My Soul is Scottish

The light at the end of the tunnel

Ah Monday… There’s nothing quite like getting to the train station only to hear that a freight train has derailed at the next stop and ‘expect significant delays.’ It was also just a wee bit windy and more than a little bit cold.

At that point you’re pretty much ready to run up the white flag and call to tell the boss you have anal glaucoma; you just don’t see your arse going in today.

Instead I got on the train, dug out my book, sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that I remembered to pee before leaving the house (because train loos are, for all intents and purposes, bio-hazard zones) and settled in for the long commute to work. Mind you, it was ever so thoughtful of the conductors on the train to suggest using an alternate form of transport.

Cheers mate. The time for that suggestion would have been AT the station but no worries, we’ll wing it, aye?

A few minutes later we were at the next station, slightly slower than normal and next thing you know, the train is going like the clappers and the significant delay turned out to be less than 5 minutes. Didn’t see that coming…

What started out as a train wreck of a Monday turned out to be the smoothest day I’ve had in weeks. To-do list sorted, tax refund credited to my account a week after filing my taxes (WOOT) and everything that went tits up in spectacular fashion on Friday somehow magically resolved itself today.

It was also time to stop putting off treating my body better ‘for just one more day’. Tomorrow finally arrived. Out with the excessive sugar, switched to tea instead of the usual cafe con leche with half a pound of sugar in and made time to pack a lunch. Pleasure is necessary in life and the mission isn’t deprivation here. It’s balance and that is something that has been sorely lacking for too long. Pleasure, yes; overindulgence, no.

Food is not an emergency. Make time for a soak in the tub. Stretch out the achy bits. Sit down at the table and eat a cooked meal. Hydrate. It might take my body a few days to get the memo but one meal, one workout and one day at a time.

It looks like the light at the end of my tunnel really was a train…. albeit a derailed one.

The story of 3 deaths.

It was my brother’s birthday yesterday so it was off to the folks for dinner. My parents are currently packing up for a move to South Carolina so they’re going through years worth of stuff and deciding what goes and what stays.

My Dad found a stack of old photos from his childhood and some from mine. Seeing my grandparents when they were a LOT younger was strange. I’ve only ever seen pictures of them as I knew them.

Memory Lane is a long road and it was great having a laugh over some memories and seeing my Dad and his siblings making their own.

There were 2 photos in particular that struck a chord. They were both family photos taken after my dad was born and it looked like the whole family gathered for the picture. Sadly only a few faces are still remembered and the other names have fallen into a void where no-one remembers them.

The woman holding my dad was Granny Bridget. I’ve heard stories of her; she sounded like a woman with an opinion and more than a little bit difficult. My dad always says she could have been a rear-gunner on a bread van in Ireland. She was that kind of woman.

The woman next to her was my Nana and the man kneeling in front of her was my Granddad.

Looking at all the unknown faces in that picture, it brought back something I read a few years ago. To the woman who wrote this, I’m SO sorry I cannot remember your name to give you credit for it. It has stayed with me since I read it in passing and I thank you for it. It goes like this.

There’s a story that everyone dies three deaths. The first death is when your body leaves this world. The second is when the last person who remembers you, dies. The third is when your name is spoken for the last time.

I have a weird thing about walking around cemeteries. I love reading the epitaphs on the graves and often there are messages that hold a lot of meaning, even though you don’t know the person who lies beneath the stone.

Ever since I read that snippet, I say the names aloud when I pass each grave. Sometimes you come to a stone that is so worn by time that the name is lost to the ages, only living on a piece of paper somewhere recording this as their final resting place. For those names I say a prayer.

For the others, their names are said aloud and I often wonder if that moment will be their third death or if someone somewhere still speaks their name in memory.

These stones are in the cemetery below Roslyn Chapel in Midlothian. The wind was howling that day and I had the place to myself walking among the dead. I feel strangely peaceful when I leave.

I might not be home but it sure does taste like it!

Back in January when the New Year was still fresh off the shelf, the plan was to find balance and harmony in my life. Since being back at work post-surgery the balance and harmony have been shot to hell.

Right. That’s enough. It’s time to go back to the starting line and try this again, shall we?

As I’ve mentioned before, the world’s most comprehensive collection of cookbooks reside on my kitchen shelf so today it’s time to dust one of them off and cook some comfort food.

My Nana used to make a sublime minestrone soup. That woman could burn water 87 ways and according to my Dad, he didn’t know cabbage was green until he met my mother. Nana either deep fried EVERYTHING or boiled it to death, and then just a little bit longer to be sure. Hers was British cooking the way it’s historically been known to the rest of world. Bland with no adventure.

