I was looking through some blog archives the other day (as you do), and I realised that so much of what I’ve already written, I could really do with reading again. Isn’t that funny? I think what happens is that I get a *bolt of inspiration* and then I write it down, quickly, before it disappears, and then it slowly fades out of mind. So I’m starting a new kind of blog post: Memory Lane Monday.

Each week, on a Monday, I’ll post something from ages ago that I feel I could do with learning again. Okay? Here goes!

Under pressure?

February 20th, 2008

As all those who know me will attest, I’m nowhere near ready for kids. I’m far too selfish for that – I love being able to come home and read for hours without interruption, I can’t imagine having to look after someone every single day for the rest of my life (even after your kids leave home, you never really stop worrying about them – we all know that). But this lack of desire for children is underwritten by a deep belief that as soon as I want to have a baby, I’ll be able to. And more and more these days, that isn’t the case. Infertility is becoming more and more common, and it’s one of those problems that nobody wants to talk about. Isn’t that crazy? It’s just like any other physical condition – it shouldn’t be something to keep hushed up.

But it is. Which is why I am so moved by this beautiful video by Keiko Zoll. It gave me goosebumps. When you have five minutes to spare, give it a watch. It’s the kind of video we all need to see, so that we can start talking about infertility and sharing the burden a little more.

What if we stopped dealing with difficult things on our own, and shared a little more? What if?

What IF? A Portrait of Infertility from Keiko Zoll on Vimeo.

For more from Keiko, visit her blog – Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed.

If you’re looking for an instant feel-good hit, check out this video.  (And this picture, how cute is that baby?)
What a pleasure!

And the perfect way to get yourself turned back downstream… Allow me to elaborate:
I had a very admin-full morning today, lots of things to do and people to chat to and meetings to co-ordinate. And by lunchtime I was starting to feel, if not grumpy, then at least a little gritchy. My To Do List for lunch involved two nasty errands: dropping off my tax forms at SARS (the South African Revenue Service) and returning a broken phone, without the original box or receipt.
Yack! What a combo.

So I made sure to get myself in the zone before I ate my lunch. I watched the video (above, again, watch it, now) and got goosebumps. I thought about what a beautiful day it is, how much I love Fridays, how lucky I am.

And then I went to the SARS offices. Where they told me I had to come back next week because the wait time was over 2 hours. I didn’t freak out, asked if I could check if I had all my forms, and spoke to a wonderful lady at Reception who took all my forms and told me I didn’t have to come back, I could just call and get my tax number next week! Amazing.
And then, as if I even need to say this, I went to Telkom and they gave me a new phone no problem…

So when I say getting in the zone makes everything go your way, I really, really mean it. Try it – and let me know how it goes.

Photo: CharlotteSpeaks

I haven’t been talking much about our incredible six months of travelling, not because I don’t want to share stories about it, but because it actually feels like a long time ago… And then every so often I’ll remember something and think, “No way! That was only 3 months ago.” Or less – we’ve only been home for 6 weeks. I suppose it’s the kind of thing where stories will leak out of me slowly.

There is one moment I distinctly remember, though:
We were on top of this mountains in Java, Indonesia, staying at a charming little place where the whole village focuses on a 3am wake-up call to jeep up to this lookout point and watch the sun rise over the Gunung Bromo volcano. Incredible stuff. Once the sun is up, you walk across the field of ash surrounding the volcano, and up to the rim, where you can look into its sulfurous heart. It was a completely extraordinary morning.

But I remember that afternoon, sitting in the garden of this hotel in Java, listening to the village going about its business, breathing in the crisp air scented with woodsmoke, and thinking, “There is just as much beauty in the simple things in life.” We were nearing the end of our fourth month of travelling, and I had an acute sense of how wonderful it would be to drink a cup of tea (a real cup of tea!) slowly on the verandah of my own home. To prepare a really delicious meal for the two of us to eat. To spend time with my family. To watch my niece playing. To talk about everything and nothing to my mom on the phone without having to worry about the cost of the call.

And now that we are home, I’m happy to say that I still think these are wonderful things.
We just had a four day weekend, and I spent it eating with family and friends. Pretty much the whole weekend. Just eating. On Friday we had my man’s parents and grandpa over for tea and cake; Saturday we went for a beach picnic with friends in the morning, and a braai with other friends in the afternoon; Sunday we had a long, lazy lunch with my brothers and their lovely ladies; and today we went to the incredible Strandloper seafood restaurant with my brothers and a whole heap of friends (seven courses of seafood dished up on the beach… Wow.)

