Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
~ Guillaume Apollinaire
For the first time in my new temporary home I find some time to be here. It’s been a tough relocation — filled with complications, challenges, and situations that have set my teeth on edge. My first thought on opening this page was to write about the process of our relocation, but I found this post which was written about two weeks before we left our home in Adelaide. It was titled The space between what’s done and what’s yet to begin, and it reflects my thoughts at the time and brought to mind some lovely moments of just being.
I’m sharing it without editing as a journal reflection on that liminal space and as a small tribute to the final days in our old hometown. . .
. . .In two weeks, we will leave this place called home. We are packing up, closing down and getting reading to move on. And in this liminal space — between what’s done and what’s yet to begin, I’ve been busy with the practicalities and technicalities of integrating my work life and my passionate life story.
The busyness of finding solutions for integrating all of this into a neat new package —website, social media, a new sense of identity — has been consuming. So much so that I was forgetting to just be. The things that matter, the most important things, were taking a back seat.
What matters right now is to enjoy our final days here. In the midst of preparing to leave, there are still walks in nature, reading, and of course writing. Not the About me page or the list of services I’m offering or whether I should pin this blog post to a Pinterest board, but finding pleasure in the work of writing my story and being present right now in my life.
I understand that the practical aspects of how I will present myself to the world is important, but at the moment, it seems like it’s too much, too difficult to think about. So I’m taking a pause — crazy though it sounds with the movers turning up in thirteen days.
David Kundtz, in his book Quiet Mind stresses that stopping — whether for a moment or a month — can be the difference between simply surviving and thriving. To me, it’s like taking a deep breath, in order to remember who I am and what I want. I wrote a blog post about taking a moment to be still a while ago, but with all the activity (mind and body) happening at the moment, I lost sight of the benefits of what David calls ‘still points’. He says:
More than anything, one should have a feeling of freedom, a feeling of having no pressing needs (even though there are often pressing needs), and as complete a state of relaxation as is possible right now.
So the agenda for the next two weeks has been cleared of the technical, practical stuff that I know will be there, waiting for when the time is right and I’m stopping for a moment to regain my equilibrium. I’m going to focus on what matters right now.
Some of that is to bid farewell to familiar haunts — walks in my favourite gardens and the beach, and as well as packing my precious belongings, finding time for writing and reading, as well as practicing my drawing and photography. Finding joy in being present in this space between.
With the trauma of moving, I have only now come to appreciate the moments taken and enjoyed in that brief time before our departure. I hope that you too can find some stillness in your life to just be. Sometimes, doing nothing is the best thing to do.
Thanks Adelaide for some of the best moments of my life!