Despite this, her sausage rolls, Cornish pasties, scones and minestrone soup were incredible. Sadly I never paid attention when she tried to teach me how to make these things and those recipes are now cremated with her and scattered around Ennerdale Water in Cumbria. *As a side note here, learn from your parents and grandparents. There will come a day when you’ll be racking your brain trying to remember something that was meaningless to you years ago. It’s gone.*

With it still being winter and more than just a wee bit chilly outside, it tastes like a beef stew and Colcannon kind of day. Colcannon is a traditional Scottish dish made of mashed potato and cabbage and beef stew is well, beef stew!

Beef stew is traditionally made with dumplings but I’m going to go renegade today and serve it on Colcannon instead. We’ll hold the dumplings for another day.

After a trip around my favourite ethnic market for fresh veg, with the world’s squeakiest trolley (shopping cart for Americans) I definitely contemplated the cliche of ‘the squeaking wheel gets the grease,’ but that’s a problem for another day.

After a cup of coffee and a long chat to my crazy mate in London, which ended in hysterical laughter, it was time to try something new.

This is the recipe I used courtesy of Food.com. *So once again, did not use a single recipe book on my shelf… dammit woman!*

http://www.food.com/recipe/creamy-colcannon-191442?mode=us&st=true&scaleto=2

A word to the wise. Read the recipe properly. I made the mistake of chopping up the potato in their skins and then boiling it, rather than boiling whole. Getting the skins off little bits of potato was a pain in the arse but that was my dumb mistake. Don’t make the same one!

There were a few recipes in my cookbooks for beef stew, none of which really appealed. *Yes, I’m fussy.*

So again, to Food.com and found this one which looked simple enough. I opted to serve with Colcannon so the dumplings didn’t happen.

http://www.food.com/recipe/a-winters-walk-beef-and-carrot-stew-with-herb-crusted-dumplings-270955?photo=112161

There’s something therapeutic about cooking something from scratch; chopping, peeling, stirring.

When browning the meat for the beef stew, I used a lot more butter than the recipe called for. The smell of melted butter… yum! Calorie counting isn’t on the agenda today. It wasn’t done back in the day and it’s not happening today. *Feel free to lose your mind about it if you want. Makes no diffs to me.* I also substituted the canned tomatoes for fresh ones.

The finished product - grub's up! — The finished product – grub’s up!

Keeping it old school today left me with a pile of dishes and in the spirit of keeping it traditional they were washed by hand. I unpacked all the stuff in the dishwasher and washed those too. Don’t ask…

The odd thing is when I start cleaning, there’s really no off button. It goes on until there’s nothing left to clean. The kitchen fell victim today; everything from my pantry to the fridge/freezer. It turns out I have a mystery collection of fancy strawberry jams I knew nothing about. *I should make scones… maybe tomorrow.* Condiments so far out of date I’m not convinced I was in the country at the time they were bought.

Frozen foods I can no longer identify and preserves. A bottle of pickled beets that looks really questionable. Really?! Tossed the lot.

Roll up your sleeves and tackle your kitchen. You’ll be glad you did. My spice collection is much larger than I thought it was and order has been restored on the shelves. There’s finally a clear view of what’s there and what isn’t.

The stew is in the oven making yummy food smells, so while that’s doing its thing and I’m in the mood it’s time to tackle the endless piles of paperwork and filing. My filing box is fit to burst and I’m willing to go out on limb and say every receipt I’ve touched since 2010 is in that box.

Order will be restored before my head hits the pillow tonight if it means staying up until the wee hours getting it done *aided by Scotch, of course.*

Most of the mountains we have in life are ones we build ourselves.

I regret to inform you that this is the truth. Irritation levels are at an all time high this week and not surprisingly the list of shit accompanying them is increasing.

The angrier I get, the more there is to be angry about. In my head it looks suspiciously like a whirlpool; slightly choppy water around the edges, nothing looks too bad and before you know it you’re sucked into a bottomless pit with no way out. Didn’t even see it coming.

Obviously it’s everyone else’s fault, I’m the victim here. Same procedure as last year, James.

Get your head out of your arse woman! You had a bad week. Yes, there was dumbassery beyond anything you could have imagined and no, the world hasn’t ended because of it. It’s a wee speed bump on life’s little highway. Shit happens. Get over it.

Today was another episode of ‘Had a crap week, missed my train home, caught the next one, got delayed, WHY GOD WHY?!’. One more shovel of crap added to the mountain I’m building myself. Give it another week or 2 and this thing will rival K2.