I suppose it’s also a novelty because I now have two brothers living in Cape Town (how lovely!) so I’m able to spend real family time without having to fly home to Durban (although I’ll still want to do that to see my other brother and my parents). Maybe it’s just the glow of having returned home so recently. But I think it’s as simple as this:

Life offers us a bouquet of moments that we can either appreciate or let slip through our fingers. They don’t last – most bouquets don’t – but if we can taste them fully as they are happening, I think that’s as whole and rich and wonderful a life as we can hope for.

What do you think?

Photo: Praziquantel

I downloaded three short videos to watch, and one of them gave me what I like to call a ‘brain explosion’ – a sudden realisation of something that should be really obvious.

She’s talking about how we all know what it is we want, and often spend our days complaining about what we want and how we don’t have it. I think, in general, I’m pretty good at not complaining, but I caught myself last night saying to Mark how I don’t know how we got to this point – of needing to be careful of our budget – and I don’t think it’s fair because we’ve been giving it our 100%, and I don’t want to go back to having to consciously stop myself worrying about money, like we were doing in the month before our trip when we didn’t know if it would be possible. Sounds a tad like complaining, don’t you think?

You know what he said? ‘It doesn’t matter how we got here.’

At the time I didn’t really pay attention to what he was saying (I’m really good at continuing a one-way discussion when I’m on a roll), but essentially this is what Esther was saying this morning: You have to stop beating the drum of how you got here and how things used to be and how much you want them to be different, or you can’t receive what you’ve been asking for. By constantly looking over your shoulder and dwelling in the past, or worrying about the future, you never give the Universe (or God, or whatever you’d like to call it), a spare second to break through and give you what you’re asking for.

The solution? Instead of worrying about what it is you want, focus on the future in a hopeful, positive way. Look forward to the life you’ve asked for coming your way. In many ways, this is exactly what our Round the World trip is about – we looked forward to it for months and months. But it’s easy to slip back into old habits, and I think that’s what’s happened when it comes to money. I feel like if I don’t worry about it then the situation won’t right itself. But in truth, as long as we’re doing all we can to earn as we travel, worrying makes absolutely no sense. And it certainly doesn’t make a difference!

So from now on I’m focusing on the future that I want. Care to join me?

It came up because of the behaviour of a certain friend (remember when I asked for your advice about friends here?)
It’s one of the friends I’ve been slowly growing apart from, and it’s pretty closely linked to the post I wrote before, about how I always expect friends to be as present for me as I am for them. Now that I got that great advice from all of you, I feel a lot more comfortable about not letting it get to me as much. Which is why I could look at the situation from a distance and see the stark truth: I have a code of conduct, and the reason I’m so disappointed in this friend is because she’s not behaving the way I think she should be.

Isn’t that ridiculous?

Even more surprising for me is the fact that, although I think of myself as a very honest person, my code of conduct includes quite a few ‘put a smile on and be gracious’ clauses (is this because of my Catholic School Upbringing?) I think if you’re exiting a friendship, you should exit with grace. That you should be as polite as possible. This has definitely got me into hot water before – I remember distinctly becoming friends with a vegan guy in college (who quickly proved to be a lot weirder than I could have anticipated!) and promising that I’d bake him a vegan cake for his birthday. By the time his birthday rolled around we weren’t really friends any more, but I still baked him the cake, because I’d promised to! He was rather confused.

Still, I think it’s possible to do things in the nicest possible way, don’t you? Although that does conflict with a phrase I love from my practical philosophy class: Tell the truth pleasantly, not pleasant untruths.

What do you think? Make it nice and gracious, or be totally honest and risk hurting someone’s feelings?

The love affair started when I needed to buy a ticket to NYC for my US book release, and the best fare I could find anywhere was R10 000 return (ouch), until I logged onto Mystery Company’s website and found the same trip for R7000 return – including taxes! That’s one of the things I love about Mystery Company – they don’t pretend to be cheap and then whack on huge taxes at the end, they’re all inclusive.

Another thing I love is that their website is really, really easy to use, and easy to check different details on – want to fly another day? No problem. Want to try a different city? Sure thing.

But the thing I love most about Mystery Company is that they’re human. They have all the convenience of an online company, but you can dial a number and speak to a real live human being without any trouble. And I think that’s pretty special in these days of automated answers.

