Each year I select a word or phrase to guide me through the year and provide a focus for growth. This year’s word is SAGEING. I first read this term in a comment on Elizabeth Gilbert’s newsletter where the commenter described it as the act of growing older and wiser, i.e. becoming sage-like. I hadn’t heard the word before, but it would not let me go, so I have known since the middle of last year what this year’s word would be! I did a little digging and found a couple of organisations with this exact focus to help me understand a little more. According to Sage-ing International, sageing is…
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6 things I learned about going slower
When I slow down, I can dive deeper—and that’s how I prefer to live. — Cait Flanders In 2023 my word for the year was SLOW. If you’re new to my blog, you can catch up with the posts throughout the year about my journey here. To summarise what I learned before I share a few of my favourite quotes collected throughout the year, here are a few takeaways that have found permanent homes in my mind: Slow living is, above all, an act of self-preservation and self-compassion. If you wish to slow down and are looking for some more practical suggestions, Courtney Carver provides a fantastic list to kick-start…
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Fast or Slow? You get to choose!
This year, I have been exploring what it means to wrap a philosophy of slowness around my life. I haven’t posted about it as much as I had expected, but that’s ok! The focus continues, and I am here to update you now. The concept that has been messing with my head for the last six months is that some things cannot be slowed down. I mistakenly and very naïvely thought everything could be slowed down to a more manageable pace. Wrong. Not everything can be slow, but conversely, not everything has to be fast. Certain things fall into either end of the spectrum, and there is a whole range…
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The slow and gentle work of love
I came across this quote from Maria Popova in someone else’s newsletter a couple of weeks ago (I wish I had noted who it was.) and wanted to share it with you. “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.” — Maria Popova. What a tender…
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Does Slow equal Lazy?
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…