Why? Does this make me feel better? No, I feel like shit.

Does this solve the problem? No, I’m too irritated to think of a logical solution so the problems will remain unsolved until I pull my finger out and deal with it.

Does this make me, in any way, pleasant to be around? No. I’m the personification of a hornet’s nest that’s been kicked to Kingdom Come.

Will any of the things that have hacked me off and grated my carrot be responsible for the end of the world as we know it? No. They’re meaningless nothings in a cesspool of other insignificant nothings. There is no net damage to the planet because someone else’s mess needed cleaning up. No net damage AT ALL.

So what good is it doing sitting here silently getting my tits in a tangle? The weekend is the prize at the end of a rough week. Instead I’m wasting it sitting here drained of energy, eyes heavier than lead with an epic case of indigestion and my body hates me a LOT. There’s something hammering on my insides trying to get out.

For what?

This calls for a time-out and a very early night. Tomorrow is another day.

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” – D. H. Lawrence

Ok, so this isn’t a cliché but it’s a fairly accurate summary of what’s on the menu today.

Since I’ve started looking for common themes in daily life, it’s tragic how often self-loathing and self-pity rear their ugly heads. I have been guilty of both to varying degrees at various points of my life.

It’s difficult to say if social media is to blame for perpetuating it, or just the media in general. Is it more prevalent now or is it that we’re hearing about it more than ever before because we make our lives accessible to everyone 24/7? People are now entitled to every little detail of our lives on demand.

The middle ground is shrinking; crushed between the need to be seen as successful and on the other side, total apathy and neglect. The pressure to succeed in today’s world is astronomical. The smallest ‘failure’ can go viral in a matter of hours if the person ‘failing’ is famous enough. A bad hair day or fashion faux pas makes front page news so the entire world can scrutinize the images until every pore has been analyzed to death.

The pressure doesn’t magically leave you unscathed until you reach adulthood. The fact that preschoolers have entrance interviews is proof the world has gone completely batshit crazy. They have no idea how much their future is riding on getting into the ‘right’ schools. They just want to play with their friends.

Then school starts and it becomes about what cars do the parents drive, what do they do for a living, wearing the latest clothes, how much are you donating to the school and if it’s not enough, your child is excluded from the crowd that can afford to give. Good grades, subject choices, sports, extra-curricular activities in the quest to become a well-rounded individual. It simply won’t do that you aren’t signed up for something! While you’re at it, you’ll need to be equally brilliant at all of it or there’ll be a letter to the parents pointing out your shortcomings.

The pressure to get high grades mounts each year until you realize your entire future is pointless because you flunked a test in some dumbass subject that doesn’t matter anyway. Well you didn’t qualify for the cripplingly expensive college that may guarantee you a job. The fact that you’ll probably end up starting out your adult life under the burden of student debt that would rival buying house is another matter entirely.

In among all of that is being bombarded by how to look, what to eat, what to wear, what’s in and what isn’t, the latest must have gadget that costs a kidney, which car you should be driving and what traits your ideal mate should have.

Social media is saturated with photos of every meal we consume, photos of the perfect moment and nauseating declarations of undying love for the person they’re sitting next to on the sofa. God forbid they should tell the person to their face. It apparently doesn’t count if their nearest and dearest don’t have virtual ring-side seats to the event.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, you’re sitting on your sofa, alone in your non-designer PJ’s eating beans on toast because you’re in debt up to your eyeballs from trying to keep up.

Your friends have the perfect bodies, the ideal mate, the house with the picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog. They just bought a new car and got a promotion. You’re Mayor of Sadsville with an average life.

About 18 months ago, I had a bathtub epiphany. For most of my life I’ve been trying to live up to being someone else. The kid with her shit together, married with kids and a husband that brings in enough money so I don’t have to work while swanning around doing yoga and driving the car pool.

Enter stage left: Bathtub epiphany. I’ve spent years feeling never quite good enough; years spent feeling like a complete failure because all the other kids were married with kids and a house.

It turns out I was hating myself and piling on the self-loathing and pity for not winning a race I never entered. The things that made me a failure where things that weren’t on the To Do list in the first place.

By society’s definition of success, I was a complete failure. Except I wasn’t. Sure, I’d like to meet someone amazing and get married someday but I don’t have my future wedding planned out in my head. I am too nomadic to commit to buying a house. Dear God, picking a city to live in is an epic mission, never mind ONE HOUSE. That takes a level of commitment I don’t have.

