Ever You Dreamed Of / A New Dimension to a Meaningful Life / School Calendar

Prayers
  really are magical.
I Pray
that you are receiving that magic,
and that your Life
is in a place of
contentment.

Prayer
will relax the mind,
and provide more insight,
more compassion
and more positive intentions.

 To find answers
for the unending problems in Life,
look in the Bible. 
The Holy Word of God
uses thoughtful stories and illustrations
from people in History,
to show our need
for Faith.
.
It guides us
through the essential questions
in Life,
and leads to reasonable and compelling
conclusions.

 You 
can Live your Life
a changed Person,
and Live a Truly
Great experience.

Your Precious Life
can
become the most Beautiful and moving 
ever you Dreamed of.

Spend a few moments
touring
around the Beautiful and Creative
Mind
you have been so Blessed with.

Feel
the Beat
of your own Sacred Heart,
as your eyes
walk around the ruins
of the physical World
inherited
by greed, and hatred
and sin.

Prayer
will transport you
to another Time
and place.

Love,
and Love alone,
will move you
to a Sacred Place
in your Heart.
.
Your Love
will play the most integral part
in Life.

Giving Love,
is as critical
as receiving it
in our quest for Happiness.

Your Love
will lift your Spirit
above all things
ever found.
.
Love
is the Masterpiece 
of God’s Creation,
in an ageless place
of Peace and reflection.
.
The Love in your
Heart,
is what Mankind
is capable of doing 
for others.
And it is
beyond description.

Prayer
is an astonishing Place,
that touches the Heart,
where your Dreams
are Real
and you discover
the Reality of
Love.

There is a Dream,
that is you.
And you
can Dream it.
.
The material World
can make it vanish.
It is so fragile,
that it may not
survive.

“What we do in Life,
echoes in Eternity.”
– Maximus Meridius

With chaos happening
all around,
we need relaxing, meditative 
Prayer.
Giving the Spiritual Dimension
in our Time,
makes Life even more special
and relevant.

Our moment with God
brings the feeling of warmth,
Love
and Peace.

As we reminisce
about the Happy moments
we have had,
and Thank God for having them,
 we bring them Alive
again.

Our childhood memories
were the Happiest time
of Life.

Go back
to these days.

Become
a Child again.
.
Nothing compares
to the Joy of being
a Child
of God.

Goodnight.

A New Dimension to a Meaningful Life

Studies suggest that appreciating beauty in the everyday may be just as powerful as a sense of overarching purpose.

• By Joshua Hicks, Frank Martela on April 15, 2022
  click here to read more
  

Credit: Westend61/Getty Images

When we think about lives filled with meaning, we often focus on people whose grand contributions benefited humanity. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela surely felt they had a worthwhile Life. But how about us ordinary people, toiling away in a typical existence?

Many scholars agree that a subjectively meaningful existence often boils down to three factors: the feeling that one’s life is coherent and “makes sense,” the possession of clear and satisfying long-term goals and the belief that one’s Life matters in the grand scheme of things. Psychologists call these three things coherence, purpose and existential mattering.

But we believe there is another element to consider. Think about the first butterfly you stop to admire after a long winter or imagine the scenery atop a hill after a fresh hike. Sometimes existence delivers us small moments of beauty. When people are open to appreciating such experiences, these moments may enhance how they view their life. We call this element experiential appreciation. The phenomenon reflects the feeling of a deep connection to events as they transpire and the ability to extract value from that link. It represents the detection of and admiration for Life’s inherent Beauty.

We recently set out to better understand this form of appreciation in a series of studies, published in Nature Human Behaviour, that involved more than 3,000 participants. Across these studies, we were interested in whether experiential appreciation was related to a person’s sense of meaning even when we accounted for the effects of the classic trio of coherence, purpose and existential mattering. If so, experiential appreciation could be a unique contributor to meaningfulness and not simply a product of these other variables.

