Category: Ramblings

Today marks my last day in my 30’s and there’s a Strawberry Moon rising tonight to mark the solstice. Love it! Turning 40 on an auspicious day because it won’t be a full moon on a solstice again until after I’m long gone.

I was born at official sunrise time on the winter solstice and now I’m on the other side of the magic line and it’s summer. WOOT!

Turning 40 has terrified me for a long time but I’ve decided sod it, I’m going to rock being 40! It’s been a gift denied to friends long gone. They never made it this far so I’m going to rock it for them as much as myself.

We spent the day at the beach; it felt so good being back in the ocean. There was no swimming allowed as there was a rip current but just sitting in the water was enough. Sand between my toes and sun on my face with the waves breaking. Damn I’ve missed the sea!

I took a walk to do some late-30’s contemplating; things I’ve done; things I haven’t done yet. There were teeny little hermit crabs in the shallows and of course, that sent my brain on a tangent.

We are always home. Our bodies are home. Wherever we are, we’re always home. My body isn’t in the state I want it to be, which could be why I keep trying to escape where I am. Crabs take their homes everywhere.

Crabs can’t exist in all environments though; we’re the same. Each of us in unique and we thrive in different environments, so when we’re out of that place, we’re uncomfortable. My ‘home’ doesn’t thrive here and I’m aware of that. So it’s time to put my home in a place where it works at its best but irrespective of where that is, I’m always home.

Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. So tidy out your ‘home’ and make it exactly what you want it to be on the inside because it will follow you everywhere. Put it in an environment where it can thrive. Environment is internal as well as external.

I found a shell on the beach which sums up where I am right now. I’ve grown and while it’s time to shed the old, the old has taught me what I know. It’s time to grow on it, add to it and make it better.

My old shell was home and the good parts will add to my new home.

Never stop growing.

The news on taking my job with me is basically no. Due to jurisdiction issues in the type of company I work for, it’s not doable. I can get a job with a different branch of the same company, I just can’t work this job from that location.

This changes the game. Plan A was taking my job with me; Plan B was doing it for a month or so from over there, then going my own way; Plan C was leaving with no job to go to.

Plans A & B are no longer options. Plan C doesn’t appeal to be honest. So Plan D is to take a few days, get a decent flight price and go over to see my friend. Then come back here and stick to my original timeline of November/December. If I can’t take my job with me, then I need to have the finances to support myself while I’m there. That means a few extra months here to clear up my loan from Bank of Dad so I can leave with everything paid up in full and completely debt free.

Plan D feels right. Plan C gives me palpitations so time to update some things on my spreadsheet and roll with it.

Thankfully my boss has offered to work around any time off I need to go to London, so that is immensely helpful and I’m grateful. The conversations we’ve had have been around a mutually beneficial solution and it’s amazing what compromises can be reached when you’re both considering what’s best for the other party. It opens up solutions that weren’t visible from a ME ME perspective. Funny how that works…

In the meantime, I’m feasting my eyes on some photography pages on Facebook that focus on Scotland. If I can’t go to my mountains, I’ll let them bring me pictures of my mountains instead.

The Highland Games are in Itasca, IL on June 17 & 18 so I will defo be heading there for a day to snap some pics and feast my eyes and ears on all things Scottish!

Yet another nudge from the universe that life and time wait for no-one. A week ago my London ‘husband’ called from Greece, where he was celebrating his partner’s birthday. An old high school friend had some bad news from his oncologist.

The cancer is back in his spine, pelvis and liver. They’ve stopped treatment and have given him a clock of ‘sometime around fall.’ That’s a mere 3 months away. He’s scared.

He isn’t even 40 with a 7 mth old daughter and 3 year old son whom he adores! They won’t remember him.

Despite all the faith in existence and the wonders of modern medicine, they cannot fix this. Mykal is taking it badly; he and Adrian are close. What do you say? Which words could possibly make this less devastating?!

While we all have ‘the rest of our lives ahead of us’, there’s no way of knowing how long ‘the rest’ is. 5 minutes. 5 years. 5 decades. Who knows?

If you sit down and give some serious thought to what you want out of life, the dream if you will, it’s very easy to get daunted and think you’ll never get it. Whether it’s the 30 lbs you need to lose, the supermodel body, the car, house, dream job; whatever IT is for you, you need to get after it.

You can tackle it balls to the wall or one step at a time. There’s no prescription for any of it. Just do something. Anything. ONE THING.

One disclaimer I’ll toss in here is that if you have more than 2 priorities, then you don’t have any. Decide which one is the most important for you with maybe a smaller one on the side and tackle it. I’ve opted for 20 lbs and relocating myself in the next 3 months. I’d like to see him again while there’s time.