Kids. Oh hell no. I’m sure they’re lovely and there are thousands of women out there who’d give their all to have one. I am not that woman. Sleep deprivation isn’t on the menu and I feel cornered the minute people want too much from me. When cornered I bolt for the hills and nothing short of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy is going to stop me once the exit has been chosen. It’s a wise person who knows their limitations.

That in itself gets people riled up to the nth degree. Tell someone you don’t want kids and it’s like you’ve admitted to killing puppies. Someone once asked me outright what was wrong with me. I’m not easily offended but THAT hacked me off in Technicolor. How about it’s none of your damn business? People do not realize how deeply offensive it is to ask someone what their plans are on child-bearing.

Has it occurred to you that maybe one or both of the couple can’t have kids? Or maybe they’ve just miscarried but no-one knew they were expecting? Maybe they just don’t want any? Maybe it’s an affordability issue? Maybe they’re in debt up to their eyeballs because fertility treatments cost the earth and this is their last chance? Maybe…. You should just worry about your own vagina for a change? Just an idea.

The perfect life I was trying to emulate turned out not to be that perfect after all. While there’s no house to call my own, or husband that I come home to, I have some amazing memories and experiences. I have freedom and that means more to me than anything on this planet.

There’s so much focus on success, however you choose to define it, that we often don’t see how many people have shut themselves off in a bid to cope. Depression is so mainstream you’re almost strange if you haven’t been depressed at least once. We dull our senses with depressants, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol and whatever else is available to get away from the guilt of not being good enough; because we’re not meeting someone else’s expectations. People are tuning out of their lives; in some tragic instances ending it completely.

The quest to be perfect has become so obsessive that people spend hours loathing their reflection because they had an unscheduled snack that amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. It’s OK to have a minute of pleasure every now and then without having to punish yourself for it.

How much pressure are you putting on yourself? I’ll play Devil’s Advocate and ask are you maybe inadvertently pressuring those around you to perform to your standards? Each person’s dreams and goals are as unique as they are so maybe take a minute before judging someone else’s success or failure.

Before you pile on the self-loathing and pity from having ‘failed’, you might want to check if the thing you’re killing yourself to achieve is something you actually want. Or are you living up to someone else’s expectations of what you should want?

Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order – Anne Wilson Schaef

Listen to Anne; you might be able to ditch a ton of baggage at this stop.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

It is once again Groundhog Day. No, not the everyday one, the actual one. Over the past 5 years, there have been 3 blizzards on Groundhog Day, 2 of them ranking in the top 5 since records began.

This year there was another blizzard warning out but it missed us slightly and dumped a pile of white fluffy junk on Wisconsin. Sorry y’all!

Last year we got to work from home during what turned out to be the 5th worst blizzard since records began. Below is what I wrote that day and now more than ever, it holds true for me.

February 2, 2015

There are those who are truly blessed in life to know where the road will take them. For the rest of us, it’s a garbled map of nonsensical signs, detours and dead-ends. You might also hit a few significant potholes along the way.

For as long as I can remember the written word has been a haven, a hiding place from a world I never asked to be a part of. My punishment for misbehaving as a child was to have my books taken away. Before I could read unsupervised, I had a tape-recorder with cassettes and books to read along to. So my parents would take my tape recorder away because without it my books were a locked door I could not enter. It was worse than death. I’ve always loved books more than people.

As a teenager I dreamed of one day buying a used typewriter to get the words out of my head onto paper faster. Handwriting was too slow.

Words were my escape from what were seemingly insurmountable challenges and circumstances that eroded my will to live. Whether it was writing to music, writing dialogue with the voice in my head, or just writing to understand my thoughts, I have always found peace on the pages. It was as healing to my soul as my piano was.

Many people I’ve met have told me that I have a way with words and I’ve secretly been filing that away in my mind for decades, hoping that the way would make itself clear. To date, that has not been the case.

The yearning to follow the writer’s path has never gone away. If anything it’s intensified over time, the words doing all they can to get out of my head and onto paper. I’ve mostly ignored it and distracted myself with ‘living.’

Living. What a joke. Looking at the map I’ve used to get me to this juncture in life it has suddenly struck me that I’ve successfully made my way to Existence. Brilliant destination if you’re ever looking for the Black Hole of the world. Happiness is optional. In fact, happiness is unlikely, but hey, you could luck out and hit the lottery.

Creativity is not for the faint-hearted. If you had to picture someone who could make a living from their craft, what immediately springs to mind? Bohemian? Hippie? Poor struggling artist living on beans and toast in a cramped room? Maybe an unkempt appearance with a flair for ridiculous hats?

