Sarah Wilson

I am pretty much obsessed with how other people run their lives. Since I was a kid I’ve asked others what time they wake up, how they organise their mornings, what little things do they stick to to get through their day. Because I think these kind of details give an insight into their success, and the vulnerability of their character. And vulnerability is often the portal to connection. I find.

Me, I start my day at 6.30 and exercise for 40 minutes, generally at the beach because the ocean wakes me up and sets the mood for my day (my Qi Gong teacher said 15 minutes in the ocean is enough to ground you for the day). I don’t phaff around the house. It’s clothes on and out, down the hill, on my bike. Then I meditate for 20 minutes, generally at the beach.

My ritual works to this point. Then it’s chaos for the rest of the day. But so long as this start-t0-the-day is in place, most things flow OK from there.

This rundown of famous thinkers’ daily rituals from onlinecollege is inspiring right now. I’m really scatty with my rituals and it’s making me scatty all over.

I like how neurotic some of the rituals are (having to eat an apple under the Arc de Triomphe every morning). And how stringent most are in adhering to them.

Interesting observation: many  famous thinkers go to bed by 9.30 every night.

Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway described his writing ritual as starting just as the sun began rising, then working straight through until whatever he had to say was said. He likens completing his morning of writing to making love to someone you love–being both empty and fulfilled at the same time. Upon completing that morning’s work, he would wait until the next morning to begin again, going over his ideas in his head and holding on to the anticipation of starting again the next day.

Fred Rogers. (from the long-lasting PBS children’s show). Each day he would wake at 5:30 and begin his day with reading, writing, study, and prayer. He would take a swim most days of his life, take a late-afternoon nap, and go to bed at 9:30 each night. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic of his rituals was that he kept his weight at 143 pounds his entire adult life. He saw his weight one day and realized it aligned with the number of letters in “I love you” and vowed to maintain that weight, which he did.

Here’s something to “Did you know…” your colleagues with this afternoon: Tonight it’s a rare Blue Moon. Rare? How so?As Adelaide blogger and healer Rebecca Dettman at psyched in stilettos helpfully writes:

One Blue Moon, every once in a while (every 2.5 years to be exact), is rare enough. But how about two in the same year — within three months of each other?! March 30 sees the second Blue Moon for 2010…
The term ‘Blue Moon’ is at least 400 years old. The definition of a ‘Blue Moon’ is two full moons falling within a calendar month…

So what? Well, Rebecca adds:

It’s a time of new beginnings, and of getting things right that you messed up or missed the first time through. Some groups use it as a period of initiation and re-dedication, so if there’s something new you need to start, now’s a good opportunity to do so.

This week I hire a Virtual Assistant in India (and, no, the picture below has nothing to do with Virtual Assistants, or India, but is an image of what I’d like to have more time for once I’ve successfully delegated stuff I hate doing ).

I tell you, VAs are the PTs of the new millennium. Ten years ago we took to delegating our weight loss to personal trainers. Soon enough they became part of the fabric of life, popping up at clients’ dinner parties and dating their friends. Now it’s all about delegating our administrative clutter to a remote assistant. Or so I’m learning.

Every productivity guru and self-help blog I encounter advocates hiring one of these faceless helpers to coordinate travel itineraries, answer emails and organise the kids’ swimming lessons…all from a cubicle in Bangalore.

Admittedly I don’t know anyone in Australia who uses a VA. I think it’s because we feel quite puncy offloading our detritus to others. I mean, who admits to having a pool cleaner?

A very quick one because I’m about to jump in the car and drive South for my Uncle Pete’s funeral at Broulee. His ashes are being scattered out to sea, which is where he lived most of his life (he was a prawn trawlerer and surfboard shaper and dude who got shipwrecked and attacked by sharks). Big. And Sad. And Full of Life…

But a few little things of joy and interest:

1. This little poppet and her bunny ears, for sale (the ears) from Les Zigouis.

There’s no special occassion looming; all the better for sending an e-card to someone who just matters to you right now. E-cards are ace. So long as they don’t involve a dancing elf. They cut down on paper, save energy costs and can still be really creative and personal.

