Reverb day 17: here, we spell it 'arsehole'

How can you stop being an a**hole, get out of your own way and make room for more of your magic to happen in 2015?



Today I would like to be a tortoise. I would like to pull my head and arms and legs into a shell, and go to sleep in a box full of straw, and spend the winter in a shed. And nobody would find this at all odd because, you know, that's what tortoises do. Nobody would feel at all hurt or insulted, nobody would expect me to send them Christmas cards, nobody would expect me to be anywhere but in my box. Because I am a tortoise.

Which is a long way of saying that I am knackered, and have been driving myself far too hard and expecting far too much of myself. I have been doing too much travelling, too much socialising, too much messing around on the internet... Not that I don't love all those things, but there are ways of doing them that drain me, and ways of doing them that fill me up, and at the moment they all seem to be wearing me out. Hence my desire to hibernate.

How can I sort this out for next year? I have a couple of ideas, and they are mostly about being more clever with my diary. Firstly, I'm thinking about working from home one day a week. I'd been resisting this, because of being terrified that I'd end up a hermit, never speaking to anybody - but one day a week is unlikely to result in this dire scenario becoming reality. On an ordinary work day I travel one hundred and sixteen miles. If I don't have to do that five days running, I think I'll wind up much less tired. Also, I've seen a small ad from a piano teacher who does daytime lessons. One of those hours that I'm not spending on the train, I can use for piano.

Then I can be clever with my annual leave. My employer is extremely generous when it comes to annual leave. This year, now I don't have to use it on moving house and boring stuff like that, I'm going to book at least two separate weeks of absolutely nothing at all, as well as using some of it on actual honest to God holidays. And by 'holidays' I do not mean 'visiting my parents on the Isle of Wight again': dearly as I love my parents, visits to them are never as relaxing as I think they're going to be. Also, it's high time I went abroad again.

Next year, I'm going to let myself have fun, damn it.

Reverb day 18: stop, look and listen

In the busyness of the everyday, taking time to nourish the soul doesn't reach the top of the 'to do' list as often as it should.

What nourishes your soul? How would you like to incorporate more of this into your life in 2015?



I could quote the whole of The Elixir, which is all about making the mundane suffused with the divine, so that the busyness of the everyday itself contains that which nourishes the soul. This is part of it; this is why I am so captivated at the moment with the bells and the hours, the moments that make me stop, and listen, and find the deep well of peace that is within myself and everywhere.

There is more to it, for it cannot be denied that it is an awful lot easier to stop and listen when I remember that this is something that I am supposed (ha!) to be doing, and so, when I make space for myself to do it, I find that there are many more of those prompts to stop and listen.

My commitment for 2015, therefore, is to book myself a retreat, and then, before I go on it, to book myself another one. To join the new work choir. To attend Wednesday communion when I possibly can. And to find a way of talking about this that doesn't sound like I'm teaching a toddler how to cross the road, though perhaps it's not such a bad analogy.