How about the person next to you on the train trading their dream to be a painter for a desk job that slowly sucks out their soul? The person selling their spirit incrementally, day by day in exchange for a wage that pays the bills rather than singing?

I am that person on the train. You’ll recognize me as the one dressed mostly in black with my head buried in a book, or headphones rammed into my skull to stop the world intruding on my thoughts.

The words are ganging up on me. It’s Do or Die time. They’re never going to go away, not until I let them out to do what they were made to do. To bring ideas, meaning and feeling into existence for others to see.

There is a saying, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ My teacher arrived today.

My best friend sent me a copy of the speech she is giving for her Toastmaster’s club. It was about conquering fear even when every fiber of your being is screaming NO. Well that hit home like a ton of bricks!

Fear has defined most of my life to this point. I won’t bore you with the details but I’ll just say it was epic. A part of that fear has been the fear of exposing my creativity to be judged by others. My writing has always been my own. My music was my own. I’ve never wanted fear to scare me away from them. So I’ve taken the safe, sterile road through life; the pot-holed highway to Existence. What a ride…

Along this little train wreck of a highway, there have been signs. You wouldn’t really expect anything less from Life’s Highway, would you? Little signs, huge honking billboard signs, bright shiny light signs. There were also signs that were covered in plastic because the off ramp ahead was closed for construction.

Now if you think about any highway on the planet, it’s almost certain that for every off-ramp, there’s a matching on-ramp on the other side. I mean, people need to turn around, right? You can’t necessarily do a U-turn in the middle of the road but the people at the place who built the roads gave you other options. It’s pretty much idiot-proof. Thank heavens SOMEONE planned ahead!

This would lead to the conclusion that for every sign you’ve missed there’s a place down the line where you can turn this bus around and head back the right way. Granted, there are different kinds of signs.

If you were driving out of Chicago and missed the turn off to Naperville, there’d be a few signs up ahead to still get you to Naperville. The further away you get from your intended destination the signs aren’t clearly marked anymore. They become new destinations, other towns, different names. But at no point does this mean that you cannot turn around and head back for Naperville. You just need to navigate through a few other places along the road home. It’s more of a challenge.

It’s not much different when you miss the turning to your creative calling. You can find your way back but it’s going to take some creative map reading or a satnav that isn’t possessed with the compulsion to only take left turns.

My friend’s speech brought home how many times I’ve chosen the safe option. Is that how I want my life to be defined and remembered? ‘She played it safe.’

I cannot say that would be an epitaph I’d be happy with.

We were blessed with a blizzard last night. Apparently the 5^th largest blizzard since records began. Oh, it’s also Groundhog Day. February 2, 2015. 4 years ago today we had the 3^rd largest blizzard since records began. Consistency, I like it!

Because of that little gift from the clouds above I worked from home today. After logging off, I went into my bedroom to see how the chunk of snow hanging off the roof was doing. At some point during the day icicles had formed from the melting snow. One of them was truly spectacular. It wasn’t just the straight up dangly icicle. It was flat at the top and curved down at an angle creating the beginning of a helix but bladed like a knife, catching the setting sun at the perfect angle.

I lay down on my bed and just stared at it for the longest time. For the first time in too many weeks my brain timed out and just observed. My body relaxed and I had nowhere to be. My laptop was off, my phone on silent, no distractions. I immortalized it in a photo. It seemed necessary. Lying there watching this sparkling icicle against a perfect blue sky. Once that pile of snow slides off the roof it will be gone. It will land on the bushes below and probably shatter. Its delicate structure wouldn’t survive the drop.

DSCN4521

It will be buried under the snow until it melts into the ground below disappearing from view. No-one was outside today. I am probably the only person who saw it sparkling in the sun like diamond lace.

What if your gift, the creativity that you’re denying is like that icicle? It’s seen by no-one yet spectacular in its beauty. That icicle had no purpose, no reason to exist. It grew from the conditions around it to exist for a short time only to fade out of sight a few hours later. Maybe that is the transient nature of art. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so let them behold it.

If my writing or your art brings beauty and inspiration to one person, is that not worth it? That icicle brought me inspiration and serenity for one afternoon. Its entire existence was to bring me something so beautiful that I was compelled to detach myself from the world to watch it. That is all. There was nothing else it needed to do. Had it not existed, or had I not worked from home to see it life would have gone on. The only difference would have been that I wouldn’t have had that moment of contemplative solitude and would have gone on blissfully unaware of it. My life would be missing a bit of serenity and I wouldn’t even know it. How many snippets of bliss have we tragically missed along the way?

