Whilst watching The Office recently Creed said something about the final changes of the episode: “No matter how you get there, or where you end up, human beings have this miraculous gift to make that place home”. And this line really stayed with me.
Bodies glistening as a bead of sweat runs down a bulging bicep. Bums clad in lycra so tight it looks sprayed on. The deep thumping of bass music vibrating through your bones….
Welcome to the gym.
And as you glance over at the impossibly animated gym-goes you feel a twinge of remorse. You think to yourself ‘I could be that gym girl with a gravity-defying ponytail’. But then those awful memories from your school PE lessons come flashing back and hit you with a thud. You resign yourself to the fact you will never be one of these ‘fit people’ and you move on with your life.
It has been nearly a year since miss Rona started her commotion in our collection ocean and what a time. It has been simultaneously one of the most eventful and uneventful years of our life. Everything has changed and shifted, and the world is pretty unrecognisable to a couple of years ago. And yet, now we have settled into our new ‘normal’, each day melds into the last. It feels like a period that time forgot.
This year is kind of a landmark year in my life. I am no longer in my early twenties.
That’s right, no more all-nighters partying, no more eating just crisps for dinner and absolutely no more sleeping in my make-up.
I am officially an adult….. Holy shit!
I have something to confess….
I cannot stop watching Wife Swap! Although it may be pure shit, I just can’t stop myself. There is something so fascinating about peering into other peoples lives to see how differently they live. I suppose in reality that’s what made me love travel so much. Every time I got my visa stamped at a new border, it felt like I was reading a new chapter in an anthropological book.
People watching was my favourite. Watching what people ate, how they got around, how they socialized, even how they walked. It was fascinating.
BUT in these quarantined times the closest I get to travelling is a quick trip up the garden, so Wife Swap will have to do!
Everything in life is a decision. We decide what time we wake up, what to eat, what to wear. And this is all before we start our day. These kinds of decisions are the small stuff. Deciding between porridge and toast is no big deal. No sweat.
But the bigger decisions- that’s when it all gets a bit tricky. There is no back-up button in life, no re-dos. We have to live with the decisions we make. And this is what makes decision making so anxiety inducing. All these decisions can begin to feel like a bit of a shitter.
Since that fateful yoga lesson, I suppose a lot has changed in my life. I mean to start, I certainly do yoga more than once a week! Starting yoga has started me on a journey of truly looking after myself.
In essence, yoga was the starting step for me to treating myself like a temple. Living like this is a privilege, and I want to make sure I treat it as such.
Sometimes what our body and mind tells us can go against what we ‘want’. We want to run but our bodies will not carry us, we want to just carry on and pretend like everything is fine. I spent years of my life ignoring the what my body was telling me like it was an inconvenience. But as I have got older and I’ve looked back I realise it wasn’t my mind being annoying. It was my intuition trying to tell me something important.
I spent all this time thinking there was something wrong with the way I felt. But as I look back on these situations, I realise my body knew what was up, it was trying to protect me. So nowadays I don’t take my body aches, or emotions, as an inconvenience. I listen to them like a warning system, they are there to help me. Or bodies are always telling us something, sometimes we just need to open our ears and listen.
Sometimes we all go out shopping and return home with something you never set out to buy or even actually need. For some people it is trainers, for others the newest handbag, for me it is the humble indoor plant. It started with a tiny cactus with a beautiful pink flower on the top which sadly I killed within a couple of months. Undeterred I decided this untimely death would not be the end of my plant parentage.
Take 2 was a medium Echeveria Imbricata, also known as a blue rose, which I loved…too much. Water is a fantastic thing for plants; however, you can have too much of a good thing and plant 2 was loved to death.
So far, I had killed 2 ‘unkillable’ plants and my green fingers seemed to be more gangrenous than horticultural….
We don’t want to be seen failing. We want to be seen to be perfectly competent all the time. It’s not pleasant when everyone knows you were dumped, or you went for a job and didn’t get it, or you failed an exam. It is embarrassing. It conflicts against this perfect persona we want to put out into the world. But guess what? You will fail, you will be rejected, and things will not always go perfectly for you. Welcome to life lads.
But should that fear stop us from trying?
To get what you want in life you have to take risks. To have the possibility of suceeding, we have to put ourselves in the vulnerable position that we might fail. Like Pam we have to be brave and take a chance.