Personal Freedom

How lonely are you?

/ Laura Lee Carter / 8 Comments

According to recent research, Americans are a pretty lonely group, and the younger you are, the lonelier you feel.

A nationwide survey by the health insurer Cigna underscores that fact. Their survey of over 20,000 American adults age 18 or older, finds that loneliness is widespread in our country, with nearly 50 percent of respondents reporting that they feel left out always or sometimes.

The Cigna results offer some alarming findings:

  • Nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent).

  • One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them.

  • Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent).

  • One in five people report they rarely or never feel close to people or feel like there are people they can talk to.

  • Americans who live with others are less likely to be lonely (average loneliness score of 43.5) compared to those who live alone (46.4). However, this does not apply to single parents/guardians (average loneliness score of 48.2) – even though they live with children, they are more likely to be lonely.

  • Only around half of Americans (53 percent) have regular meaningful in-person social interactions, such as having an extended conversation with a friend or spending quality time with family.

  • Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) is the loneliest generation and claims to be in worse health than older generations.

Is social media part of the problem?

Social media use alone is not a predictor of loneliness; respondents defined as very heavy users of social media have a loneliness score (43.5) not markedly different from the score of those who never use social media (41.7).

More time online and social media may be causing a rise in depression and suicide among American adolescents. People who spend less time looking at screens and more time having face-to-face social interactions are less likely to be depressive or suicidal.

It appears that how people use social media determines its influence on one’s sense of isolation.

Members of Generation Z, born between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, had an overall loneliness score of 48.3. Millennials, just a little bit older, scored 45.3. By comparison, baby boomers scored 42.4. The Greatest Generation, people ages 72 and above, had a score of 38.6 on the loneliness scale.

I have been what I consider to be a loner for most of my life, and enjoyed most of that time alone. Even though I moved here with Mike, I feared moving to rural Colorado because I didn’t know if I would find friends here. As it turns out, I do have a few friends who understand the value of a great education, deep friendship and healthy solitude.

Laura and Rasta on insulation 2014 (2)

I also find I enjoy spending more time alone when feeling so connected to nature as I do here.

Breathe: A Surprisingly Refreshing Movie!

/ Laura Lee Carter / 4 Comments

When I read the description of the 2017 film Breathe, I wasn’t so sure whether to borrow it from my local library. It sounded very sad and perhaps overly sentimental, but as it turns out, I LOVED IT!

First of all, nobody remembers how devastating polio was just a few years before I was born (1955). This is the true story of how Robin Cavendish  became paralyzed from the neck down by polio in Africa in 1958 at age 28.

How common was this in the 1950s?

In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history. Of the nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis.  -Wikipedia

Robin Cavendish and son

Robin and his son Jonathan in 1961

The love between Robin and his wife is so inspirational! The uplifting part of this film is the way Robin and his wife Diana Blacker refuse to allow Robin to be confined to a hospital bed, imprisoned by the limits of his respirator. In England Robin Cavendish became one of the first paralyzed polio victims to defy expectations, leave the hospital, and with the help of a special wheelchair, live life to its fullest despite his polio-induced paralysis.

After a year in hospital he insisted on being able to leave, against the advice of his doctors. So excited about his new-found freedom, Cavendish decided to help others experience the same. He sought the help of Teddy Hall, an Oxford scientist and engineer, who developed a wheelchair with a portable respirator so he could become ever more mobile. Cavendish and Hall raised money from benefactors across the country and also persuaded the government to help fund the manufacture of these special wheelchairs.

Breathe film

Robin died by assisted suicide (euthanasia) in 1994 when his lungs stopped functioning at age 64, defying doctors’ predictions that his life would be meaningless and cut short outside of a hospital. His son Jonathan, conceived months before his paralysis, grew up to become a film producer. His production company Imaginarium Studios, is behind this film.

I highly recommend this well-made film about real life challenges and how the human brain and spirit often rises to overcome them. Yes it is definitely a tear-jerker, but in such a meaningful and  positive way!

Rediscovering your heart

/ Laura Lee Carter / 5 Comments

“Who knows why you start rediscovering your heart you just do it again and again…”    – Jimmy Buffet

Midlife is such a marvelous time to rediscover yourself and your earliest dreams and goals. It is the time to look back and see how well you have achieved those goals you treasured as a child, and what else needs to be done to make your life complete.

