Sarah Wilson

This week I find my “right reason”…and get a little faith.

On Tuesday I sat with Mitch Albom. Which is lovely and fitting, really, because Mitch wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, a book about how he spent Tuesdays sitting with a bloke called Morrie. Not read it? Well, Morrie is Mitch’s former teacher and is dying. Mitch is a sports journo from Detroit. Each week Mitch visits Morrie who, as he faces death, shares his compassionate insights with Mitch. The end. Or thereabouts.

Much like when I look at a Splade or a pair of Crocs, I’ve often wondered what possesses someone to spend years of their life creatively and myopically dedicated to something that, on paper, isn’t exactly a commercial shoo-in. I mean a book of wisdoms by a dying teacher and a sports hack…who was he kidding? Indeed, countless publishers knocked the book back.

But perhaps you know what comes next. Tuesdays with Morrie was finally published in 2000 for a modest fee. It became the biggest selling memoir in history. And Mitch has sold a whopping 28 million books since.

So the question I put to Mitch: what kept him writing?

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?

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.

This week I travel lightly

In the next two weeks I have to travel to Africa, Perth, the Gold Coast and Melbourne for work and a wedding. My feet are already puffy and my olfactory bulb awash with the carby stench of inflight fruit buns in dreaded anticipation.

I hate travelling. Years ago I loved the world of complimentary acrylic travel socks and miniature soaps. And I once cited “playing Tetris on long-haul flights” as one of my favourite pastimes. But novelty fades. And now I find being in transit unnerving; my whole system (my bowels, my sleep) grinds to a halt in protest. However, given this is a travel issue and my brief with this column is to come up with better ways to do life, I was compelled this week to find a cheery slant to the caper.

Making travel as efficient as possible is one approach. In blogland, countless sites are dedicated to this pursuit. Onebag.com shares tips on the best way to pack a Samsonite.  Airlinemeals.net meal-spots plane food so you can plan your airborne dining. You’ll never be caught off guard by creamy cauliflower again! Tripit.com gets most travel pundits totally frothing. Email through all your pesky flight, hotel and car hire confirmations and – whoosh! – Tripit magically consolidates them into one itinerary.

This week I reclaim my Sunday

Sundays are sad. So says a Swedish study just out. It found the Sabbath the most depressing day of the week because (and I just love how big, important studies have an uncanny knack for pointing out the bleeding obvious) it’s the day before school and work starts. It also found the mood plunge is particularly profound among married couples and East Germans. (I could venture a theory on this, but I fear it’d only make things bleaker.)

Me, I’ve often found Sundays mood-sinky. When I was a kid, they were Dickensian-grim. As the sun set and the dam snap-froze over for the night, Dad would haul me and my brothers out to the back paddocks to chop wood for the week. Then Mum would line us up on the verandah to scrub knees and cut toenails. We’d catch the last bit of The Wonderful World of Disney before dinner. Then bed, the dread of first period clinging to us, prickly and restrictive like a Fair-Isle jumper in the rain.

As adults, you’d think we’d find a way to address this. To make Sundays sunnier. I know some people head to the pub on Sunday nights by way of a final hoorah to the weekend. This was a fad for a while and I hear it put off the inevitable quite effectively.

But I’ve noticed more recently that Sundays have taken on a panicky, catch-up quality. There’s not enough time in the week to get everything done. Certain tasks – wading through long emails, finishing that advisory report, filling out health insurance forms  – can’t get done in the Monday-Friday flurry. So we set aside “just a few hours” on Sunday afternoon to “get on top of things”.

This week… I am neurotic

Now, you might ask, how can indulging in a private personality schism make life better. I’m kind of asking myself the same, but let’s see how this goes.