This has significantly bumped up my clock on moving but I do my best living under pressure. The passport application went in last Saturday with a rush job on it. The boss is aware of my plan and he’s actually trying to make it happen for me from a job perspective. (Never underestimate people’s willingness to help you on your way.)

The visa app will go in within the next 3 weeks and from there it’s a roughly 3 week turnaround on a response. This means by the end of June I will have an answer on which way my life is going. It’s magic spreadsheet time, when I start finding homes for the stuff that won’t be shipped. This is happening. I’m going home!

That it took a terminally ill friend I haven’t seen in 25 years to make me pull my finger out of my arse is sad. I wish I was going home under happier circumstances. While it might sound trite and meaningless in the grand scheme, he has pushed me to LIVE; to finally get off my butt and make a change. I turn 40 1 month today. Holy shit.

While the visa work is happening in the background, there’s the business of gently getting my body back. I’ve had a cough I haven’t been able to shake for about 6 months now so I Googled things that cause mucous. Well…

Increased consumption of dairy (cheese is GOOD!), caffeine (yep!), sugar (yep because it goes in my caffeine), alcohol (scotch is delicious!), bread/gluten (yep, sammiches every day, sometimes twice a day) and eggs (I don’t have a problem with eggs.)

All of those things have increased since the end of last year so time to rein them in. Simply put, the coffees have to go because they will take some dairy and sugar with them. Scotch has been off the menu for a week and sammiches are down to every other day and no bread at home. My chest feels easier and I’m coughing a bit less.

Next is the small matter of shifting the poundage. I’ve cranked up my water intake and gone back to logging my stuff on myfitnesspal. It’s helpful seeing where the wasted calories are going. **SUGAR**

Unfortunately, a little over a week ago I asked my sister to show me how to make koeksisters, which is a traditional South African sweet and it takes a TON of sugar. We made the syrup last week and today is the dough and deep frying… the timing is not great given the mission I gave myself about 2 days after making the suggestion. But it’s family time and I’ve always wanted to learn how to make them so that’s what’s going down today. Moderation.

I’m in 3 fitbit challenges today so win, lose, shit or bust, I need to hit my 10k step goal. It might be in increments of 20 mins at a time, but I’ll meet it because it’s necessary.

You don’t need to tackle every goal in its entirety; break them down into bits. So what if it’s 20 minutes at a time, you’re still reaching the goal and that is what we’re aiming for. Getting to the finish line of the life we want to live.

I’ll cheer your corner all day long on the road to living your best life.

You were my best friend’s brother. We’ve never met and never will. Not in this world anyway.

Through a random roll of the cosmic dice, you are gone. The laws of physics state that nature abhors a vacuum. Empty spaces must be filled; physics dictates that to be the case.

Your life was extinguished; maybe before its time; maybe in perfect time. No-one can know. The messages people have left in memory of your life speak of a life filled to the brim. Your hours were filled with hunting, hiking, fishing, camping. Family. Work was a side gig to enable what you loved. Work was not your life.

The pages of your book were filled with the things that brought you happiness and peace. Too often it’s the other way and work is all-consuming. The be-all and end-all of existence. Thankfully that was not the case with you.

You filled your pages with things that your family can look back on and smile over. Maybe not now, but someday. They will look at the example you left and realise that the meaning of life was left in the pages of your life.

They don’t understand now. They want more pages for you. Lots more pages. Pages that include them and pages that mean you’re still there. But you’ve gone.

Too much time is spent trading what is irreplaceable for what is replaceable. We trade our time for things. Things are replaceable; time is not.

You spent your time on irreplaceable moments of joy. Like for like; as it should be. That lesson is something those who know you, will take with them. Hopefully they will carry that memory from this day onward. The note to LIVE. Fill your days with what makes your heart sing because there’s no way of knowing how many verses this song called Life has.

Nature abhors a vacuum. You didn’t leave one. You filled every page of your book with no space remaining. Nature cannot move in to fill the space you have left. You left no space for regret and THAT is a life well lived. However short it may have been. You are irreplaceable.

Know that you have left the ultimate gift. A map on how to LIVE.

No-one wants to close the book on someone they love, but you wrote the perfect book. No blank spaces.

Rest in peace, Andre.

The idea of soulmates is not something to be taken lightly. Some scoff it off as fairy tales; others believe.

I’ve often wondered if I’ll ever find mine. The pessimism of reality tries to drown out the single spark of hope but somehow that spark won’t die. I want to believe he’s real.

