.

We live in an often sad and angry world. Where the old guard of those in power are spreading misinformation under the banner of alternative facts. In an attempt to hold on to their control.

Understand this dynamic. When it’s gotten you down I hope my blog can be the positive prescription for taking time to enjoy yourself.

Read the news should you be able to. Think for yourself about what’s going on and how to treat other people.

In my blog I seek to offer a remedy to the hate: joy, love, peace, and understanding.

In the coming blog entry I’ll talk about my solution.

I’m a fifty-four year old woman living through “the change” of life.

I have things to say and I’m not going to be afraid to say them.

This is what I know to be true:

To forgive is to heal. To love is to live.

 

Spreading Joy, Love, Peace, and Understanding

By reading about other women I’m inspired to spread joy, love, peace, and understanding.

Dua is Albanian for love.

The Dua Lipa interview in the May issue of Elle magazine has inspired me to no end.

She’s the Albanian singer-songwriter who won a Grammy award for Best New Artist.

In the interview she talked about having eggs as snacks. She cooked and fed her interviewer eggs.

In my Flourish blog devoted to other topics I wrote about my change to scrambling eggs and veggies for breakfast.

Hearing Dua Lipa talk about having eggs as a snack reinforces my belief that a music star–or any famous person–can be an inspiration.

In the interview she talked about getting lost in a scroll hole of negative comments about who you are.

Not a fan of social media I understand the temptation to live for “likes” and worry that what you write will alienate your followers.

Dua seems down-to-earth which impresses me.

The interview talked about how women have been standing up and asserting our needs for a long time. Starting with Janet Jackson in the 1990s.

This gives me confidence to stand up for myself and what I believe in.

Ladies: start your engines.

 

 

Life at 54

Turning 50 is what it is. Turning 54 is another thing entirely. You’re on the shady side of your early fifties.

In coming blog entries I want to talk about this era in a woman’s life.

How your priorities can change. How your identity can change.

I want to document my efforts to go Green.

I want to chronicle what it’s like to wake up one day and realize your life is getting shorter. Realizing that you have only a limited amount of time to achieve your goals and resolutions.

The future isn’t guaranteed–either for ourselves or the planet.

Like Michael Jackson sang in “Man in the Mirror” I’m striving to help better the world.

So first I have to look in the mirror and change my life.

This starts with having a sustainable lifestyle first of all. Once this is in place you can start thinking about global issues.

Menopause is the right time to make positive changes.

Changing for the better is possible at any time in your life.

I say: love turning 50. It heralds a decade where the possibilities are beautiful.

Not everything might be a bed of roses at this time.

That’s when you put on rose-color lipstick. And go out to get what you want.

Women are conditioned that we have to take care of everyone else.

Now is the time to get our needs met.

I’ll talk in a coming blog entry about an interview with Dua Lipa in Elle magazine.

Along with Arianna Grande she’s one of my new role models.

Being More With Less

My new favorite blog is Courtney Carver’s.

She is the woman who edited her clothing choices to 33 items used every 3 months.

I’ll link to her website at the bottom of this blog entry.

Her latest writing is about the Italian ethic of Dolce Far Niente or sweetness of doing nothing.

I’m proud to be Italian American.

Before Carver scheduled time every so often to do nothing in her own words she:

“Ran at an unsustainable pace, multi-tasking my way through the day and enjoying or being present for very little of it.”

That’s exactly what happened in my own life.

Everything changes when you go through “the change.” This is no exaggeration.

Sometimes you need time by yourself to rest and recharge your batteries.

I get what Carver is saying.

More imperative is what she outlines as the Truth:

“Recognize the difference between nothing and numbing.”

“Escaping your busy life with substances and activities that help you numb out does the opposite of intentionally doing nothing.”

Right said Courtney.

In coming blog entries I’m going to talk about my own strategies I’m adopting as a way to Be More with Less.

My new mantra is Go Slow to Move Forward.

Rush, rush, rushing around isn’t good for a person’s mental health. Slowing down and pacing yourself is the solution.

Coco Chanel told women to look at ourselves in the mirror and take off one thing before leaving the house.

I say remove one item from your to-do list before you leave the house in the morning. Better yet remove two items.

Women shouldn’t have to keep doing double the work to only wind up getting half as far.

Won’t you join me and Courtney Carver in enjoying Dolce Far Niente–the sweetness of doing nothing?

Be More with Less blog

Having a Capsule Wardrobe

It strikes me today that having too many clothes is a liability.

Your mental health suffers every morning when you stare at a bursting closet and lament: “I have nothing to wear!”

Seeing everything take up all that space in reality you subconsciously think: “I’ll never get my act together!”

Having a routine and prioritizing what’s important to focus on is imperative at mid-life.

After the arrival of the Uniqlo package over a year later I understood that it can cause distress to be overwhelmed by the act of choosing and using items in your wardrobe.

To wit I had written: “Where would I be able to stuff yet another sweater?”

