Dancing Geek

Going nowhere

Ok, I’m starting to think that I need some outside help.  I watching some pretty amazing people, do some pretty amazing things around me and I’m realising that there’s a lot I’m not facing still.  There’s a lot that’s feels like it’s hovering on the peripheral of my awareness, ready for me to turn and look at it, but I’m not looking.

Now I can come up with all kinds of rationalisation around needing to be kind to myself, and dancing round the pain, and being ok with where I am right now, but I’m feeling like I want to get going and I’m revving my engine, but I’m not taking the gears out of neutral because driving is to damn freaking scary!

I know some very cool people nowadays.  Supportive, caring, thoughtful, intelligent people.  The kind of people I craved growing up.  So now I’m putting it in writing that I’m looking for help to give me a bit of a push forward.

Where to go?

Whenever I try and consciously think about what issues I might deal with or what’s keeping me stuck I can’t seem to find anything.  It’s like there’s a little munchkin in my head that keeps all these things just out of view.  So even when I do at least pay lip service to thinking about these things the munchkin is able to whip them away as I turn my gaze and I’m left feeling like I’ve someone hiding stuff just behind my head.  Yeah, creepy, I know.

So I’m feeling stuck even knowing where to head to, and I’m feeling stuck knowing what to do about it.  Just trying to get this out feels like I’m making stuff up because I can’t think of anything to justify it other than a gut feeling and the fact that I’m not exactly living the dream right now (heck, I don’t even know what my dream is – all the stuff I want, that’s being pulled from view by that pesky munchkin too).

Any starters for 10?

A reflection on my holiday

Over my holiday I let myself just get on with the stuff that I was interested in, without thinking about whether it was reflection, action or rest time.

[As much as I'd love to think this is an amazing new way to get stuff done whilst ensuring I feel rested, I think that it's actually just a holiday.  Getting things that matter done is not always easy, reflection sometimes requires being an a hard space.  The whole point of my holiday was to have some easy time.]

Great friends and good fun

I ended up spending a long weekend with a couple of very good friends down in Somerset, chatting, playing XBox 360 (oh, how I want one now), and vegging out without feeling in the least bit self-conscious.  These guys rock!

As well as that I started to get back into cooking (more specifically baking: cake is yummy!)  Oh, I like cooking other stuff too, it seems a combination of trying and learning new things in the kitchen with enjoying ‘old favourites’ interspersed is suiting me at the moment.

My other idea of fun has been to look into what I need in order to have a more serious go at growing food this year (Ok, I admit it, Glyn did most, read all, of the work last year).

Pattern alert!

With the cooking, and the garden, it’s easy for me to get lost in books on the subject.  Flicking through amazing recipes trying to find the perfect one to try, pouring through gardening manuals trying to pick the perfect vegetables and varieties that we should grow.  Fortunately, I managed to find a few things that are relatively simple and easy to do, and I’m not too hung up about them turning out perfect so I’ve been able to actually do stuff too!

Momentum is beautiful, so I’m hoping to build on that.  Not with the intention of suddenly creating gourmet meals everyday or becoming the world’s best gardener (those these do pop up in my head and I will try to say hello in a loving way to these ideas without letting them become shoulds), but just to keep doing little bits every so often.  Little and often is rule number 2 after all!

Results so far

In the kitchen:

• a pretty decent loaf of bread that takes 1 1/2 hrs in total to prepare and bake – awesome!
• Tunisian Orange Cake (oh my god this is sooo nice!)
• Pizzas (nom nom) plus I froze one uncooked pizza base to see how that works out

In the garden:

• Cleared out rubbish pile to the tip
• Bagged up rotten leaves to use as leaf mould
• Prepared space for and put together second compost bin
• Started to turn the compost from first to second bin (aerate, hydrate and allow me to fix first bin which is falling apart a bit).

And one that is a bit of both: I got a separate mini bin for the kitchen for proper compost waste (raw veg stuff, egg shells, tea bags).  We have been putting all our kitchen waste in the council composting bin (they can take meat and cooked foods too, plus all our rabbit waste) so now I’ll be able to grab the best of that for our garden and let the council have the stuff that my little compost bin can’t digest!

You know what, it does feel better to focus on some of the good stuff I’ve been up to.  I may do this more often

My pasta is boiling over

So I had a bit of a holiday, because I needed one, because I’d been working through lots of thoughts and ideas and learning and changing and my brain and body needed a rest.

Only problem is, that after that I started to get that bubbling feeling, where I can tell there’s something under the surface starting to build up, like when I cook pasta on our annoying electric hob and because I can’t get the temperature right it’s constantly bubbling up under the lid.

Well, the starchy bubbles have started to pop out of the top of the pan, and they are spilling everywhere, making a mess, and generally unwelcome.  In the analogyverse the obvious thing to do is to take the lid off the pan.  However, that’s drastic, results in the pan then going completely off the boil and annoying to have to keep doing.

What I really want to do is get the temperature right so that I’ve got my pasta simmering away but the pan doesn’t spill over.

Balance

What I need is a balance so that I’ve got space for the stuff to come out, but that it’s not so much that I’m overwhelmed.  And in my mind I should be able to find a way for that to happen where I stay in a blissful state of balance the whole time, but I’m suddenly thinking, right now, that maybe that’s not going to happen.  That life doesn’t work like that and that it’s more a case of letting a little steam out every so often.  Little and often, my second rule for testing if something is true.

So if the method is more about little and often, about making it a practice rather than a state of being, what would that involve?

• Time to reflect
• Time to do
• Time to rest

So yeah, my holiday has interupted by Alternative MA, and that’s what it was supposed to do, but it’s also telling me that something wasn’t working.  Despite all my best intentions there apparently still wasn’t enough rest time.  Which is just horrifying, because I really tried to give myself lots of time out, more than I was necessarily comfortable with, and it looks like I need more.

Still, there’s a few things I can start back on now, including my practice for releasing a bit of the steam (Dance of Shiva, and writing here – you know, that 30 day trial thing I did a while back and haven’t wrapped up any lovely tidy conclusion from, before your mind starts wondering).

Time to do is things like the garden and cooking, both being things that are bringing me massive joy at the moment.  And lots of reading.

Rest?  That’s where I get stuck I think.  How to rest.  How to rejuvinate?  I’m so used to doing, I’m struggling to find ways of being that aren’t so far removed from the familiar that there’s no chance they’ll stick.  Add to that the fact that the second I ‘do something to relax’ it becomes another task on my list and brings all kinds of effort and expectations which are basically what I’m trying to rest from anyway.

Wise self: Dear James, you have permission to just chill out for a bit, ok?

Me: Ummm, how do I do that without ‘doing’ it?