This is something I wrote a long time ago to the soulmate I haven’t found yet.

Tens of thousands of words in existence, millions if you count all the languages. Yet here I sit and I cannot find the words. You have to wonder if there are words that haven’t been found yet because sometimes you come up against a feeling or thought and all the words in existence are suddenly MIA. Cannot find a single one to make the feeling real.

Maybe the feeling has a color, a smell, a sound. Blue. The most epic shade of blue framed in a smile that could melt any resistance in its path. The sound of that laugh is something burned so deep into my mind that I don’t know that I could erase it if I tried. I wouldn’t want to. There’s an empty space that the sound fills perfectly.

The pure terror that comes from knowing something without knowing how you know it. Are you from another time and place? Another lifetime? Are we back at the start again for the hundredth time because we walk this road in every incarnation? Are you the treasure I seek each time, sometimes to be found, other times not?

My hands want to reach out for you, to feel your skin, to absorb your heat. It’s getting harder to resist, I’m only so strong and the gravity of you is something I can’t fight forever. You’re orbiting me and each orbit is bringing you closer. When we collide will that be the end of life as we know it? Complete destruction of everything that went before, a slate wiped clean only to begin a new life form after the collision.

It wouldn’t be the first time. The gravity that draws us together cannot be stopped. Each lifetime ends the same way. You with me. Me with you. One. The end result never changes.

So we build in challenges, set up obstacles to be overcome because where is the fun in the same game each time? New challenges to overcome just to prove we will not be kept apart. With no memory of previous lifetimes the only clue we have each time is an aching emptiness that cannot be filled by anything or anyone else. The emptiness is deafening in its longing; a soundless scream into the void calling the other and then our gravity moves everything in its path to bring us back into orbit again. We latch on and we start circling each other in the eternal game that will end in us morphing into one again.

The search for the twin flame continues.

It’s been a while since I last checked in. Things have been somewhat chaotic of late.

My brother is finally up and running and returned to work today. We’re very grateful for the support and kind words people sent through. The kindness of strangers cannot be overstated!

As far as possible, I’ve tried to work on the concept of my 4 rooms for well-being; physical, mental, emotional & spiritual.

The physical room is finally getting a long overdue airing out. Daily walks are back on the menu now that it’s warming up. Thank heavens! It’s become my walking meditation. I walk off my stress and think through whatever’s bugging me. It’s a 2 for 1 bargain! Pretty soon it will be light enough in the mornings to walk to the station – YAY!

Seeing nature come alive again is such a mental boost. It’s a reminder that no matter how bleak and shitty things look or how long it lasts, the light will always return. The grass is definitely greener!

The mental room is more organised. Focusing intently for shorter periods of time got better results than slogging away endlessly with half a mind. Learn to say no when there are too many things on your plate. I know, easier said than done, but just once, SAY IT. NO.

Homesickness gave the emotional room a rather hard knock. When you’re trying to stay afloat in a sea of chaos, it’s difficult to keep your focus. Progress on my plans to move to Scotland ground to a half for a while, which left me feeling like I was trying to achieve the impossible.

Since the last time I wrote, I’ve passed my citizenship test and will be doing my oath ceremony at the end of the month. As I’m doing a formal name change with my citizenship, there’s the small matter of changing my existing passport with the South African embassy. What I thought would take a few weeks to do turns out to be more like 18 months. Finding out that I’d possibly need to delay my move by 18 months was the emotional equivalent of shooting my childhood puppy. Total devastation.

Thankfully the UK visa people are logical and the court order will be sufficient for them to link my old and new names for a visa without needing to change my birth certificate. WAHOOOOOOO! The day I found that out felt like I’d won the lottery!!

Little things like that make me believe the universe will make this move happen for me. It will work.

Spiritually I’ve made time to feed my soul things that make me happy. Reading, music and walking meditations have created an oasis of calm in the chaos.

I’d love to figure out why when one area of life falls into balance, something else falls out. It’s as if there needs to be something out of whack or things wouldn’t be right with the world.

On the plus side, there are more rooms in balance than ones that are out of whack so that’s a step in the right direction.

Serenity is achievable; now only to remember how.

A few weeks ago, the quote from Nina Leavins made an appearance in my blog. It’s time to revisit her wisdom:

“The Self Care Formula is simple. It is NITO(5R)…that is Nutrients In and Toxins Out in the 5 Realms the body works in (Mental, Emotional, Physical, Environmental and Spiritual). Unfortunately, we are doing TINO(5R) that is toxins in and nutrients out.” 

My physical realm has been decidedly toxic for some time and each time it comes up on my radar, there’s a new creative excuse as to why it hasn’t been fixed.

