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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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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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…
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Same Storm, Different Boat
Looking back at 2020 and my word for 2021 2020 was a very odd year all around. To put it mildly! I had chosen Consistency as my word for the year, and I intended to put solid effort into building habits and working towards being where I wanted to be health-wise before my milestone birthday at the end of 2020. That didn’t really happen. Derailments occurred and habits came and went as stress levels ebbed and flowed. I didn’t get to where I wanted to be, but I did make a little progress, so cannot claim complete failure! And so, consistency will continue to be my word for this year,…
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How consistency is helping with COVID-19 anxiety
Do it again and again. Consistency makes the rain drops to create holes in the rock. Whatever is difficult can be done easily with regular attendance, attention and action. Israelmore Ayivor We’ve just launched into the eighth month of what has been one of the more interesting years in modern history. It’s time for an update on how my word of the year Consistency has been helping. As with most people I can confidently say that this year looks nothing like I expected it to. I started working from home at the end of March and the change threw me for a little while. I failed to create new routines…
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Wondering about Consistency
Farewell 2019… hello 2020! 2019 was a mixed bag of both great and not so great. the great: I got married in June, went through a very positive team shift at work, my oldest son graduated from uni, my youngest son blitzed his first year at uni, several visits with my family, finally being able to walk more than a few metres without pain (my massage therapist is a magician). the not so great: I said farewell to my husband for another six months or so, several injuries that impacted my training, a nasty cold/flu that hung around for months, and as I write this my country is on fire…
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Wondering …
It has been a somewhat crazy start to the year and I have been feeling overcooked and unable to see or feel wonder on a scale that I thought mattered. Tired to the point of not caring any more. There have definitely been very few a-ha moments! Work has been nuts and I had been trying to take leave since about September last year, but it never quite happened. So as soon as the dust settled in February I checked out for a couple of weeks and took myself off to the South Coast. The seaside has always been soothing for me, and I hoped it would work its magic…