Creativity is a living thing. It needs to be expressed and set free. If you choose to imprison it within, it will eat you alive until your dying day. Do it because it makes you happy. Don’t shelve it because it’s not profitable. Not everyone can do what you do so realize that what you have is rare because of it. Yes there are people who are better but it doesn’t make it any less rare. There are millions of tanzanite stones in the world, yet they are considered rare because of their finite supply. They don’t all look identical and they aren’t all the same size. Why would your art need to fit a mold? It doesn’t and the sooner we all realize that the sooner fear won’t have a voice in this dialogue.

There will always be those who will give a negative review. That is unavoidable. It’s like wanting everyone to love mayonnaise. What matters are the ones who find inspiration and just plain joy in what you have to offer. THOSE are the ones you are called to serve. Those are the ones you were made to inspire. The negative reviewers have their happiness scheduled with someone else and that’s ok.

There’s no way of knowing when the hourglass is about to drop its last few grains. So maybe, just maybe, you need to whip out your map and make a U-turn. It’s time to head home. Don’t forget to find inspiration on the road back. It’s everywhere if you only look up once in a while

Stuck between two cliches…

My life is stuck between 2 clichés at the moment; never put off until tomorrow what you can do today and nothing ventured, nothing gained. The irony of it all is that I know I need to cross the line that keeps me in my comfort zone yet I keep telling myself that there’s always tomorrow; that mythical day that never arrives.

I have often imagined my dream life and the person I would be in it. Yet, when faced with the choice of doing what it will take or doing what I normally do, I tell myself that it’s just ‘one last day of bad eating because I’ll fix it tomorrow.’ The only problem is tomorrow is about a decade overdue. It never came.

Do you put yourself out there and do what you’ve always wanted to do or stay on the hamster wheel? ‘I’ll write tomorrow.’ ‘I’ll start my photography on the weekend.’ ‘I’ll work on my craft at some point but right now I have to do this other thing.’ The list of creative excuses is endless. I’ve made them all.

The intention when I started this blog was to find my way home; no small project by any stretch of the imagination. Emigrating is not for the faint hearted. It’s not simply a case of picking a destination on the map and heading off to pastures new. Nothing stays the same when you emigrate.

To do this is going to take an indestructible willpower and the resources to get it done.

While most of us are stuck in a scarcity mentality there really is no need to be. We live in an infinite universe if we’re only willing to see it; instead we see lack because that’s what we’re focused on finding. The resources are there, the means to do this are all there. There’s a BUT here. The resources are there BUT they are outside of my comfort zone. If I want to fund this endeavor, this is going to mean finding alternative flows of income to supplement the one I already have. It might involve making money doing something I’ve always dreamed of doing yet never grew the balls to try in case I failed.

To win the prize I need to venture outside of my safe zone into the unknown. If you will not venture there you cannot expect to gain. At my core I know this to be a fundamental truth. This isn’t the first time tackling emigration. So why I can’t I remember what pushed me to succeed the last two times? What was the catalyst that propelled me out of the paddling pool into the ocean?

Instead I’m consciously putting off until tomorrow things I need to do now. Why do we do that? We know what we need to do, yet we resist. We want to change our situation yet we simultaneously fear changing. We want the situation to change while wanting ourselves to stay the same.

Wherever you go you take yourself with you. The scenery might look different but the view will be the same. Your view on the world will not change if you do not change. It really is that simple. Expecting your life to change when you hold the same limited view of it is a bit like expecting to see a different view out of your window just because you changed the glass.

Growth demands we venture out of what we know into what we don’t know in order to learn something new. Sure, it’s risky. Change always is but risk and fear are not synonymous and maybe that’s the clue.

You can’t please everyone.

This should be glaringly obvious but we’re a stubborn species; we’ll try and prove this one wrong all day long. We get our clichés confused and insist that impossible is actually ‘I’m possible’. We undertake an epic attempt at being The Little Engine That Could in our quest to please everyone.

Then we hit a wall. Sometimes gently but most times going full speed. The shattering realization that you’ve thrown your energy into a bottomless well that will never give you water.

Taking a step back to gain perspective is necessary and at times soul-destroying. It was for me. I rearranged my entire life as a pre-teen when my parents divorced. The choice was Mom or Dad. How does a 10 year old make that choice? It wouldn’t be an easy choice as an adult; it’s practically impossible as a child.

My kid logic looked at the question very simplistically. If I choose Mom, Dad will be hurt. If I choose Dad, Mom will be hurt. I love them both so who do I hurt? I couldn’t choose so I went to live with my Grandmother from the age of 12. My choice.