Well, enough.

Each time I draw a mental picture of what I want in life, being healthy and balanced features somewhere in the top 3. Yet it is an aspect that is consistently neglected and time isn’t waiting for me to get on board. Aging waits for no-one.

Using the concept of 4 rooms, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, my mental room occupies most of my time. The emotional one is usually opened up to hurl a bunch of chaos into it and the spiritual room is barely a blip on the radar. The physical room is a train wreck.

Searching for balance feels like it’s been a lifelong quest; one I haven’t put much effort into if I’m brutally honest. Oh, I’ve thought about it plenty; it’s just never progressed beyond being the ‘well that would be nice’ phase.

With a family history of chronic medical issues ranging from cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems, some of which can be attributed to obesity, ignoring the physical realm is not something that can live on the back burner forever.

Everything in life is a choice; even not choosing. If we are not choosing health, we are tacitly choosing its counterpart.

Taking out the recycling and trash earlier brought home how much of a mark a single person makes. The scuba diver’s mantra of ‘take nothing but memories and leave nothing but bubbles’ pinged into my head. There’s definitely a lot more than bubbles going into the trash, never mind attempting to calculate the cost of what I’ve taken.

Exercising is the bane of my life; I hate it. Not even going to attempt to sugarcoat or deny that. So what alternatives are available to increase health and decrease weight?

Diet.

Willpower is not something I possess in bucket loads. Stubbornness, yes. Willpower? Nope.

So the challenge is on to find a simple way to rejig my diet that will not involve copious amounts of willpower. Cooking is my therapist, so time to make that therapist dish up a cure using Nina’s advice of NITO(5R).

It’s time to choose. Health? Or continuing to feel like this for the next decade?

 

 

Sometimes trying to put feelings into words is like trying to nail jelly to the wall; difficult and more than a little bit messy.

Looking back over the week and taking stock over my 4 rooms, the score card looks a bit like this:

Emotional room: Train wreck

Physical: Quite a bit better initially. I started off great for 4 days then derailed for the end of the week.

Mental: Exhausted

Spiritual: Neglected.

Let’s start with the top of the pile, shall we?

Tuesday was an actual train wreck that ended with a body under the train during the commute home. Sitting on a train for a few hours thinking about the life that ended under it definitely gives a person pause for thought.

Wednesday was dinner with the folks and a hard goodbye. I never realised how much it meant seeing them regularly until I waved goodbye and they weren’t there for dinner on Friday. The house that’s been my 2nd home since I arrived here is now someone else’s home.

My brother and his family have taken over the house and while it looks mostly the same, it feels different. It’s their space now and the freedom to come and go through that space is no longer there for me. Something as simple as the sofa being pushed all the way against the wall has left me feeling unsettled because it’s clearly no longer my parents’ home. It’s not my safety net. That has left me feeling strangely devastated.

Physically I made better choices regarding my diet this week. Well, let me clarify that; I did until Thursday. Thursday, Friday and today were less planned and as a result, definitely unhealthier.

Not having made time last weekend to properly stock up my fridge for the week ahead got me through to Wednesday but derailed me for the rest of the week. Putting non-essential shit too high up on the priority list left the last half of the week in a mess. The first order of business in the morning is to restock my fridge with the things I’ll need to eat right for a week. Sanctuary would be better sought in my spiritual room rather than in beer and Scotch.

Mentally I’m fried. Work is taking too high a toll on my sanity at the moment and Wednesday had me at the end of a very short rope. If I’d had my passport in my bag my commute home might have taken me to O’Hare airport. Finding a handle on work is going to take some creative problem-solving on my part and to be honest, I can’t be arsed.

The urge to go back to Scotland is drowning out my will to do anything else other than count down the days until I can send in my visa application. Please can I just go home to my mountains…? My Falcon’s Eye is still next to my heart every day, reminding me to go home.

The spiritual room didn’t even get a second glance this week.

Life is starting to feel decidedly like one of those hidden object games where you need to find a specific item in one place to use in another place, which unlocks the thing holding the clue you need to solve a problem somewhere else.

Maybe the solution to the mental & emotional upheaval is in the room I didn’t go into this week.

Time to log off from the endless Netflix reruns, put on some soothing tunes, light some incense and get under my blankie with a book.

Tomorrow is another clean slate so draw a line under today, leave the failings at the door and get some rest.

Every Tuesday & Friday I have dinner with my family. When I was religiously logging my foods on Myfitnesspal, Tuesdays were always a gamble calorie-wise. As a result, I nicknamed it Trainwreck Tuesdays. Could be a good day, could be a train wreck.

