About
Welcome to Ripples of Improvement – a blog about human connection.
My name is Cathy and I am interested in how we interact with others. This blog is my way of sharing information about this broad topic. The topic of how we interact with others covers so many things:
- How we think.
- How we treat, and relate, to ourselves.
- Self improvement.
- Psychology.
- Brain science into senses and emotions.
- How we react to, and around, our friends.
- Family dynamics, including parenting, dealing with extended family, and sibling relationships.
- Romantic relationships.
- How we work with others, whether that is at a paid job, a volunteer organization, or even your neighbors.
- How we relate to the environment and how others treat it.
- Teaching and teachers.
- Networking, and even interviewing.
- Giving gifts and celebrating events such as birthdays, engagements, weddings, and new babies.
Ripples of Improvement covers all of these topics and more. I look at these topics from a view point of curiosity, looking to dig out the interesting tidbits and facts that tell us about ourselves.
How This Is Reflected In The Name Ripples of Improvement
No one lives in a vacuum. You will interact with people at some point, probably every day. How you carry yourself and interact with others can be the difference between a good day and a bad day, or a strengthened relationship and a strained one. As we work on our relationships and strive to be better – better communicators, better parents, better lovers, better friends, better people – we affect the world around us. “Ripples of Improvement” is a metaphor for all of these experiences.
Everyone knows that when you drop an object into a still body of water, you create ripples. You can compare life to the still body of water, and our actions to the object dropped. The larger the object, the stronger the ripples, and the farther they will travel. Similarly, the more concerted the effort, the farther reaching the effect and implications.
Conversely, there is a concept called “Mind Like Water.” The idea is our minds are a body of water. Stress, troubling thoughts, powerful emotions, and similar experiences cause the body of water to be anything but still. Mind Like Water is then letting go of the stress and other troubles and bringing your mind back to a sense of peace and calm – like a still body of water.
I like both of these concepts very much and work to use both of them often. While this seems at odds, I feel the two concepts complement each other beautifully. For me, the idea of “Ripples of Improvement” is a way to combine these concepts into one: Strive to have a calm, still mind, but if ripples do intrude, do your best to make sure they are ripples of improvement, not ripples of turbulence.