Bookmark these four FREE sites for moments when you feel like emitting some care.

1. The High Brow: Send a card created from an art in MOMA’s collection in New York.

2. The Cool Insert-A-Face Version: Jibjab does those ones where you can cut and paste your friend’s face into the novelty action. But they do it in quite a cool way. I also like the beatboxing flautist one.

Not sure if you follow The DC on Twitter. I do. Although every now and then I “unfollow” him because he is a rather prolific twit… that is, he posts a lot of tweets!

This morning, he posted this: No Gotham. Reality is the perceiver. The  perception is deception

In response to this from Gotham, Deepak’s son: @gothamchopra: Reality is an act of perception.

I loved the idea DC corrects his son about the perception of reality via social networking. An existentialist’s tangle, right there!!!!!!

Bit of a sad-sack giveaway, you might be thinking? Ahhhh, not so!

This free download from Tracey Thorn (of Everything But the Girl fame) touched this 36-year-old in lovely, poignant ways. It might you too.

Thorn is releasing her solo album soon, but is letting us download the single “Oh, the Divorces!” for free in advance. It’s so very melancholic – all about witnessing friends breaking up. I’m not sure if its the fact that the song is geared squarely at my demo that appeals… Either way, I liked this bit:

“And each time I hear who’s to part/ I examine my heart/ See how it stands/ Wonder if it’s still in safe hands”.

Examining my own heart to see how it stands…soooo important, don’t you think?. How often do we see friends who hand over their heart to someone else, expecting them to hold it with care forever? It’s like placing it on the most outer limb of a tree and thinking the wind won’t blow it down.

To my mind, it’s always best to hold your own heart close to the trunk, grounded and rooted in the earth. And then invite others over to sit with it there.

http://www.strangefeelingrecords.com/divorces.html

“In stillness the world is restored.” ~ Lao Tzu

I can’t tell you how much this quote means to me right now. I’ve been moving around too much – travelling for work, looking externally for validation and stimulation, getting buzzy in my head about ideas and constantly in “scheduling mode”.

I’ve been running late for everything. Running, running.

This kind of freneticness – it creeps up on you.

Now it’s time to be still. And create space around me – in my movements, in my diary. Right down to the cellular level.

I went to the Chinese doctor this morning and she says to me, “Ah, stagnation…you’re flow is blocked”. Is it what! I can feel it – in my digestion, in my walking, in my communication with people. I need space around my cells so my chi can flow freely. So I can be restored.

There’s no pill to do this. It’s an attitude that you just adopt. Now. It’s being still.

Three things to do, flowing from this quote:

1. Sit for 20 minutes every day at 7am and then at 6pm, when my day finishes. Just sit. Still. Nothing else to do. I do this every day (with my meditation), but I’m going to focus on stillness and space for a few days so I can get back on track.

2. Schedule 15 minutes buffer around every activity. When I was at Cosmo, my gorgeous PA Lauren would do this with every meeting. It was a little breather she created for me.

3. Visualise, or feel, space and stillness - around me, around each and every cell. I’m doing this as I type and already I feel like I’m strolling with more flow.

What do you do to get still and restore?

Hello, I’m a glasses nerd. I’ve worn glasses since I was 4. I’ve done the whole history of dorky glasses. Oooooh, yes: horn-rims, over-sized flastic fantastics and….an eye patch.

When I tell this story, I found most people struggle to top it: when I was 12 I had to wear an eye patch for a 18 months. Not a cool pirate one; a piece of beige tape over the left lens of my horn-rimmed frames.

It gave me a particularly BROWN and befuddled look. Yessum, I was special. Right at a time when the 6 other girls at my primary school were getting boobs and boyfriends.

Which puts me in a most authoratative been-there-done-that position to advise on embracing an awkward aesthetic fixture.

Yours might be a bald head. Big boobs. Crooked teeth. Or a “thing” for wearing combat boots that you just can’t shake.

The thing is: I could get corrective surgery. Or contacts. But I never have, despite even being offered it for free. Why? Glasses are part of me. My look works around them.

