This week I am including some juicy bits and pieces to keep your mind trained on expanding, staying creative and getting clarity on who you could BE. Below is a photo of Marley dashing through ancient samurai gardens in Japan. She was that age where EVERYTHING reported was questioned ‘Why’. It’s so easy to get annoyed with kids and their frequent querying, and just want everyone to ‘get on with it’. But it’s a quality I hope she never loses, and it keeps me on my game to never stop asking why either.
I love this quote by Kate Moss for Dazed and Confused Mag in 1999. “My mum used to say to me ‘you can’t have fun all the time’ and I used to say ‘why not?’ Why the fuck can’t I have fun all the time?”. A perfectly posed ‘Why’ question indeed.
This week I am FASCINATED by
– a trend report on Dolmio, an Aussie pasta brand that found that 38% of households interviewed felt there was no way to limit tech use during family dinners, and that a huge 63% of all arguments over dinner were related to technology. So they invented a Pepper Hacker, which has a disguised wifi blocker in response to unprecedented desire for this invention. Google Wifi also launched in Oct 2016 a ‘family pause’ switch.
– the incredible impact simply having my phone on continual silent has created. I could not have interpreted how much I was badgered by my phone, how interrupted and distracted I was, until I wasn’t. I have no notifications on my phone even turned on, just calls and texts and yet STILL it was constantly interfering. So I now just check it when I want to check it. It’s incredibly freeing. Of course I initially battled the questions of my own unreasonable mind ‘but what if it’s an emergency’. So I sat and thought about the entire of 2017 and how many actual emergencies were delivered to me through my mobile. The answer was none. So that was that.
What I am READING
– I’ve just completed The Art Of Learning by Joshua Waitzkin. Holy shit. – I’ve started We Are All Stardust; Conversations with Steven Klein – I’m loving it- I’m still and likely will be for some time reading Tools Of Titans by Tim Ferris. My 100% recommendation is read this on a Kindle for ease of jumping around, as that is exactly how the book was intended.
What I am COOKING
School went back today. Oh dear god the battles of the lunch boxes of the tiny people. I am now as I prepare my morning coffee also putting on a pot of short grain brown rice. A small lunch box of it for Marley, and for Arran and I to eat in the day with either gomasio, pickles, bonito flakes, seaweed sprinkly bits we bought in Japan, or all of the above. Get into making your own GOMASIO. We make it all the time and it goes on everything in our house including salads, cheese and pickle crackers, porridge with umemboshi and tamari and more…
What I am LOVING
As I do relish editing and refining my life, I did an audit of last year and really dived into work structure. My schedule. My calendar. I read this article in the midst of this audit too. My questions included…
– What was going well, what was hopeless…
– Where did joy lay. Was I following it…
– Where did I feel cramped and anxious. Where did I feel creative and expanded…
The answers, as always were revealing. And I instantly noticed one glaringly obvious thing. When I work a weekend (teaching meditation, Retreats, workshops etc), I would then frequently work the Mon – Fri before it and after it. So often I would be working away, albeit happily, for sometimes 16-18 days at a time. Fine once or twice every half year, but every month, not so much so.
So when I rescheduled my teaching schedule to host our Weekly Knowledge and Meditation Meetings on a Tuesday, I realised I now had Monday’s free. Perfect. So they’re now my thinking day. My day of do whatever I please. Swim, lunch, study, write things like this, work on my book, whatever. Maybe work, but 95% likely not work. The freedom is there. What’s the point of being self employed if you can’t work with what you want?
Already I am in love with this day. This Monday was deliriously delightful. I woke, normal morning of tongue scrape, drink 500 ml of water, stretch, meditate, read. Then a home brewed cup coffee of course! I drank it with cockatoos watching me in the garden. Then Arran and I dropped Marley to school, and then went for a swim at the beach. Ate breakfast on the sand at Avalon, sat in the sun. Returned home, went for a dip at the end of our street with the dog. Then I read on the lounge, wrote a little, pondered some things, had lunch with my Dad. Picked up Marley, swam, hung out and went to karate. It was the most pressure free day ever, as no one is around, and really there’s no social things to engage with. Even if you’re employed, I ask you this – is there some way in which you can look at your calendar, to carve out, even once a month, time when everyone else is under the pump? Where you can feel free, and unhindered and create space to just BE and not DO? My Monday now feels ludicrously luxurious. And it’s why I love it even more.
Keep inspired. Keep creative,
Jac x