Needless to say my life turned out differently than it might have if I’d chosen a different path. In some ways I think it was the best decision; in others it stunted my emotional development. More than a decade disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle of depression. The darkest years of my life when I could barely get myself going every day and I still threw the miniscule amount of energy I could find into making sure no-one got hurt. Everyone around me needed to be happy.

There are different levels of being a people-pleaser. I took the express train into the wall. Thankfully the wall was at Flight Center and I booked a ticket the hell out of my life. I relocated my will to live to distant shores and set up my life in England.

Being geographically separated from the people I’d been trying to please since I could sit up straight made a world of difference. I was finally myself.

It’s not easy choosing yourself when you’ve never done it before. It’s harder realizing that the people you’ve so carefully ‘protected’ and sacrificed for would not do the same for you if the roles were reversed. I’m not referring to parenting here, that’s a different scenario altogether.

Each person is solely responsible for their own happiness. Happiness is a conscious decision. It’s not a guaranteed response to what’s going on around you. You cannot consciously choose for someone else to be happy if they are not making that same decision for themselves.

There are people who are naturally optimistic and then there are the others. I am sometimes that other. The one who is angry all the time and more than a little bit negative. Most times it’s something getting on my wick, I blow a fuse, vent some crazy and then I feel better again.

The others are the ones who expect happiness to knock on their door with a string quartet in tow. Happiness knocks but they don’t open the door because who the hell is bugging me at this hour?!

This might be a crazy analogy but when you’re a people-pleaser, you’re a bit like a window washer. You’re cleaning everyone else’s windows except your own but you can only ever reach the outside windows. You can’t clean someone’s windows from the inside, that’s their domain. So they can have the cleanest damn windows on the outside, but if they haven’t cleaned the gunk off the inside, they’ll never appreciate the view. People who thrive off people-pleasers are not the window-washing type. They’ll always have dirty windows on the inside so your efforts will have been for naught.

When you live your life entirely to make other people happy at your own expense, they get to live twice. They live their own life and they live yours too. You don’t get to live at all. Before you throw more of yourself into a one way transaction, remember that time is irreplaceable. You might want to be careful where you spend it because every minute you spend trading your happiness for someone else’s, is one minute closer to the end of your clock.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

Funnily enough, this little nugget has been rearing its head a lot lately. The irony is that the pastures we’re trying to escape are probably the same pastures we ran to with open arms in the not too distant past.

I see this in my own life and recently I’ve been noticing it in others too. Is it part of the human condition to never be satisfied?

In my own life it’s disguised as the need to keep moving. The constant whisper in my head that something needs to change. The change is never clear and eventually frustration drives me out of my mind and I go all in, balls to the wall and just change it all. That way I’m likely to find the offending culprit because nothing stayed the same.

That’s the call now. Pack. Move. Go. GET OUT OF HERE. Yet only 5 short years ago I was on the piece of land I’m now longing to return to. I was living in England and packing up my life to move here because I was just sick of it all. I needed a change. So I changed.

I envisioned a life here, the friends I would have and the things I would do. I would live.

Turns out the plan got lost in the move. I left my friends behind and moved to a place where I became the square peg in the round hole. Stubbornness has stopped me from rounding my edges to fit in. Why should I?

My aunt told me once that I need to maybe be less honest when dealing with other people. Not in the sense that I should lie to them but tone down my life experiences ‘because it intimidates people.’ Tough. Sorry but just because you’ve never crossed a state line in your life doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I’m like you. I’m not.

I moved my life to this pasture and I didn’t water it. My life was lived in half measures that didn’t make the best use of the energy I expended living. The grass died and it’s a pretty damn barren field right now. Meanwhile the field I left behind is so green it burns my retinas.

Maybe it’s a design flaw in humans. No matter how much we have, we need and want more. I see it in the people around me. We fault and complain about our jobs for whatever reasons; not enough money; don’t like the people we work with; not enough time off; the list is endless. So off they go and look for new jobs with better money, nicer people, a boss they can live with and all the other magic ingredients that make up a greener pasture.

Voila. Found it. New job and off they go. For a few weeks you hear about how amazing it all is and all the new magic stuff they get that they never got before. The people are great, the perks are pure magic and finally they’ve arrived at the greenest pasture ever grown.

Fast forward 3 months, 6 months, maybe a year and it’s back to ‘FML, I hate this place. I hate my job. I need more money. I don’t earn enough. I’m sick of working hard and getting no reward and recognition for it. My boss wants too much and I’m out.’

