This morning the air is filled with the scent of grass and the sound of birdsong. A blue sky is welcoming the day, and promising warmth soon.
Alt text tells me this week’s photo is a road with words painted on it. It is indeed and it is a photo of what I call the country road where the words SLOW/ARAF are painted. I walked to this area yesterday to take a photo for today’s blog, but the words were very faded so I am using a photo which I think I took during my lockdown walks. Slow is a timely reminder for me right now.
Having talked recently about how important it is to balance self-care and to notice what you need, it almost surprised me that I wasn’t listening to myself. (I say ‘almost’ because I definitely heard the whisper of, you need a couple of early nights!And instead of acknowledging the whisper I chose to ignore it. So my thinking went a bit like this… Feeling a bit more tired than usual? Push on through. Ocular migraine? Have some water and then carry on computing. Unmotivated to prepare dinner from scratch? Bung something in the oven and add peas, and oh yes, carrots because that’ll ramp it up towards the five a day.
And the message from the universe came when said carrots were getting peeled. And I was rushing because I just wanted it done because then I could…uh oh! I temporarily mistook my left index finger for a carrot and managed to potato peel its tip. The fact it was THAT finger made me feel a bit wobbly so after I had rinsed it and hidden it under some firmly gripped kitchen roll, I chopped the carrots nice and small so they would be done in the same time as the peas, and then got Kath to pop a plaster on it to seal it back down so I wouldn’t see it. (THAT finger being the finger I once had an ‘axecident’ with.)
In the morning it looked a little sad when I removed the plaster, but I showered and nothing much happened except it was a little sore. Magic healing, I thought until I hit it on the basin when cleaning my teeth. And then the world went a little narrower than usual and much blacker.
Thank goodness for a wife who bounces out of bed on her only lie-in day, a local minor injuries unit and the kind and gentle nurse who helped me clean it up, applied steri-strips, popped a bandage over it, and told me I wasn’t making a fuss.
So this week I will be re-establishing the joy of focusing on one thing at a time. I will also be remembering to pause for stillness when I can hear that I am carrying a whole conversation of thoughts around in my head. I will be taking time to think about what needs setting down, and what it is that I need to pay attention to. And for an easy and quick reminder, I will be binning all the shoulds. They are definitely not helpful with their not good enough, critical tone. I will instead be thinking about my coulds and exploring their potential benefits and how they match with my wants rather than giving myself a hard time.
And if you see me peeling carrots in the future you will probably notice that I am intentionally quite mindful about it. Here’s to the art of zen peeling and listening to what we need.
I do of course have times when I truly revel in the way my mind can ask lots of questions and go off at different tangents in response to each one. So for this week’s poem I am choosing to share again a one that I wrote after tidying my desk one evening. During the day I had been coaching and had also reviewed a list of coaching questions. I wanted to organise my workspace and spend some time with my own creative writing to unwind. One of the questions on the papers I was filing away was: ‘What would you like to achieve?’ This question continued to echo in my head after my desk was clear so I used it as the title and set to writing…
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACHIEVE?
A gold medal pings into my mind as the question lands between us in the silence. But I can’t say gold medal because I don’t know exactly what I want it for. My mind pictures me standing there at the award ceremony, bowing my head forward a little in readiness for the presentation. The ribbon brushes my hair, and I feel the warmth of the fingers of the woman transferring the medal as her hands knock against my ears. My head is cumbersome. People with cumbersome heads shouldn’t be getting medals. The applause suddenly feels false, and I didn’t even hear the start of it. I need to hear the beginning of the congratulatory clap. I need to be in the moment. I change my wish. I want a gold medal that fits easily over my head. No, I know what I want… I want a head that fits through the gap in a medal ribbon without causing a kerfuffle for the person handling the ceremony. I want it all to look flawless so everyone remembers me standing on that podium being given a medal. Given, that’s an interesting word. Medals are won not given. Not in a tombola, one in a hundred chance kind of way. You earn a medal by setting a goal and working on it. Over and over again until you are the best you can be. There’s that question again, What would you like to achieve?
Sue Finch 