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…
-
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
7 things I’ve learned from having cats in the first 7 weeks
It took more than four decades of desperate wanting, and now I finally have cats in the house! Let me tell you a little story about how that came to be before I dive into what I have learned about myself and cats in the short time we’ve had them. I was seven years old when I found out that I was horribly allergic to cats. My family was travelling and visiting friends on dad’s long service leave trip. One family we visited had some kind of fluffy cats that I immediately fell in love with, and equally rapidly started having severe asthma attacks, hives, and eyes that itched and…
-
Kindness – my word for 2018
This article was first posted on my Robertson Studios blog on 7 January 2018. Further kindness updates can be found here, but from now on I will be posting wordy articles and updates on this blog. “In a world where you can be anything, be kind” – Unknown That is the mantra that I will use to set my intention for the year ahead, and I have chosen KINDNESS to be my guiding word. Why did I choose kindness? It’s one of those serendipity things really. I started thinking about my hopes for this year in early December, collected a list of words that I felt fit the bill, and let it…