Where was the tipping point? On what day did the scale fall out of balance back onto the barren pasture side of the equation? Or is it that our lives expanded into the new pasture so completely that it sucked the life out of it? Our lives now need infinitely more to be satisfied and the cycle starts again.

How much is enough? Or do we even have ANY clue as to what would make us happy?

Happiness is a fairly nebulous concept when you think about it. Maybe it has a colour or a sound to it. Maybe it has a shape. Maybe it has none of those things. It floats up in the next pasture like a will-o-the-wisp luring us forward only to disappear the minute we reach it and pop up in the next field; taunting us to a never-ending game of catch.

The grass is greenest where you water it. So what stops us watering it with love and attention? What prevents us from tending the pasture when we arrive? Is it that we’re distracted by the will-o-the-wisp in the next field and gardening duties just fall by the wayside while we try to chase it down? Do we spend any time enjoying the view from the new pasture before setting our sights on the freakishly green one over the next hill?

DSCN6659 — The cottage on Culloden Battlefield in greener pastures

I haven’t given one iota of care and attention to my life here. I’ve lived, paid my bills and traded my hours for money. Well….. actually that’s not entirely true. I’ve travelled more than I ever have before. I’ve seen my bestie almost every year since I moved here because she’s just a hop over the border in Canada. We’ve gone diving in Mexico which was never on my list of places to go and I loved it! I’ve visited cities it never occurred to me to see and they’ve all been incredible. I’ve made some great lifelong friends. I’ve spent time reconnecting with my family which are bonds I’d never nurtured before. They mean a lot to me now.

Those were the flower beds I planted in my field. Some of those will continue to bloom each year, coming back better and more beautiful than the year before. Others will die off as seasonal plants do. They were beautiful in their time and they will fade from view to be replaced by something new.

Switching pastures is a tedious affair, make no mistake about that. So before you do it again, decide if the new pasture will be worthy of your care and loving attention because that’s what it’s going to take. If you want it to be burn-your-eyes-green, you need to appreciate and care for it. Enjoy the view and stop obsessing about the field over the fence. It’s just another field.

Ignorance is bliss!

The search for meaning in mundane clichés has yielded some unexpected nuggets of clarity. Well, maybe that’s not entirely correct; I did expect to find meaning. What I didn’t expect is how relevant that meaning would be.

Let’s start with ignorance is bliss. Oh the irony… I don’t suffer fools gladly so out of all the clichés that could possibly hold meaning, this was the last one I thought I’d ever find wisdom in.

The start of a new year generally brings new beginnings, resolutions we mean to keep in the hope they will bring meaning and balance to our frenetic lives. We all do it, even knowing as we do that those resolutions will probably fall by the wayside before the month is out. The hardcore among us manage to pull off some of their resolutions; the rest of us are sipping hot chocolate with extra cream even while bemoaning that blasted 10 lbs. that just won’t shift.

My only resolution for this year is to be happy. Find what makes me happy and do that. Never mind the weight, forget winning the lottery; just be happy!

This means simplifying, decluttering and making room in my days for happiness to intrude. I whittled down my e-mail lists, cancelled subscriptions and I stopped reading the news. I went from reading news sites dozens of times a day to nothing. Complete cold turkey on anything remotely news related. The only exception is I still check the weather because that’s just sensible.

If there’s been a shooting/bombing/murder/robbery/riot/racist incident/terrorist threat, I don’t know about it. It’s been 24 days of no news articles. Nada. And let me tell you, BLISS! Ignorance really is bliss!

The constant inundation of bad news and tragic events isn’t necessary to function. Information overload doesn’t always serve the cause. When you click into a news site, you have no control over what’s going to be in your face. You can control whether or not you actually read the entire article, but there’s no control over all the car crash headlines jostling for your attention. The headlines suck us in with the lure of gory details; it’s like a car crash that sickens you to your stomach but you can’t look away.

We don’t need to be hooked up to every little thing in life. People are so afraid they’ll miss something that they’re constantly monitoring everything to make sure nothing slips by them. Here’s a question. Does having all of this extra information make you any happier?

It doesn’t make me one iota happier knowing that Kim Whatsherface has decided she’s only going to eat foods that start with a P or wear her hair in a side parting instead of tied up. Who gives a damn?

It’s time to pull the plug on all the meaningless and depressing bullcrap that doesn’t matter to you. By all means, be informed if you need to be but don’t drown yourself in every little detail. If you can live without it and it doesn’t make you smile, kick it to the curb. You can’t get flustered and uptight about things that aren’t on your radar and therein lies the bliss.