Having a capsule wardrobe is the antidote.

Ever the radical that I am I created a genius plan that beats Marie Kondo at her own tidying up game.

The solution is to only buy clothes you truly love instead of schlepping home impulse buys.

When you do this you won’t have to stare at a bunch of clothes and ask yourself if you truly love each item enough to keep it.

Choosing and using only a core collection of wardrobe items saves your sanity at the front end.

So that you won’t have to engage in clutter control at the back end.

Elsewhere this concept is calling having a capsule wardrobe.

Most experts say this involves having and using about 30 items of clothing each season.

My goal is to replace the clothes I buy in the future with fewer items of better quality.

Really one hack for front-end clutter control is to know Your Self and determine your Style. (More about creating your own style here in the future.)

Then you’ll be saved from purchasing mistakes that only hang in your closet unworn.

Here I can tell you that limiting the amount of clothes you buy frees you up to spend more time on things you truly enjoy.

Some of us hate to shop–at least in actual stores.

Putting careful thought into the clothes you buy is a good habit.

I plan to go 2 years without buying another sweater, pair of pants, skirt, or dress. I’ll talk about this Fashion Challenge in a coming blog entry.

My goal is to do what experts advise: “shop in your own closet” to create new outfits every week.

It seems about right to have 30 to 33 items of clothing you rotate every season.

For the original source of the Capsule Wardrobe Makeover you can read about Project 333 here.

The Be More With Less blogger edited out her clothes to help herself better manage a medical condition.

I’m confident that this approach can S.O.S.–save our sanity every morning when we open the closet doors and ask:

“What do I have to wear?”

Making Changes at Mid Life

Last week I used the last shred of dough to hire a Health Coach.

Her fee was customary and not at all exorbitant for health coach services.

The coach quickly figured out that I needed to change up my eating plan:

I’m to cut out carbohydrates like any kind of grains. I’m to buy full-fat plain Greek yogurt instead of 0 fat yogurt. I’m to add protein and healthy fat to my breakfast and lunch meals.

Out, out will go the granola, and the pasta of any kind except only rarely as a treat (once a season as opposed to weekly.)

Eggs are perfectly fine to have for breakfast. I buy the organic eggs and scramble them with organic mushrooms, diced peppers, and broccoli.

At mid-life I buy and cook mostly organic food. It tastes better. It doesn’t have cancer-causing pesticides. It’s cheaper than paying medical costs when you become ill.

Alas, lifestyle choices are often the culprit in ill health at mid-life and beyond.

I’m lucky that as a young kid I always detested cigarette smoking so didn’t take up this awful habit.

In my Flourish blog I’ve talked about how the food we eat can impact our mood.

Emotional distress can cause physical fatigue too according to a doctor.

At 50 and beyond–even starting at 40 and younger–it pays dividends to make your health a priority.

Living in health and harmony can enable you to live longer if you ask me.

I also think that making conscious choices at mid-life is the way to go. Instead of acting or reacting on autopilot not aware of what you’re thinking doing or saying.

At 50 and beyond there can be a lot of stress. Some of us might be acting as our parent’s caregiver.

It can also be quite a shock when we realize we need to make changes to sustain our health as we get older.

In the Flourish blog is where I will continue to talk in detail about fitness and nutrition.

In here I would like to talk about practical lifestyle changes.

The coming blog entry will be devoted to managing your wardrobe better to ameliorate your health.

Who really needs 100 sweaters?

On Individuality

As I roll into another birthday all of this resonates with me:

How repressing our Self leads to ill health.

How what makes us different makes us beautiful.

How daring to be vocal about what’s not right in the world is not only necessary it should be expected when we reach mid-life.

My literary agent is working with me on a book proposal project. She edited one sentence. She replaced the word Visionary that I used and changed it to radical.

What I write is radical at times. I write things and talk about things that no one else is writing or talking about.

I’m often the first one–and the only one–doing this.

As 54 beckons, and I look around and see what’s happening outside around me I can’t help but think that courage is warranted.

We need to have the guts to stand up and shout about it when something’s not right.

We need to have the courage to stand tall when other people refuse to treat their fellow human beings with dignity.

It’s sad that acting true to yourself is seen as courageous.

It should be expected and accepted that every one of has the right to be ourselves.

This struck me more so as an inviolable creed after riding a crowded city bus one night.

I came home and realized that the way to live is to have no fear.

So I would like to tell readers of this blog: Dare to be You.

God broke the mold after he made you. God doesn’t make junk. God doesn’t make mistakes.

Whether you are Christian or not and whether you practice some kind of actual religion or not I trust you can understand the underlying theme:

Basing how you live–even so far as deciding how to dress–on fear of what people think, on fear of standing out, on any kind of fear is not the way to live.

The older I get with my life getting shorter I think:

“You don’t have time to waste trying to impress people who are cowards.

You’re the only one who has to accept and be impressed by yourself.”

