Relishing The First Meal After A Cold

image from flikr
brungrrl photostream

You know the feeling? The enjoyment you get during that first meal after you have recovered from the cold or flu. You savour the aroma wafting from your plate, your first real aroma in a week. You relish the taste washing over your taste buds which have come alive after a week of dormancy. And you feel hungry. I’ll say it again YOU FEEL HUNGRY!!!

You embrace the hunger for you know the feeling of having hunger in a world where you can satisfy that hunger with relative ease. It feels good to eat and to have your senses once again co-operating to deliver an enjoyable experience. You look forward to the next meal and the next as you focus on the joy of satisfying your appetite.

Metaphorically speaking this is exactly how I’m currently feeling about my work. And what a revelation and relief it is!

The discontent and restlessness had been creeping in for a while. But like all good soldiers, I was taught not to give into these feelings and to keep on swimming, swimming, swimming… I swam for a while, but most of the time felt like a salmon swimming up-stream. However unlike most salmon, I am not genetically programmed to swim upstream and eventually it became too much.

It took a further period before I was ready to admit defeat or if not defeat a temporary surrender. This was an enormous step, huge… because for the pervious twenty years I loved my work, threw myself into it and not only surfed with the tide, but caught pretty much every wave. To this day, I don’t know what changed… was it simply my priorities, my outlook on life, the sense that there should be something better, the sense that time was ebbing?

Whatever the case, this had me spooked and in totally foreign territory. I had had all the answers up to now, but I had hit on my $64,000 question.

After a period of just being, I am now back engaged in corporate Australia and I am hungry again. Only this time, my hunger is tempered by wisdom and I know the key is balance. Work is but one component of a busy and well-rounded life and I am learning the discipline of saying “no.” Now, I am happy to let a project go to someone else if it means I have time to do the things that feed my soul. Now I’m happy to say, “yes, I’ll do it for you…. if it can wait until tomorrow.” Now I know that I can face the consequence of those decisions and this is not weakness. In fact, it is strength.

I am now working for a company that does meaningful work and I am proud to be working for that organisation. My team is wonderful, playful, engaging, human and appreciative. Their expectations are realistic and most of all we respect each other’s talents and disciplines. This is novel. My work is instructive and challenging. In short, I feel that my work is valuable and that I am valued and challenged.

image from freedigitalphotos.net

And I can see now that value and challenge were what was missing in my last workplace. Value of course, has nothing to do with remuneration. It was only fear that was keeping me there – fear and habit.

Facing fear and putting it and the old workplace behind me was the best decision I made.

The family has effortlessly flowed back into the routine of a working mother and I have a real sense that my children feel that life is now back to their “normal”. My work flu is now over and I partake of my meal with a humility born of a journey taken and a lesson learned.

Have you had a “coming alive” experience? Have you ever totally changed your perspective on an aspect of your life?

Avoid Losing The Most Precious of Things – You

In my last post I advocated for the practice of ethical hedonism and noted that mothers owed it to themselves and those around them to indulge just a little. Preferably, they should do this without guilt. You can read about my views on hedonism here.

In that post I referred to the “intense stage of mothering young dependant children” and how emerging from it was one of the factors that lead me to my current views on hedonism. In their comments to my post, my blogging buddies at Grown and Flown, also reinforced the importance of that emergence and by doing so gave me the idea for this blog post. Thank you ladies!

There is no doubt that emerging from that phase (which I will call the Emergence in this post) was a game changer for me, although I never realised it at the time.

Like most new mothers I really had no idea going in just how intense mothering young children would be. Up until the point of the birth of my first child, I never had the opportunity to be around young children and certainly didn’t seek them out. However, the motion picture of my life in my head always included children and so it came to pass. Within a month of deciding to fall pregnant I fell well and truly down the mothering rabbit hole and came across all manner of interesting tea party guests and situations that I had never before encountered.

I remember the very early days, sleep deprived and racked with guilt about not breast-feeding, feeling totally inadequate amongst the mess that was my house. I remember how I latched onto every progressive variation to baby routine like a starving woman and recounted to the Italian Stallion how the high point in my day was baby graduating from 60 mls of formula for every feed to 90 mls. Then there were the toddler years, when baby was all ability, no common sense and when one’s watching and listening skills are honed to perfection. Then it was onto the daycare and school years where your life became a dance to the starting and finishing times of these fine institutions.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of great times too and the rewards of parenting are some of the finest in life. I wouldn’t change the rhythm of my life for anything. However the above is the reality of mothering young children and it’s more than permissible to admit that it is hard work and that some days are just about survival.

“What did you do today, dear?”

“We survived with all body parts intact. World peace will just have to wait until tomorrow”

However, little did I know that the focus I put into parenting my young children, whilst pursuing a high-powered career and being a wife and daughter came with a cost. After all, everything you do is worth doing to the best of your abilities, right? Naturally, you want the very best for your children, and you think that the very best is giving yourself completely and utterly over to the task. At least I did.

At the point of Emergence I felt rather pleased about some of the time I had regained. Time back for myself to do the little things I had put on the back burner for the past fifteen years. A few months after Emergence I was still trying to remember what those little things were and finally discovered the cost of all my “doing”. In putting my needs last and feeling guilty about indulging in a little daily hedonism during those years I had unknowingly eroded my most important relationship, namely with myself.

The human race is fond of labelling. We tend to spend a lot of time and effort pursuing high status labels. I knew I was a wife, mother, career woman and daughter. But beyond that? Who was I and who did I want to be? It’s only by answering these questions, that we are to find the path forward.

This is not to say I lay the blame solely at the feet of mothering. My Emergence was a real point of convergence – where Emergence meets middle age, meets searching for a more meaningful existence, meets career questioning. Everyone’s life path is different and points of convergence will vary.

I have a sense that finding the answers will take some time. Much like weight loss – most of us gain weight through years of bad habits and then expect overnight miracles from our diets. It just isn’t going to happen. And there will be interruptions and glitches along the way.

So that’s why I advocate balance and a little measured pleasure. It helps you remain connected with who you are and your aspirations. I really hope that anyone involved with the concerns of others can take something away from today’s post. Giving yourself over to the cause is important, but remember YOU are a worthy cause as well.

So hello world, I’m just Judy and I like exploring but dislike labels. I also happen to be a mother, wife and daughter, an occasional humourist and blogger.

I’d love to hear how you describe yourself by taking it back to the most basic, without labels in the comment section below. Help us to get to know you.

Elephant and rock man images courtesy freedigitalphotos.net

Let’s Phlog Monday: Coastal Textures

Patterns are intriguing. Particularly natural ones.

They depict a wonderful combination of logic and creativity. A meeting of the left and right brains. For the longest time, my creative side has been drowned out by logic, reasoning, problem solving, facts, principles, process and tasks. If you are one of the lucky ones that have married your logical and creative sides, then I applaud you. This is still very much a work in progress for me.

I am often awed by the surrounding coastal landscape and the patterns found within it. Even when there are obvious natural flaws, the patterning is often sublime and impossible to humanly replicate. Elements combining together to construct three dimensional wizardry. The energy used to create these patterns is often immense, but Mother Nature takes it all in stride. Patterning is the instrument of the universe.

Here are some coastal patterns I have recently encountered. I hope you can feel the texture of the images in these photos. There’s a beauty in patterned repetition. Rough and smooth, creativity and logic…… balance.