So instead I:

-  don’t shirk. I wear my glasses boldly. And I wear bold glasses. When you make a stamp firmly, people believe what you’re doing is the right thing to do. People believe that my glasses-wearing is good because I don’t apologise for them. The bald man can do the same. It doesn’t have to detract from an evolutionary mating POV…it doesn’t have to suggest weakness (bad eyes, follicular inadequacies).

- work with, not against or around. I don’t wear jewellery near my face to detract from the “glasses effect”. Glasses are my jewellery.

This week I “Be Sarah” (which may or may not involve rolling around in bed in luxurious knits)

I have this problem. I’m a really bad party-goer. I can’t seem to stay at them, and my personality grinds to a glazed-over halt whenever I’m forced to. Standing in restrictive going-out garb on a Friday or Saturday night, being shouted at in my left ear by booze-addled, distracted people is my idea of purgatory.

Over the years I’ve developed some unique tricks to circumvent them.  I ride my pushbike to nightclubs – in heels and the full regalia – so I can make easy, and early, getaways. Or I arrange to meet friends beforehand for dinner and then rack off at ten to leave everyone to whoop their way into the night without me.

I’ve always wished I could party. I’ve persisted at them for years. But recently – and it took years of rubbing the cat’s fur the wrong way to get to this juncture – I’ve worked out that parties and me, well, we’re a square peg and a big round hole.

It’s funny. I’ve been on this search for “a better life” for some time and it’s involved slaying through all manner of gnarly resistance and ego-protecting armour.  It’s been exhausting. But, frankly, not as exhausting as living with the resistance, as many of us do. We do stuff daily that grates with our true selves – go to gyms, meet the same toxic friends for brunch each month and remain in cul-de-sacd careers – often for decades. Such sustained disconnect eventually renders us unable to access our true selves, to know what we really like.

But this week I stumbled upon advice that addresses this pervasive issue head-on. American writer Gretchen Rubin started a “Happiness Project” blog two years ago and it’s now a New York Times bestselling book. I got an advance copy this week and leaping from page 10 was this salient lesson: “Be Gretchen”. As in, “Be [insert your own name here]’”.

Gretchen worked out she didn’t like doing stuff everyone else found “fun”, and that happiness was about embracing her Gretchen-ness and doing what she liked doing, such as reading kids’ books and collecting bluebirds. She won’t ever be the kind of crazy cad to jet off to Paris or go to a jazz club at midnight. Which makes her sad. But it’s just not her.

As she laments, “you can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you like to do”. Which is just so damn true; I think I’ll make it my email signature.

walking up mountains and wearing beanies is very ME

Sure, but how do you work out what you like doing so you can then go about doing it? The gazillion-dollar question, right? Gretchen advises thinking back to what you liked doing as a kid. Which is very Jungian and fine if you can recall a time when you weren’t trying to fit in to the collective’s idea of fun.

Me, I thought the challenge could be tackled by signing on to a dating site. Not to date, but to go through the process of filling out the questionnaires that ask you what you like to read, how you like spending weekends and what kind of person you’d like to love you. Yep, odd, but I figured it was a nifty way to be forced to consider what it is that makes me me. There’s nothing like knowing you’re about to be judged by thousands of strangers to hone your attention. And to ensure you get the sales pitch right.

So this is what I came up with. I don’t like drinking pina coladas, hen’s days, going to malls on weekends, taking photos when travelling (it disrupts the flow; I punished myself for years trying to capture my holidays because “that’s what you’re meant to do”), organized sports, car chase movies or lying by pools. I like dinner parties, grilled figs, adrenalin-fuelled solo sports and talking in tents. When I got stuck on a question (what do you prefer, adventure or DVD nights?) I visualized myself doing the activity. If it appeared in colour it was “me”, in black and white it wasn’t, and indicated resistance.

The final chapter in this experiment, of course, is to start living out your preferences. Which takes practice, and fighting the urge to revert to work or “duty” when it gets a bit hard. As Gretchen says, you have to schedule time for fun. Me, I generally find Friday and Saturday these days pretty free.