Warning: there’s a bit of swearing in this one. 😉
”I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear: I’m not screwing around. It’s time.” ~ Brene Brown
I’ve always been the girl with the plan. If I wanted to write a book or lose weight or start exercising or learn something, I would sit down and figure out where I wanted to be, then work backwards. If you were to open any past planner of mine, you would find at least one countdown on those pages.
But I never got there.
I never got to the end of the countdown with success. I never ended at my goal weight, I never wrote 50,000 words in a month and I never got to ten push-ups.
Why?
I think for four reasons:
- I’ve always been a bit rebellious and my ‘screwyouiwon’tdowhatyoutellme’ notion sadly even works on self-imposed rules.
- I was getting something out of staying where I was. If I never got there, I wouldn’t have to see what there meant.
- I bought whole-heartedly into the notion of ‘be gentle with yourself.’ But instead of doing that, I used it as an excuse to not show up if I didn’t feel like it or if I was tired or if or if or if…
And that’s all crap. Yep, all just excuses.
Yesterday I did a long guided meditation in which I asked my guides for the answer to a question. There is some stuff I want to clear, and this seemed like as good an idea as any. I went in, I sat at the feet of a guide, and I asked my question. The answer?
“Stop fucking around and show up.”
Not your usual answer, but I took it, mostly because I’ve been getting the same answer for weeks in my writing and my course creation and my journalling: just show up.
Over the past twenty-four hours, I have read the other part of that phrase four different times in four different places: stop fucking around.
Those words? Five times in two days? Really?
Today I counted – because that is what I do – and I realised that it is 90 days until my birthday. And within those 90 days, we will be moving into our house. Usually that would have me making a Plan and writing a goal in my diary.
But not today. Today I am admitting that that doesn’t work, and instead I am going to stop fucking around and just show up at the page. Every day. No matter what. No matter how I feel or where I have to go or what I have to do. Everything counts. This matters. My work matters.
I matter.
90 days of showing up. 90 days until my birthday. 90 days.
I can count that down.
It’s a good Plan.
xo
During one of the calls, Jamie had us visualise our future self. Now, I am more auditory than visual, so I have found visualising a challenge in the past, but Jamie always manages to get me to ‘see’ something.
Fast forward to last week. I was sitting on the couch with my husband and we were having a conversation about True things. We were quiet for a moment and out of somewhere I got a strange feeling of, ‘oh there you are!’ and felt this weird click.
In that moment I could only sit and breathe and wonder, and it has taken me a few days to process it all. I feel different, and all I can feel right now is gratitude. There is so much more to all of this than we can possibly imagine. It’s a Mystery and a dance and a conversation.
