I have to say the past 12 month have been very educational for me. I have learned a lot about life, health and myself and I am looking forward to learn loads more in the coming 12 month and beyond. I am looking forward to what life has in stock for me, I am convinced this is going to be a great year and I will have some changes coming up. I can feel it in the air.
My goals for my 32 year of life is to learn and explore more about life, especially in the area of health and good (healthy) food and share my knowledge with others. I am also convinced I will have some changes in my working life, not too sure what exactly that might be, but change is going to happen. Maybe I will finally write that book I have in me or start some teaching or expand my business or all three.
I am excited about this ‘year’. Especially since my mother and brother along with some more family and friends are coming to Australia in early January, I haven’t seen them for about 5 years. I have planned a big trip for the eight of us, travelling to the Northern Territory (Ayers Rock) and then all the way from Cairns in Queensland to Sydney. I will write about it in detail once I am back.
A birthday is just another day if you are not excited about it, so I choose to be happy about it and make it a special occasion. You only turn 32 once in a lifetime.
Isn’t it ironic that every time just before your vacation you suddenly get so busy that you actually don’t know where left and right is anymore? I normally manage to schedule my workload so well that I don’t have to ever think about work outside of work hours, but this week sure hit me like truck. Funny enough everything has to be finished before I leave, as if I would never come back or take three month off.
I am going to New Zealand the day after tomorrow, and I am very much looking forward to it. It will only be for nine days but I am sure I will enjoy every bit of it.
It has been over a year since my last vacation and after this week I sure feel like I need a month off.
One thing I have learned today though is that you need to speak up, when you need help. Once put forward to the boss that I might not be able to finish everything despite staying back till all hours of the night, really made a difference... Fist of all we figured out what really needed to be done urgently and then got some of the coworkers to give me a hand as well.
I am funny when it comes to working, for some reason I always want to do it myself. I guess that comes from my parents constant reminder “if you want it done right, do it yourself” and as much as that is hammered into my head, I am learning to let go of this belief and actually enjoy being helped.
I will not be able to write any blogs in the next ten days, but I will make sure to tell you all about New Zealand when I get back. Hope you have a great week
As mentioned in some of my other articles I visit my country retreat almost every weekend. We bought this beautiful piece of Australian shrubs about two years ago. And yes, since then we have spent many hours fixing up the little house and cleaning up the land.
It is an idyllic 100 acres of undulating fields with eucalypt trees and native bushes. Even though it seems like I am working harder on my weekends then during the week at my job, it gives me a certain joy and sensation of achievement. We are still living a bit ‘backwards” and that is, I believe, what makes it so enjoyable. For once we do not have electricity. We use hammer and nails to build structures and only rely on the power inverter which we hook up to our car to do the jobs where we just cannot do without. A tractor is another luxury we ought to buy one day when we can find the right one for the right prize…
Even though I do have a fully (well maybe not as fully as in the city) functioning kitchen, I prefer to do my cooking outside on a campfire or in my pizza oven, which took 6-7 weekends to finish. I am not a labourer and bricklaying is not something I have ever done before, but I gave it a go and with lots of trial and error this oven is now my pride and joy. It makes the best pizzas and fantastic breads and roasts.
This weekend however I did some cooking on a campfire in a big cast iron pot. For the first time since cooking on fire, my dinner burned. It was disgraceful. And all just because I left the pot without supervision for 15 minutes to check on some sheep our neighbour gave us.
Our three little sheep…. Our neighbour had little to none grass left on his property and because we have no animals other then natives anywhere in the place he gave us three of his sheep to take care of. They are still a bit shy, probably because they grew up in a big herd with little contact to humans, but we are getting closer to them every week. If anybody has some tricks on how to get them to be less shy, I would appreciate some advice…
The best things in the country are by far, the fresh air and the wonderful starry nights. It is the most WOW experience to just lay or sit next to your campfire and stare into the sky. I have never seen so many stars, so clear and bright. My big dream is to build a couple of extra cabins and hire them out to visitors for holiday accommodations, but for now I will just enjoy it with friends and family.
But for now I am looking forward to 9 days in New Zealand, leaving in 4 days…
As mentioned before happiness has many ingredients, one of them is peace. I am not talking about the peace between countries and nations, even though world peace would be a fantastic and idyllic event, no doubt about it. The peace I am talking about is the peace with ‘what is’. When we constantly argue with reality we will neither be at peace nor be happy.
Yes the world can be an unfair place and things don’t always happen the way you want them to happen, but arguing with what has already happened will not make you feel any better about the situation or yourself.
Most of the arguments arise only in our heads after the event. I am still a big offender of this; I am working on it though. You know the times when you have discussions in your head that will most probably never happen in real life. Or something happened and you play out how it could have happened if only…. (I am not the only one doing that, right?)
This is not living in peace with ‘what is’, and the best way to shut these inner arguments is by realising that you are having them in the first place. When I start the inner chatter and replaying of events, I now quickly remind myself that they are neither real nor important. We waste valuable energy every time we argue with reality.
I used to think that my boss should appreciate me more; and even though I might have liked a bit more positive feedback and recognition, the inner chatter arguing my points of why my boss should be more appreciative made me feel worse. It wasn’t that my boss didn’t like my work, nor do I know for a fact that he never appreciated me. The point is that I felt unappreciated but made it worse by whinging (Australian for whining) to myself that he doesn’t appreciate me. My thoughts made me unhappy. Fact was only that I didn’t see how much he appreciated me. And I told myself how horrible it is to work for him, whilst replaying events long gone of what I should have said and what he should have done.