All in all, you can see why I fell in love with Mystery Company, can’t you?
And then we sent through a proposal to them, to see if they’d be interested in sponsoring our flights for our just-around-the-corner Travelling the World with Diabetes journey, and they were interested! And are sponsoring us! Because we’re on the same page. They understand that sponsoring a cause they believe in will help them out down the line.

And that’s really why I love Mystery Company. Because it’s not too often you find people who are on the same page as you, people who speak your language. I am so excited to be working with them for the next 9 months!

PS: Want to know who Mystery Company is? Check out their fascinating, travel-and-life-related blog at  http://blog.travelstart.co.za/ and their website at  http://www.travelstart.co.za/
Next month they’re celebrating their 10th birthday with some crazy competitions – I’ll keep you in the loop!

But I must admit, the last couple of weeks (possibly months) have been a difficult test of that… My man and I have been working full-time on getting this Round-the-World trip off the ground. We’ve written, designed and sent out hundreds of proposals (well, maybe not hundreds, but at least 30 or 40 which in real life is a lot of work). We’ve knocked on door after door after door, waiting for the magical one to open. We’ve thought as much out of the box as our brains would allow us, to come up with fresh solutions. It’s been hard work! Wonderful hard work, because we knew it was taking us to our dream of travelling around the world together, but on a day-to-day level it’s been pretty exhausting.

All this exhaustion reached a peak two weeks ago (today). It was the day before we were set to leave on our Joburg-Durban-Blue Train trip, and we had just found out that yet another company couldn’t help us out with sponsoring our flights. Up till then, each time someone had said no I hadn’t let it bother me – I just forged ahead and sent out the next proposal. But this time, it hit me. Hard. Because I had pretty much reached the end of my tether. I couldn’t think of anyone else who could help us out, and I couldn’t understand why people weren’t forthcoming when what we want to do – spread positive awareness about diabetes around the world – is such a great cause. I felt like we were offering delicious cupcakes to passers-by, and none of them wanted any.

I was feeling really awful about it, I must admit, but I remembered that whole thing about needing to let go and choose the downstream thought (remember I wrote about going downstream here?)

Now, those of you who have been reading for a while will know that letting go is not exactly my forte. In fact, I’m something of a control freak, so letting go is pretty painful for me to do. Still, I’d tried absolutely everything, and now it was time to hand it over to the Universe and say: Please help. I couldn’t have made it more clear what we needed to make the trip happen, so I had to let go and trust that it would come.

Did I mention that I find letting go of control extremely painful??

Anyhoo, a few hours after I made this decision, an email popped up in my inbox from a company I’d approached two weeks before and hadn’t heard back from, who now wanted to chat about our project. So exciting! Except we were leaving first thing the next morning and couldn’t meet with them till we returned… Nearly two weeks later.

The last two weeks have been full of uncertainty. While telling everyone that we were leaving on the 1st of September, we didn’t actually have any tickets (troublesome, that) and didn’t know if we’d be able to afford the whole trip unless the company in question (I’ll be writing about them later in the week, they deserve their own post!) sponsored at least a portion of our travels.

Back to real life yesterday, and within the first few hours of the day we heard that this magical company is happy to sponsor half our tickets, slicing our air ticket prices not only in half, but in a third. I cannot tell you how relieved I am! I actually felt shivery yesterday I was so relieved and happy!!

And, of course, it proves what all these books on Law of Attraction and the Art of Letting Go have been saying all along – there’s only so far you can go with action, then you have to let go and trust that what you have asked for will come to you. It might only come at the last minute (2 weeks before you leave, when you’ve already sold up and have nowhere to live after that date!) but it will come.

Phew.

Have you ever had an experience like this?

It just seems as if I’m on learning fast-forward at the moment, you know? And I know it’s because I’ve asked for a lot from life-right-now… Doing a 9 month Round-the-World journey isn’t your usual run-of-the-mill life choice. But I feel like I need to wise up really quickly to grow up to the challenge.

Is any of this making any sense? Basically, I’m having to learn a lot while being really busy and dealing with challenging situations. And it’s not exhausting, or overwhelming, but it is big. Life feels big at the moment.

How are you feeling today?

“It is very difficult to understand what anybody else’s experience is. There aren’t enough words to really understand what anybody else is living. Physical beings want things to be the same. They want people to think the same. You work rather hard at sameness, but you will never win that battle, because from Nonphysical, diversity is known to be the most beneficial part of the game.”

Find more inspiration here.