As an initial test of our idea, during the early stages of the COVID pandemic, we had participants rate their endorsement of different coping strategies to relieve their stress. We found that people who managed stress by focusing on their appreciation for Life’s Beauty also reported experiencing Life as highly meaningful.

In the next study, we asked participants to rate the extent to which they agreed with various statements, such as “I have a great appreciation for the beauty of life” and “I appreciate a wide variety of experiences,” as well as other statements that related to coherence, purpose, existential mattering and a general sense of meaning in life.

Our results showed that the more people indicated that they were “appreciating life” and its many experiences, the more they felt their existence was valuable. In fact, these two elements related strongly to each other even when we controlled for other aspects of a meaningful life. In subsequent studies, we further explored the connection between these concepts. For example, we found that participants asked to recall the most meaningful event of the past week generally reported high experiential appreciation in those moments.

Finally, we conducted a series of experiments in which we gave people specific tasks and, once more, asked them to report how strongly they identified with statements linked to purpose, mattering, et cetera.

In one case, we found that participants who watched an awe-inspiring video, such as the opening sequence of the BBC documentary Planet Earth, reported having a greater sense of experiential appreciation and meaning in life, compared with participants who watched more neutral videos, such as an instructional woodworking video.

Similarly, participants who wrote about a recent experience for which they were grateful had a greater sense of meaning and experiential appreciation afterward when compared with participants who simply wrote about a common place they had visited in the past week.

The results confirmed our original theory: appreciating small things can make Life feel more meaningful. But applying that insight can be difficult. Our modern, fast-paced, project-oriented lifestyles fill the day with targets and goals. We are on the go, and we attempt to maximize output both at work and at leisure. This focus on future outcomes makes it all too easy to miss what is happening right now. Yet Life happens in the present moment. We should slow down, let Life surprise us and embrace the significance in the everyday.

As former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in 1950, “We live in a wonderful world…. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about for Mind Matters? Please send suggestions to Scientific American’s Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas at pitchmindmatters@gmail.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Joshua Hicks studies the experience of meaning in life, authenticity and the true self. He is currently a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University. He received his Ph.D. in personality and social psychology at the University of Missouri.

Frank Martela is a researcher specializing in both the psychology and philosophy of well-being and meaning in life. He is currently a university lecturer at Aalto University in Finland. He is the author of A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence (Harper Design, 2020). He received a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Helsinki in Finland and a Ph.D. in organizational research at Aalto University.

Recent Articles by Frank Martela

• Be Yourself–Everyone Else Is Taken
• Exercise, Eat Well, Help Others: Altruism’s Surprisingly Strong Health Impact
• Finland Is the Happiest Country in the World, and Finns Aren’t Happy about It

Your Childhood
lies through
your Memory,
attitude
and Imagination.

Knowledge is power
and LIFE.

School Calendar

2022-23
Please check back regularly
for any amendments that may occur.

First Semester
Sept. 6 – December 16   2022

Sept. 6 (TUESDAY)               First Day of First Semester
Oct. 10 (Monday)                   Columbus Day Holiday
Nov. 21 – 25                           Fall Break (and Thanksgiving)
Dec. 16                                   Last Day of Fall Semester

Second Semester

Jan. 3 (TUESDAY)                 Second Semester Begins
Jan. 16  (Monday)                  Dr. Martin L. King Holiday
Feb. 20  (Monday)                  Presidents’ Day Holiday
Mar. 13 – 17                           Spring Break Holiday
April 7 & 10                           Good Friday and Easter Monday Holidays
May 26                                    Last Day of Spring Semester

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and provided for educational purposes.

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– Section 107 – Copyright Act 1976,
allowance is made for “fair use”
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Fair use is permitted by copyright statute.

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© Copyright 1995-2023
The Anderson Private School.

“He who opens a school door,
closes a prison.“
– Victor Hugo

I wish you all
 Peace.

Hang on
to your Faith.
You will get there.

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