You could find endless examples of this. “My husband doesn’t love me enough!”; “my mother hates me”; “my teacher always gives me bad marks because she doesn’t like me” ….
Your thoughts make you happy, and every time you have negative thoughts about who has done what, you argue with something that you cannot change or something that might not be real in the first place and will never come to pass.
This does not mean that we should turn a blind eye on incorrect behaviours, abuse or things that need attention. But instead of having the inner voice tell you all day that it was a horrible thing to happen to you, try and make peace with it. Ask your boss for a review, tell your husband you love him and wait till he replies with a ‘love you too’. Go and try to understand, why you are getting bad marks or why your mother behaves the way she does…. You might be surprised to see that it is nothing like the story you repeated over and over in your head.
I am working on this day by day, and it is not always easy to shut up the chatter in my head, but every day it gets easier to reason with what is and except it. Because every time I try and fight with reality- I loose. Time will not be reversible; the milk has been spilled, if you can’t change it- except it.
Success can mean a lot of things to different people, it starts with the most modest things like negotiating with your daughter to wear something you would pick instead of their random choosing of a ballerina dress in the middle of winter, or actually packing your own lunch instead of buying it from the fast-food shop across the office.
When we conventionally think of success we might think of a new deal at work or a happy client, more money in the bank and the boss giving us a well deserved pat on the back.
To feel successful, I set little goals and when I complete them or stick to them I get a feeling of achievement – I succeeded and when I outdo my goal I feel even better about myself. The key is to set realistic goals, don’t raise the bar too high, but make sure you do raise the bar and actually have to achieve something to reach the goal. If your goals are too high you will set yourself up for failure and that comes with a really bad feeling of unworthiness. So stay realistic…
My goal five weeks ago was to loose some excess weight I had been carrying around for quite some time. I am not overweight or anything, just felt that I needed a good detox again and flush out my body to kick start a healthier routine. Winter always presents me with a nice gift of extra kilos, as it does to many other people especially women.
On top of feeling really sluggish I also came down with a cold and had some skin blemishes that I wanted gone. My goal was to loose one or two kilos whilst eating healthy and doing some walking daily.
Today I weigh myself for the first time and measured how many cm I have lost around my waist, chest and hips. I am so pleased with the results. I lost 4 kilos, and 17 cm all up and I didn’t even try really hard. I hope nobody put a spell on me like the one in the ‘Stephen King’ book ‘Thinner’…
I feel great and for the first time I didn’t starve myself or beat myself up every time I didn’t follow the ‘diet’ correctly. You can probably imagine how successful I feel today; it makes me happy. So this day can only be good….
My next goal will be to keep living healthy with lots of fresh fruit and veggies, less processed food and keep going for a daily walk. I also want to work on my family life and find more time for fun.
To experience true happiness requires many different things; even though money and materialism seem to be so important in our lives, they on its own cannot make a person truly happy. Good health, talent and success might also be vital distributions to ones happiness, but love, both giving and receiving, is the one most important part for me to experience happiness. Without love, all the others don’t matter. What is success, when you cannot share it with someone you love and what do you do with all the riches of the world if you are by yourself and have no one to turn to.
Love is the most important part of life and there is only one way of being loved. I am not just talking about finding a husband or wife but also about the love you might receive from your family and friends, neighbors and siblings….
To be loved means to be lovable and the only way to attract someone to love you will happen when you love yourself and develop a personality which is lovable. There is no way that you can make somebody love you, other then being yourself. If you try too hard to impress someone, it will show and if you are too occupied with your looks people will see you as shallow. I am not saying not to care about your looks, as that will get you attention, but looks is not all that matters. You need a lovable personality to keep people that love you in your life.
What do I mean by lovable personality? Well that is in the eye of the beholder… I might find someone who gives me space more lovable then someone who would be fixated on me, whilst someone else might find it very lovable… Only people that don’t pretend to be someone else and show their true nature will find someone that will love them the way they are. We all have different personalities and every one of us has some sort of lovable characteristics, we just need to find the right person to appreciate it. Once you have found love don’t let go of the things that made you lovable in the first place, keep working on your good trades to make the relationship flourish.
I have been in a relationship with a very special man for over seven years (seven year itch) and we still have to work on our good and bad sides to keep the love alive. A relationship doesn’t mean you have to quit your individuality. Your individuality was what attracted your partner in the first place. Yes we have to compromise in a relationship to make it work, but it does not mean you have to give up your beliefs and personality.
So wish me luck to overcome the seven year itch- it is not always as easy as it seems to keep the love alive, but we are constantly working on it.
I just bought an MP3 player a week ago, after long thoughts of the pros and cons I went with the pros and just did it. I know people say that the constant music straight into your ears are not suppose to be great for you and the vibes of electric devices affect you as well, but I really like music, especially when I can take it with me on my walks around the park. It seems, depending on the rhythm of the song, to speed me up and put a spring into my steps. It is great. If you exercise and I hope you take the time out to do so, I can only recommend bringing along some music. It makes it a whole lot more enjoyable.
I will also invest in some audio books to put onto my player. How good will it be to listen to a book whilst cooking your dinner, or whilst driving to work….?
So if you are like me, why not invest in a bit of fun in the form of a MP3 player?
