My carefully constructed blueprint might not have all the details I will discover or dream up. Plans I'm sure will work now might prove to be unusable when tasked with carrying this memoir from start to finish. Hopefully I'll conceive of ideas that are more valuable than anything I've yet imagined at this early juncture.
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Two+ years, five days, a full heart and an impatient mind
Two years and two weeks ago, the core of my (re)Discover Your Spark content was gifted to me by the Universe. Earlier this summer, I engaged two women to help me market this work to a larger audience. This time last week, I was waiting to launch my virtual, FREE 5-day (re)Discover Your Spark retreat, and now it’s all over. Isn’t time a funny thing? We spend so much of our lives waiting for something to start, the days and hours seeming to drag by. And then, when it finally happens, it flies by and is over in a flash. Let me share some of what I heard from people…
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Two parts of the same journey
We are here to create, to love, to learn, to grow, to share our gifts, and, very importantly, to experience joy. It’s not about getting to point B but “the journey,” as they say—and it sounds like a lie. But it is truer than we realize. What is point B anyway but number two in a long line of even more things? Yrsa Daley-Ward The How I’m a consistent re-reader of books that move me. I purposefully don’t have a lot of books in our home because I only keep those I know I’ll re-read multiple times. I have a system: I check out a book from the library, and…
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(re)Discover a candle to start an inferno
I looked around to take in the moment, to gather my wits about me and to recognize the enormity of what had just happened. I looked ahead to the field of trees that enclosed the beautiful French-style farmhouse where I was living, and I started moving toward it again.
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The sun’ll (always) come out
Breathing through the anxiety of watching the sun descend below the endless horizon into utter blackness and waking up in the murky blue black of the early morning for two straight weeks didn't totally cure me of my fear of the dark, but two years later, I'm more comfortable with the unknown of night than I ever was before.
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I’m in a bit of a naming crisis…can you help me out?
Then there's also the final word of the existing phrase to contend with: "Disruption." I'm sure the word came to me because I was literally experiencing a massive disruption to my routine: I was away from home and work for 14 days with only my thoughts to keep me company. It was a huge jolt to my systems—to the way I had been kind of autopiloting through life: Get up, go to spin, get ready for work, go to work, come home, make dinner, attend an arts event, come home, read, go to bed. Repeat.
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My big takeaway from these last 365 days of disruption (and it’s got nothing to do with COVID)
But I didn't know, until I went back to read these old blog posts this morning, that I had started using the same words weeks before I left. I don't remember writing that phrase or even thinking that. And if I hadn't written it down in a place that I could go back to, it would just be lost to me. Maybe I wouldn't have been heard or understood the clear voice by the side of the field. Maybe the revelation wouldn't have even happened.
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6 months, 182 days, 4,380 hours ago…
So the Hamlet analogy can only go so far since the ending is not something to aspire to, but the point of hesitancy is something very real to consider. How do other people make bold moves with so little certainty of the outcome? And what is it about the potential of success or failure that I'm afraid of?
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2020: my year in review
Beyond the devastation (and our late in the year diagnosis), COVID was a gift for Dr Marry and me. I closed down my offices in March and have been working from home ever since. That means Dr Marry and I had all spring and summer and much of the fall together since his job was also a hybrid of in-person and virtual teaching. We walked and biked more than we ever have. I baked copious amounts of bread and went back to my pre-full time job delight of searching for and trying fun new recipes.
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Manage your stress or it will manage you
Stress is inevitable. Jobs, families, money, personal anxiety, mental and physical health, politics, the economy, a global pandemic...the list goes on and on. But almost nothing is ever better accomplished by a panicked frenzied state of being. And if it is, the price to pay is with your own state of mind.