Here’s a short essay from my book Find Your Reason To Be Here: The Search for Meaning in Midlife, about how this process might proceed:

pretty purple rocks

What Defines You? Rediscover Your Heart 

Your first step in this new action plan will be to let go of your previous reality, which was built on unrealistic goals, rules, expectations, and perceptions. This will require that you first find a way to believe it is possible for you to change your life.

How will you do this? First you must rediscover your heart, your inner wisdom, and your belief in your power to change perhaps everything in your life. Do you remember your child’s-mind and heart at age seven or eight? When you were that kid you had a pretty good idea of what you loved to do and what you were naturally good at. Back then you were still listening to your inner wisdom and paying more attention to its truths. That was before authority figures began sharing their truths with you, convincing you that your own truth was silly, unrealistic, and not worth listening to.

Now is the time to check inside again and excavate that child’s wisdom from the decades of outside advice and beliefs you have accumulated in your head and heart. Yes, there were many practical concerns that drove you to choose the major you pursued in college, the career you have dedicated your life to up until now, and even the love partner you may have spent the past 20 or 30 years with.

No need to judge the choices you have made up to now. Know that you have always done your best to survive and thrive, but also respect your present need for a mid-course adjustment. Constantly racing towards some sense of security is quite human, but not realistic. Find new respect for your changing self and the many new perceptions you will gather as you attempt to turn off the safety-seeking, security-oriented feedback loop in your brain. Security can only take you so far, but to grow and evolve you must take new risks. Your overall goal is to have no regrets as you look back over your life from the age of 70 or 80.

Change in midlife requires that, like never before in your life, you begin to believe in yourself and your power to change. This exercise will require that you develop your highest levels of self-love, self-respect, and self-compassion.

As you begin to recall your past interests and dreams, think about what happened to them. Did they hold any validity? Do you miss those dreams or have reasons to believe that you would still like to pursue them? Were they vestiges of your authentic self, which you have tried to delete or ignore for decades? Would this be a good time to allow them back into your heart, if only for a bit of new consideration?

Midlife is the best time to question again why you are here and become crystal clear about what needs to happen in your life before you die.

Laura and Rasta the view 2014

Open to your vast spontaneous creativity, give yourself the freedom to try new things, let go of your innate fear of failure, and finally feel free to experiment, perhaps for the first time in decades!

Now that I’ve gotten used to being ‘old’…

/ Laura Lee Carter / 5 Comments

An elder friend told me years ago, ‘old’ is always ten years older than you are right now! Actually, I still do struggle with the apparent fact that I am now 63 years old. In my mind people in their sixties are like my grandparents. They are retired, checked out of the work world. I barely remember my grandparents before they retired. I mostly remember them as elderly folks who hung out a lot watching TV. This all reminds me of how different and out of it I must seem to kids today.

I’m beginning to think I’m the last person on planet earth who has never owned a “smart” phone and never really needed one.

I still communicate with my friends through e-mail to set up dates, etc. It works and does not add all those additional monthly expenses for mobile phones. I suppose my thrifty nature has made it possible for us to retire early… But then you do run into the whole, “What do you do with your life now?” question.

First of all, anything would be better than my life back in 2004 when I lost my last job. I was driving a hour each way to Denver to work at Regis University Libraries. I swear I’m still suffering from back and shoulder pain from that daily trek down I-25 to a job I hated, with people who apparently hated me. After six years I got fired in a way that felt like the end of life itself, but turned out to be the best thing ever!  Yes, my life since then has been the perfect example of this Chinese parable from 2,000 years ago:

A Chinese farmer gets a beautiful horse, but it soon runs away. A neighbor says, “That’s bad!” The farmer replies, “Good news, bad news, who can say?”

The horse comes back and brings another horse with him. Good news, you might say. 

The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it, but is then thrown and breaks his leg.

“So sorry for your bad news,” says the concerned neighbor. “Good news, bad news, who can say?” the farmer replies.

In a week or so, the emperor’s men come and take every able-bodied young man to fight in a war. The farmer’s son is spared...

Proving once again that nothing is as it seems at the time. From my first (and ONLY!) firing as a professional librarian at age 49, I learned that it’s best not to get too hung up on what happened today. Even something that seems like the worst EVER can turn out to be a hidden opportunity to improve your life!