It’s a fool’s errand trying to conform to what other people tell you is the only way to live, act, be, and dress.

Viewing the World at 50

My newfound alarm at the hazardous conditions garment workers labor under has been part of a series of revelations I’ve come to post-50 years old.

Every week I log on to the Accidental Icon blog.

In one comment Lyn Slater wrote:

“Creativity can move one forward into doing what one really wants to do in life.”

Being resourceful. Veering off the beaten path. Deciding for your self how you want to live.

These things seem to have taken precedence in my life as I near another birthday.

When I turned 35 that was the start of realizing that living only for self-gain and making tons of money wasn’t such a great idea.

Fast-forward to 53: I don’t think anyone will get very far in life acting selfish and greedy and materialistic.

The point is that feeling good about ourselves and doing good is why we’re here on earth.

How old are you? If you’re not in your fifties yet what I’m writing will be a preview of the years to come.

At 53:

I’m done with the hate in the world.

I’m done with caring what people who sit in judgment of you think.

I’m done with fearing acting true to yourself because you worry people won’t approve of the Real You.

In your twenties and possibly going into your thirties you have different ideas about what’s important.

It’s later in life as the years roll along that I think:

Wasn’t it kind of entitled to be upset that your mother gave you a fluorescent green shirt as a Christmas present? (As recorded in my memoir.)

See what happens. You’ll turn 50 someday too. You hopefully won’t be the same person you were when you were 20. Or even when you were 40.

The famous boxer Muhammad Ali has a great quote I’ll end here with:

“A  man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”

Women: this applies to us too.

Conscious Chic

Merriam-Webster online defines the noun Chic as:

Smart elegance and sophistication especially of dress or manner.

As I roll into my mid-fifties the goal is to be conscious not live life on auto-pilot.

Reading We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now has been a wake-up call.

This has awakened in me the urge to speak out as a Rebel/Feminist.

At this point in my life living on the cusp of getting older I think each person should decide for themselves how they want to be, live, act, dress, and think.

To be a Feminist in today’s world was beautifully expressed by Gaia Repossi, an Italian Creative Director living in Paris:

“Since I am a creative person, my style is my language, a way in which I speak.

I would encourage you to “speak” freely as yourself, to be guided by your instinct, to be faithful to your heart and mind, to say something…Contemporary elegance, to me, is rooted in an enlightened feminism, in equality of genders and sexualities, and in freedom from gender.”

To embrace and honor your individuality–of gender yet also of personality–and that of others is the goal.

My agenda in advancing the ethic of Conscious Chic is precisely to liberate ourselves from the old-school patriarchy that has caused the hazardous working conditions in garment factories around the globe.

Being chained to a treadmill of buying and spending isn’t the way to live the rest of your life after you turn 50.

I say: be Chic by being You.

Acting as a conscious consumer can be a great way to manage your mental and physical health at mid-life.

In coming blog entries I’ll talk about this in more detail via the concept of having a capsule wardrobe of 30 or so items.

My Mid-Life Clothing Revelation

As I get older, like any woman in her fifties, I’m examining my life: what to discard, what to keep as I move towards another birthday.

On the cusp of 54 your priorities could change. The things you value could change.

I’ve been reading a book that is a revelation.

The book We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages is an eye-opener.

Around the globe people labor at McJobs. The definition of a McJob is one that is soul-crushing and leads nowhere for those individuals trapped working there.

Thus my reference in the title of the last blog entry to McFashion. This is what I call the shoddy fast fashion that garment workers sew in unsafe working conditions in countries where the government is in cahoots with U.S. transnational corporations.

Echoes of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire here were repeated in the Rana Plaza collapse where over 1,000 garment workers were killed a few years ago.

I don’t know what’s worse: that the governments in other countries allow these deplorable conditions at the hands of American business. Or whether U.S. companies should shoulder the blame totally.

A pair of Zara pants I bought were poorly constructed and didn’t ever fit right. As a rule, I don’t shop in fast fashion stores or go shopping every week as a hobby.

In two books the authors stated that the average person buys 63 items of clothing every year. How can that be?

I’m no fan of the nationalist fervor in the U.S. We must think of people living in other countries. How U.S. companies are ravaging their lands, harming people’s health, and polluting the earth.

I will always be a purveyor of fashion as therapy. Yet it’s a privilege that so few women living in other countries have: the right to parade down their streets in finery, free of violence and sexual abuse, able to exert their power in the face of oppression.

Garment workers paid barely $77 per month make a pair of Nike shoes that cost $150 here.

I’d like to offer alternatives to help redress the perils of runaway fashion.

Is it possible to “have your cape, and wear it too?”

There’s a better way. I’ll talk in coming blog entries about books that offer solutions. Plus I’ll give my own strategies.

I call this ethic Conscious Chic.

I have ideas for how to manage your wardrobe to help improve your health.

I’m all for making your life easier when you’re a woman going through “the change.”