Better shared or kept in my head?

Late last year I won a gift card in an online auction. It was for some hypnosis sessions.   They were pretty cool, very relaxing and they are helping me to lose some weight and break the cycle of fat, get thin, get fat, get thin.  I get to listen to CDs each day and I settled down yesterday evening to do that. "small person, I need 30 mins of peace to listen to my tapes. Got it?"  "Yes mom!"  No going out, no one comes in...got it?  "Yes mom"

15 mins later as I drift into relaxation ..."mom, can my friend come in to play? Mom! Mom! Mom, can you hear me? Can my friend come into to play? Mom, I'm talking to you".  Hmmm

Then stomp stomp stomp up the stairs, I hear two small boys open my office door..."mom, can my friend come in?"  I say nothing...so they proceed to tickle my feet to get me to wake up.  What's the point eh?  Maybe relaxation is for other people. Cd on Pause, life back on Play.

It's been an exhausting long long week, working 12 hours a day and whilst that is horrible there is another layer to it that made it nasty.  There were no emergencies, no one was trapped in a mine shaft, no one had 46 minutes of air left...it was just that a volume of work was some how cranked to very loud. I'm reminded of that story about the frog in a pot.  If you drop it in boiling water it will notice that for sure. If you put it in cold water and warm it slowly it doesn't notice it for a long long time. I think I am the frog in that pot and the water got my attention. It's a big pot and there are lots of us in it. I worry that frog soup is the future at work.  I did some stuff to turn the heat down for me and frogs around me but weekends do see me puzzling how to break this cycle...as you are readling now.

Before my live hypno session the hypno lady asked a question from nowhere that is rattling around in my head..."do you count summers?".  " sorry I don't understand what you mean" "do you count summers, how many more summers you might have on earth? Do you understand how little time there is in a lifetime? If you understand that you will focus on enjoying life, enjoying the summers. If you don't focus on that, and live busy, just doing the everyday and you miss an opportunity to enjoy life to the full"...do I count summers?  Yes, sort of I guess. For 20 years I have known that the pursuit of wealth and status will not bring me happiness. What brings me happiness is the joy in a single day, that adds up to a joyful week that adds up to a joyful month, you get the idea.

I have tried to articulate this to people for years to help them live life to the full.  I struggle to articulate it in a way that they can see past their concern that I am a anti establishment anarchist hippy...I'm not, I'm a hardworking person whose priorities include " me and mine" in equal or greater measure to paid work.  I guess it's none of my business how other people choose to live their lives  but having "got it" 20 years ago I feel compelled to pay that knowledge forward. Live your life, have fun. Sit in the sun and do nothing regularly.

So for today's joy small person and I are off to Niagara to ride water slides...not down the Falls.  Then off to the botanical garden to buy seeds for the season ahead. Happy days

Happy days to all
Namaste

8,000 and counting

We walked to the park today and I sat in the sun for an hour as small person played soccer.  Nothing too remarkable in that, other than that yesterday we woke up to an inch of snow and he had to do his egg hunting in a parka.  He came in half way to get gloves as it was so cold. Today, no snow anywhere, sun out, sun glasses on.  Energized by that burst of vitimin D I just popped into Home Depot to get some spring colour but sadly nothing to buy.  A few more weeks before a pansy or primrose appears.

It was strangely nostalgic to be looking for spring plants. Having spent the first 16 years of my working life in horticulture Easter has pretty much been the colourful, busy start to the season. But that was an ocean away as here everything is still sleeping, ready to wake up in a few weeks for 3 days of Spring before going turbo into Summer.  But still, the environment was reassuring.  I reminisced about how much less stressful life was when I was managing a garden centre. But nostalgia isn't real, those days were no less stressful if I'm honest, it was just that I had other problems to solve back then.

I have just announced to my husband that "I am ****ing sick of problem solving at work.  Why is everything so bloody complicated?"  And as I compare now to 25 years ago I can see the same patterns.  Maybe that's what drew me to Home Depot, maybe I was looking for a familiar less complicated environment?  Back then I had mountains of work to do, limited people to do that work, new stuff arriving all of the time and the challenge was to work out what would die first (plants that is not people, although...).  The days were long, days off were spent at work, or were frowned upon as Laziness.  So roll forward 25 years, same jigsaw pieces, new stuff arriving, not enough people, nothing dying persay but having to choose what to do and, most days, what not to do.

A year ago I was micro stressing that my inbox was approaching 2000 emails, most read but many unactioned.  Last week my inbox hit 8000 emails, around 80 unread, the rest read and waiting for someone to do something.  Maybe these emails are the Pansy's and primroses, fresh and eager when they arrive then gradually they die away, unloved, untended as I frantically squirt water at a fire elsewhere.  What does any of this tell me?  It tells me that I am drawn to jobs that cannot be fully completed; where the daily chore is not mostly doing the work, but is mostly arranging the work into piles and then doing maybe 3 key things each day.  It tells me that whatever hours I put in there will always be a mountain more to do.

So as I sat in the sun, in Canada...in Canada for goodness sake!...most days I don't even recognize tht I am here.  Life in conference calls has no sense of presence.  I sat in the sun and vowed that enough is enough.  I don't want to spend every night and weekend on email.  I do want to have the energy to drag my son away from the iPad, I want to live outdoors, feel the sun everyday, not just at weekends. I am reclaiming my life from that side of my personality that works non stop.  I am a part timer and from now on I am going to deliver that dream.  Let battle commence.