Thanks to Michael Neill’s The Space Within for this…
A thought about thoughts
Waking up
Bad news: my car is sick.
Good news: the garage is within jogging distance. So after dropping it off at half seven this morning I got the chance to jog back home along the Railway Walk – a leafy corridor chugging along behind housing estates, factories, and under the stuttering stop-go lanes of the M1.
What a treat it was to be reminded how the world looks and smells early in the morning, before traffic smells dull its sharpness and our own busy-ness descends like a veil to cut us off from what is all around.
The ripe scent of honeysuckle tangled amongst the trees and shrubs. A pair of bright blackbirds hopping away from me, as light as their own feathers. Splatters of pigeon poo decorating the leaves of nettle beds. Miniature scaredolls watching me from the top of their bamboo sticks in the allotments.
Even a passing cyclist left behind a delicate scent of shower gel, shampoo and clean skin.
For some distance I followed a dog walker. His head was bent over a phone the whole time. He noticed none of it I assume, since my puffing appearance seemed to shock him.
How many mornings is that me? Making to do lists in my head the moment I wake up. Running through the conversations I need to have. Snapping on the chattering radio which drowns out the birdsong in my garden. Working out what I’ll do when. Firing up the laptop to check emails and see on Facebook and Twitter what everyone I know is saying, doing and thinking about.
How many mornings is it you?
This morning on Facebook, before I headed out to the garage, I saw one friend had posted a picture of a journal she’s bought (thanks Heidi). The front cover reads ‘Let’s Go On An Adventure’.
Beneath it another friend wrote: “It’s called waking up every morning.”
I just have.
Do what you can
Doing what we can: sharing with you a story I found incredibly moving. It’s a reminder of how we never know what difference a small gesture or word might make in someone else’s life.
Share the (good) news
Readers of Best Year will know that I have a particular beef with my former colleagues working in journalism. When did the idea of ‘news’ get hi-jacked to mean only a certain sort of news: the bad, the disastrous and the downright ugly? And how interesting it might have been to monitor the effect that a different news agenda during the few weeks of the Olympics had on our public mood. Of course bad things were still happening in the world, yet the headlines that greeted us every morning were about people achieving their dreams; about success and co-operation and friendliness and belief. In which frame of mind I wonder – despair and cynicism or joy in other’s success and the potential of individuals to make their dreams come true – are we more able to address the bad stuff and deal with the disastrous?
With which preamble my mission today is to deliver one activity I suggest in the book, to share and spread good news rather than bad, and to ask you to pass it on. It may not banish the autumn fog and rain that we’re looking out on at the moment, but perhaps it will light a small warm glow inside that will remind you that sometimes it takes very little to turn a bad news day into a good one. And very little to make a big difference in people’s lives.
Here it is, a short video showing how something as insignificant as a plastic bottle is changing lives. Enjoy!
When Scottie met Rottie
When Scottie met Rottie: My morning jog along the canal always yields some lovely cameos and today was no exception: a huge Rottweiler sauntering along with her owner, when along bounces a small white Highland Terrier.
The Scottie did what every self-respecting male dog would do on a peaceful sunny morning: went straight for the Rottie’s hindquarters, wholly undetterred by the difference in size, and, more critically, height.
I’d passed them too quickly to see what happened next, but I couldn’t help thinking what a great lesson that short scene was in being yourself. There was only one thing on the little dog’s mind and it had nothing to do with him being too short or too long-haired or the wrong breed or colour.
If a tiny little dog is able to set its sights so high, happy inside its own skin, why can’t we?
Finding your North Star
Liking these 20 questions to ask yourself from Martha Beck, author of Finding your North Star. Not a bad list to check in with yourself on from time to time
http://www.oprah.com/shiftyourlife/questions-that-could-change-your-life
Compassion at work
Just wanted to share this thought-provoking blogpost on bringing compassion to the toughest situations in your life. Well worth reading and thinking about if something’s challenging you right now xx
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/compassion-workplace_b_1670…
Loving what is
I’ve been using Byron Katie’s ideas in my workshops for a few years. But this is one of the best overviews I’ve come across: what she said…. http://exmoorjane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/…/what-katie-said.html
Switching to ‘receive’
As those of you who are reading the book know, one of the sections is on ‘receiving’ and how hard we find it. Reading this post from two people who have been on both the giving and receiving end may help to make it easier next time….
The Great Rift
I’ve changed sides. It was always Meryl but for a long time now it’s been Robert. Let me explain.
There’s a scene in Out of Africa where Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep, and Denys Finch Hatton, played by Robert Redford, discover their dealbreaker.
They are in love; a beautiful love story based on their shared passion for conversation, music, literature, the way they both have of demanding so much from life, and above all the beauty of Africa’s vast spaces.
And yet, in the midst of all this, Denys sometimes vanishes from Karen’s ‘farm in Africa’ for days on end.
His absence gnaws away at her somehow. “When you go away…you don’t always go on safari do you? You just want to be away.”
“It’s not meant to hurt you.”
“It does.”
How I used to resent his obstinacy (I called it selfishness). His inability to accede to Karen’s need for someone to be physically THERE. His belief that you might love someone and still sometimes love your own company more.
Those things were all that were standing in the way of the happy ending I craved.
I watched Out of Africa again recently and fell back in love with it myself: with its breath-taking shots of the Great Rift Valley, the spare truth of the script – and, finally, the complexity of the grown up relationships within it.
Now I’ve reached an age neither of them attained, I understand the extent to which, actually, Denys knows Karen better than she knows herself and speaks for them both when he defends his disappearances: “I don’t want to live someone else’s idea of how to live. Don’t ask me to do that. I don’t want to find out one day that I’m at the end of someone else’s life.”
I see he speaks for me, and for many of us in knowing the importance of separation in order to come home to oneself; the times of stillness and empty spaces (that are anything but) that are so essential to our well-being.
Out of Africa is not one love story but many it turns out.
And one of those stories is about self-love: the importance of knowing ourselves well enough to honour our own needs, even when that means disappointing someone else.
It was in Africa that I discovered, for the first time, how essential to me are the quiet times; the times of meditation, escape, stillness, coming home to me.
For five months, as 50 of us rumbled through the continent in two Bedford trucks, skin pressed against each other, knees around our ears because the provisions we carried took up more space than us, my way of coping was to turn my back and, for hours, stare out at the landscapes we were passing through.
I remember writing in my journal at the time how astonishing it was to discover my huge capacity for alone time. And how, when I didn’t have it, even Africa’s vibrant colours dulled along with the edges of my own nature and capacity to enjoy what we were doing.
I think of Karen Blixen on her farm, working ever harder to tame the elements, to control nature and other people. To put gloves on her Kikuyu house servants, reroute the river, and battle the voices of disapproval coming from Happy Valley with all its codes and norms.
In the end those things can be infinitely more dangerous to us than the wildness that lay beyond the farm. The roar that threatens most isn’t the lions on the plain but the noise in our heads when we live according to others’ rules.
My wish for all of us this week is the courage to honour our needs, and sufficient space – whether we find it in the Great Rift Valley or the contours of our own quiet minds – to recognise what those are.
Have the best year of your life 