Finding joy in the everyday

Depression is more than just feeling sad —    it is a serious condition which makes coping with day-to-day  living  very hard and leaves you feeling down most of the time. Depression is REAL and it can lead to devastating results. When someone comes to you and tells you that they are feeling depressed LISTEN and don’t trivialise them.  Depression should never be treated flippantly, always take what you hear seriously.  Sadly not that long ago a blogger wrote a post and linked to Facebook about depression and provided very poor advice, which included “kick out self-pity quickly”. It was clear that this blogger didn’t understand depression and had never been around someone with depression. Someone wrote in the comments that they were feeling very suicidal that day. Someone else provided the emergency US suicide phone number. The blogger deleted it. I was angry as this was a call for help and the blogger treated it with distain. Here ...

We all need a hug from time to time!   Source When my children were growing up I wanting to teach them the importances of caring for others, being kind and generous, reaching out to help, showing compassion. To learn gentleness in a world that doesn’t value gentleness. My youngest was always a very caring child so it wasn’t difficult to teach him these  values.   However I noticed that as he got older he would take on the problems of others and want to solve them. This meant he carried the weight of other people’s problems on his shoulders when he didn’t have the skills or strength to do so.  You cannot do this for very long before it starts to having a major impact upon your health.    Whilst I still think it is important to teach children these things, it is also very important to watch out for signs in those children and young adults who “care too much” (and as someone  described  to me "the recusers").  Its important for them to...