I had all sorts of plans for this Daily Reminder.
I didn't know I had all sorts of plans—as in, I genuinely hadn't spotted that that was going on—until they fell apart.
It's funny how that works, isn't it?
We don't notice we're doing it, until life comes along and delivers something very different.
We're racing along and the wheels fall off and suddenly we find ourselves stranded by the side of the road, blinking in the sunlight, scratching our heads.
Our attention had been so firmly set on our destination—how we were going to get there, what was going to happen when we did, what it all meant, what would happen after that—and we were so distracted by the noise of it all (planning is a very noisy vehicle), that yet again, we'd taken our eyes off life itself.
And now here we are, standing next to our broken down vehicle, in the calm and the quiet of the middle of nowhere, forced to reassess.
(Man plans, God laughs.)
Take a deep breath. Look around. Feel warmth on skin. Hear the birds and other sounds, far off in the distance. Be still, as the moment reveals itself.
Gosh, it's beautiful.
I hadn't noticed.
I remember the first shoots of this ‘spotting-I-was-caught-up-in-plans’ appearing in the kitchen, quite late on in the day.
Trying to solve stuckness in the time-honoured fashion of making more tea, it dawned on me just how bad I was feeling.
“Late one, or early one?” was the last thing my wife had asked me, before heading to bed herself. (I've been doing a fair bit of ‘medieval sleeping’ recently, and she wants to know my predictions, so she can start the business of planning her own tomorrow, right before sleep. It's a universal thing.)
I didn't know, but I didn't particularly want to set an alarm for stupid o'clock either, so I'd reluctantly committed to ‘late one’, and here I was, making tea. Feeling bad.
Such a gift, ‘feeling bad’.
So helpful, one could almost develop a taste for it.
Because it's the tap on the shoulder we need. It's life saying to us,
“Would you care to slow the f**k down for a moment, and reassess?”
Stirring a cup for tea for a few seconds longer than I would do normally was all it took for the shoots of awareness to appear.
Hang on, I thought. I've been here before, haven't I? This ‘feeling bad’ in the run up to something?
And in the middle of it, helpless to do anything about it, I got the sense that I'd maybe noticed just enough… to take my foot off the gas ever so slightly, and get curious.
It still really looked like the problem was this Daily Reminder, but now, I wasn't quite so sure of that.
What's it been, in the past, when I've been feeling bad like this? What's been the issue? How did it get resolved?
I recalled all the days of fretting in advance of a Wellbeing Wednesdays, or a talk I was due to give, or a podcast appearance, or a piece of writing I couldn't nail, or a conversation I was due to have or basically anything where the mind has got its knickers in a twist because it thinks that it has to do stuff that life actually does…
🙄
And as I lifted the teabag out, the only difference seemed to be that I was left with a certainty that something would happen; that life would deliver the results. That it would turn out alright in the end.
So I took my cup of tea back upstairs, sat at my desk and spent the next couple of hours feeling bad there, instead of in the kitchen, procrastinating on admin, before giving up and crawling into bed, resigned instead to another ‘early one’.
😆
I woke a few hours later (before the stupid o'clock alarm, I should note) with the answer.
Those two words woke me up.
That's what the Daily Reminders are all about! Showing you it's ok to be real—to be human—by being human with you.
And I'd lost sight of that recently.
What with the launch of the new website and all, there's been a recent period of (what appears as) quite intense planning. It's been a huge project-planning exercise, with so many little this-before-that-before-the-other scenarios playing out, that I'd allowed the mind's illusion of control to creep into my writing.
📦: Then I'll write this. And this is how it will be received. And it will link in nicely with that. And what will happen as a result of that will be this. And then tomorrow I'll write that other…
My attention had been so firmly set on my destination, and I'd been so distracted by the noise of planning, that yet again, I'd taken my eyes off life itself.
But that's not what we're about here – polished, planned posts that you can get just about anywhere on the internet.
We keep it real here. Messy, like life.
And invite you to go a bit deeper, by seeing an answer to this one that is so obvious, I got away with writing it as the very first word, of the very first sentence, of the very first paragraph of this Daily Reminder: ‘I’.
Because it wasn't me that had plans for this Daily Reminder.
It was the mind.
😘
Giles