Today Trainwreck Tuesday turned into an actual thing. Yesterday was a late one and I missed 3 trains home so to make up for it I decided to miss 3 trains in to work but I still left on time. The 3:18 train out of Union Station.

Our train hit a pedestrian about 10 minutes outside of Chicago. It was a fatal accident and we spent 3 + hours sitting on the tracks while the Fire Department and police did their thing. The evidence technician had to do his thing; the engineer was relieved and a replacement engineer brought in; the train had to be inspected to ensure it could continue safely.

I didn’t realise at first that it was our train that was involved as all trains were stopped but as other trains started passing us after a while, it was clear we were the ‘incident.’

Thankfully the passengers in our car were reasonable but passengers in other cars were losing it and cussing the conductors. Yeah, we all have somewhere to be but for the love of God, there’s a body under the train.

Yes, we’re hungry, we need to pee *I used the loo….. dear Lord, it was a biohazard zone*, we all have somewhere we need to be. As the one conductor calmly pointed out: we all get to go home. Slower than planned, but we get to go home.

Perspective.

Sitting on the tracks was frustrating initially but the sun eventually set and it was a beautiful sunset. The man under the train never realised yesterday was the last sunset he’d ever have the chance to see. He’ll not see another one.

While people are losing their shit with the conductor, there’s a family somewhere getting a phone call that someone they love won’t be coming home. Someone’s life just got shattered while we sat there counting down until we could move again.

This was the first time I’ve been in a train that hit someone. It wasn’t how I imagined it. There wasn’t an impact and a sudden screeching to a halt. The train just slowed down and stopped. When we did, I knew there’d been an accident because that wasn’t a place we normally stopped. I didn’t know it was us. It’s hard to explain how you feel a life ending without tangible evidence of it; their energy merely departing. Maybe I’m just funny that way. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Tonight was someone’s first death. There are 2 more awaiting him in the distant future.

RIP man on the tracks. It was not your time.

The change of the seasons brings the predictable gift of allergies and general germ infestations. *that’s a technical term for colds and flu.

My London buddy has been plagued with flu for the better part of 2 weeks and is still feeling like shit on a stick *his words. Because of the way his company works, each employee is awarded some arbitrary score based on number of sick days blah blah.

So is he currently in bed, looking after himself and giving his body what it needs to recover? No. Of course not. There’s a penalty if he does, so instead he’s dragging his germ-infested arse into the office and spreading the love, never giving his body the rest it desperately needs to recover.

When did that become the norm? When did self-care get shelved for profitability? Our value has been downgraded to the point where we are cogs in the profit machine and work we will! No matter what. You feel like shit? Too bad Honey, you’re on duty making money for the machine. Get to it!

I’m generally very good about making sure I leave work on time. I work 7 am to 2:45 pm; those are the boundaries I set from the start and for the most part they are respected. The past few weeks those boundaries have been more of a suggestion and I’m feeling the effects of it.

Coming home too late too cook anything meaningful so I resort to quick and easy. Yeah well, quick and easy comes with consequences and my body feels sluggish and mentally exhausted.

That we constantly sacrifice our self-care at the altar of someone else’s profit is something that seriously needs to change. This just isn’t cricket. My life doesn’t have a dollar value thank you very much!

It’s enough. Our collective sanity has gone down the crapper and for what? How productive can you be when you feel like you’ve been hit by a truck? It winds me up sitting on the train sandwiched between people sniffling and hacking up a lung. Why do the rest of us have to be covered in germs because your boss is a dick?! GO HOME AND REST FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

I came across this quote today and it sums it up pretty neatly:

“The Self Care Formula is simple. It is NITO(5R)…that is Nutrients In and Toxins Out in the 5 Realms the body works in (Mental, Emotional, Physical, Environmental and Spiritual). Unfortunately, we are doing TINO(5R) that is toxins in and nutrients out.”
― Nina Leavins

This ties in quite neatly with the 4 rooms philosophy I’m testing in my life. Nina adds in a 5th element which is crucial: Environment. The 4 rooms exist within the 5th so it makes sense that it all needs to be viewed holistically. Attempting to balance 4 rooms within an unbalanced Environment isn’t going to have optimum results.

Take an inventory of what environment you’re trying to balance yourself in because at the moment my environment is going a long way to throwing my 4 rooms out of whack in spectacular fashion. There was time to meditate tonight which is something I never do. It was definitely a much needed deposit into my spiritual room and it needs to become more regular.

This is going to be trial and error but it’s a start. At least the errors mean we’ve tried for something.