I have been trying to write this article for several weeks now, which in and of itself is not really a problem. What has been tying me in guilty knots is that I had set myself a publishing schedule and was not sticking to it. I kept putting it off because I was too tired or more interested in painting or whatever. I have procrastifaffed left, right and centre. I called myself lazy. This guilt is silly because I am not being paid for these posts, and nothing happens if I don’t post on schedule. And yet, I have been berating myself for not publishing when I told myself I…
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Caught in the hallway
I mentioned in my empty nesters post that I felt like I was starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel between the phases of life … just a crack of light. That space in the middle there is the liminal space. A place of transition where you don’t sit comfortably in either the young or the old categories. The word liminal means threshold, it comes from the Latin word limen. The idea is that you are standing on the threshold of something new and waiting to be let in. Waiting for beginnings and endings — it’s a weird place to be. Sometimes it feels chaotic and uncomfortable like…
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Why is curiosity so important?
In this month’s newsletter I wrote about curiosity and cats… here’s a sneak peek… We are born curious, have you ever witnessed a baby stare in wonder as they discover they have fingers and toes? Or a toddler taste things, stick their fingers in things or ask interminable questions? Kids are curious! The problem is that throughout our school careers answers are more acceptable than questions, so curiosity is slowly but surely drummed out of us. Big businesses tell us to stop thinking and focus on revenue. Not very inspiring is it? Curiosity is chaotic and unpredictable, and this is not at all welcome in a world that likes order…
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We’re empty nesters!
“Mum!” “Yeah mate?” “My offer was accepted on the apartment!” Those were the words that signalled the imminent and gentle flight of my oldest chick from the proverbial nest towards the end of 2022. The youngest chick had flown a couple of months earlier with little warning. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was a possibility at some point, but one afternoon he announced that he was going to be living in his father’s granny flat from here out, and I was happy for him! You see both lads had been shuttling between our place and their father’s place ever since we separated, spending alternate weeks with each. But…
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Slow down, you move too fast!
My word for 2023 is SLOW! Which is kind of odd, because I like to drive fast. Ha! I chose slow because it feels like the natural next step after last year’s word – Presence – where I discovered that presence is simply paying attention. The thing is though, I cannot pay attention if I don’t slow down and perhaps even stop from time to time; life is going by at warp speed, and I want to see if I can put on the brakes a little. My choice was reinforced towards the end of last year when my physio guy kept telling me to slow down with my weight…
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Did I manage to stay present? – 2022 in review
Ooof! Well, that one flew past quickly! There were a couple of months there in the middle that dragged, but for the most part, I blinked a couple of times and 2022 was over. So here I am with a little wrap up of some of the highlights and my final thoughts on my word of the year – Presence. In a nutshell: I feel like I am finally coming out of that weird liminal space between the first half of life and the second half of life and starting to feel my way on this new landscape. There’s lots of new ground to explore in the coming years, and…
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Nine quotes about presence that made me think this year
I haven’t written as much about presence this year as I had hoped, but I have been focussing on presence and living it, which has meant putting certain projects aside and pausing to look around more than once in a blue moon. Spending time with the people I love and being completely present there too. Unfortunately, that also meant less writing for a little while. I’ll be pulling together a wrap up article for the year’s happenings shortly, but before I do that, I wanted to share a few of the quotes I came across in my reading this year that directly related to being present or made me think…
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The story of Welly the Combat cat
This year’s Remembrance Day post takes us on a journey to Ukraine and the story of Welly who features in my recently completed mixed media piece pictured below. A person I am close to was in Ukraine recently doing some consulting work and travelling around with a group to get a picture of what was happening on the ground. They were touring a bombed residential area on the outskirts of Kyiv when a little furball came wandering out of the rubble of a recently destroyed building. The little mite meowed piteously and walked straight up to one of the soldiers who promptly picked it up. He figured out it was a…
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You got know when to fold ’em
Let me tell you a little story. For a couple of months now I have been trying to write a piece about making time for presence and cultivating my mind garden. Let me tell you…it has been a struggle! I could not find a way to say what I wanted to say no matter how many times I rewrote and rearranged the words, and then life gave me other stuff to focus on. It got to the point where I dreaded opening the document because I thought I was failing at doing something I had committed myself to do. It also stopped me writing anything else for my blogs because…
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Presence – my word for 2022
To say that 2021 didn’t go as planned is an understatement, and I’m definitely not Robinson Crusoe in that respect. I don’t think there’s a person on the planet that can say everything went as they hoped it would last year. My word for the past couple of the years was Consistency (2020, 2021), and I discovered that there is a point in a pandemic, when one is in lockdown, that consistency can become somewhat of an obsession around keeping routines and the like in order to feel like everything is under control, when they plainly are not. But on the flip side, having habits to rely on certainly did…