320 W. 2nd St. Walsenburg

Our Walsenburg rental, an 100-year-old miner’s home!

My best example of this is four years ago when we moved down here to build solar in the foothills. When we first got here I was not certain this was such a great idea. Moving from an up-and-coming city like Fort Collins to a poor, quiet, rundown town like Walsenburg left me thinking,

“Is this a bad thing? Have I lost my mind?”

4052 Comanche Drive September 4th 2021 with sunflowers (3)

But resilience and patience got us through the difficult adjustment stage of building this home out in the foothills west of Walsenburg, and today I am supremely happy to be here now.

Note to myself: Allow LOTS of time for personal adjustment around major life changes.

And yes, we do find excellent ways to spend our days, even in retirement. We have learned to enjoy a much slower pace with lots of time to just be. I have also learned how to truly live in the present.

If you can find a better way to live your life, go for it!

“There’s nothing sweeter than falling in love with the moment we’re given, the only one we have.”  — Marcia Smalley

Access your intuition, a new kind of wisdom

/ Laura Lee Carter / 1 Comment

Another excerpt from one my books. This time its: How To Believe in Love Again: Opening to Forgiveness, Trust, and Your Own Inner Wisdom. 

“We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”   – Albert Einstein

Can we change, and if so, how?  We can only change with renewed self-awareness, honest self-love, determination, positive support from others, the addition of a few new skill sets, and with a willingness to go inside of ourselves to harvest the wisdom we have accumulated over a lifetime.  All of this takes courage.

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Determination and courage come from the absolute certainty that the way we have been living so far has not worked. When you reach that desperate moment when you know your rational mind no longer has all of the answers you seek, it is time to surrender.  Admitting surrender is difficult. This admission is equivalent to acknowledging that you have failed in your efforts so far. Pure stubbornness and denial of your feelings and needs have not given you the life you had hoped for, or the answers you seek.

You would be crazy to continue on this path: Time for a new leap of faith…

Now what?  Depending solely on rational thought has not worked. It is now time to welcome in the wisdom of the universe and those others who wish to help. It is now time to begin to access the wisdom of your own intuition, every little whisper emanating from your unconscious, your dreams or wherever they come from. These are the voices that will guide you back to where you so want to go.

Intuition is tricky. It is a way of knowing, yet it is often unclear how we know it. Some seem to have greater natural access to their intuition, but we all can develop the necessary skills to access this invaluable inner guidance. Extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, and telepathy are all different types of intuitive access to your right brain hemisphere, the part that specializes in intuitive, holistic pattern perceptions. Most of us have been raised to strongly value messages from our rational, linear left brain. It is now time to listen to the other side of the story and find some brain balance.

Why bother?  Because by combining the power of your own intuition with your intellect, you will begin to see different patterns and recognize new possibilities, opening up your mind to many new choices that were not available to you before. As Frances E. Vaughan, a psychologist who specializes in integrating psychology and spiritual growth states in her book Awakening Intuition:

“Awakening intuition enables one to see the choices available and is thus a liberating experience…At any given moment one is conscious of only a small portion of what one knows.  Intuition allows one to draw on that vast storehouse of unconscious knowledge that includes not only everything that one has experienced or learned, either consciously or subliminally, but also the infinite reservoir of the collective and universal unconscious…”

Do you believe it is possible to expand your consciousness to include your intuitive side? Do you believe you could benefit from an expansion of your level of self-awareness? If you do not believe this, than it probably isn’t possible. Don’t lie to yourself about what you believe. If you simply feel perplexed or confused, acknowledge that is where you are at right now. Welcome in all of your disillusioned parts to participate in this experiment in accessing the rest of your brain, the part that hasn’t been available to help for all of these years.

Quiet the mind of its perpetual chatter. Relax so you may learn how to listen to what you already know inside. You may need to take some time alone to access these new caring voices. They are hard to hear if the rest of your life is in chaos. Trust in your inner wisdom to show you what steps you need to take to open previously closed doors and learn why you are not open to love now.

intuition trust your hunches

Intuition is an essential tool to guide you towards a healthier sense of yourself and what you need to do next to attract what you want into your life.