For starters, openly acknowledging something in yourself that others have long suspected can make life easier for everyone involved. But let’s take this one step further. Acknowledging and celebrating something that we all have lurking beneath the surface – in one guise or another – but that we rarely talk about, can take life to a whole new level of sweetness. Movies and books about oddball characters do this. I’m thinking Juno and American Beauty. We recognise a part of ourselves in the kooky characters, and it makes us smile in belongingness.  It just does.

So on Thursday I was stood up by a friend. Her excuse was as flimsy as a philanderer’s promise and it was her third last-minute no-show. Sitting at the restaurant fuming into a ramekin of bar olives I wondered if it wasn’t time to defriend.

It’s a concept many of you relate to. I know this because  “unfriending” has just been deemed Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, and presumably because more than just a few of us are talking about dumping redundant friends. (Oxford debated whether to go with “unfriend” or the social media-speak version “defriend”; proper English won out.) But my question, as always, is whether a decluttering of your black book – like you might a drawer of kitchen appliance warranties – makes life better. Come take a walk with me on this one.

• Truth is, I have too many friends. Again, you get what I mean. Our circles have expanded, we’re stupidly bogged down in life admin and many of us have become friend whores, accumulating hundreds (thousands?) of friends on Twitter and Facebook. Exerts call these “weak ties”. We had no idea this would happen when we signed up. But that’s what technology does – it moves faster than us. Now, we’re swamped with weak ties.

This week I try out “satisfycing” for size.

The inspiration for this week’s reflection is the release of Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough, the latest tome to tell women how to score a bloke. Gosh, and there we all were living life according to the 2004 self-help gospel He’s Just Not Into You (the premise: don’t settle for Mr Not Sure Enough).  How wrong can a girl be!

(As a bracketed aside, I wonder if the Mr Not Sure Enoughs can be lured back from the dating scrapheap to become Mr Good Enoughs? They might need to be!)

If you missed Gottlieb’s controversial 2008 article in Atlantic magazine, on which the book is based, her throw-in-the-towel theory is this: women who get to 30 and haven’t found Mr Right should choose a guy who’ll simply “do the job”. Single and now in her 40s, Gottlieb says she wished she’d settled for a “perfectly acceptable but uninspiring” man herself.  How, um, inspiring. Apparently Tobey Maguire thought so; he’s bought the film rights.

Now, I’ll say no more on the topic (if you can’t say something nice and all that jazz). Except to say that this week it inspired me to revisit decision-making.

This week I go streamlined on a single-speed bike

You might’ve noticed everyone’s into “simplifying”. It’s very recessional chic right now. People from all walks are chucking stuff out and packing up what’s left to go live in Bali. Or on a goat farm. Luxury car manufacturers and banks are flogging simplicity in their advertising slogans and a new self-help genre has spawned showing us how to consolidate our remote controls and live without a waffle-maker.

Admittedly, I’ve previously ridden this altruistic bandwagon myself, decluttering my books and hosing out my email inbox. But I’m now wondering if “streamlining” isn’t a better way to go. “Simplifying” tends to have a certain The Good Life vibe to it, don’t you think – a bit grubby, earnest and requiring a fulltime commitment to composting. When, let’s face it, most of us could relate to Penelope Keith when she’d look over the fence in despair at her neighbours’ muddy mess.

Simplifying is about reversing our erroneous ways, uprooting our lives and ridding ourselves of things. Which is kind of sad and harsh and really hard to achieve. Streamlining, however, is gentle. It’s about shaving off excess, and perhaps steering the boat a little to the left, for a more flow-y ride. It’s a smooth, glide-y ethos for life, and an elegant aesthetic. No gumboots required. Yes, streamlining makes life better. Of that I’m sure.

This thinking started a month ago when I looked over at my dual-suspension, knobbly-tyred mountain bike in the hall and thought, what a cluttery, clumpy contraption you are!

This week I happily and surely go sober.

You see, I’m the ambassador for FebFast, an initiative that invites Australians to go sober in February and raise money for a bunch of substance abuse charities.

If you want to join my FebFast team go to this link…here! The password is detoxme. We’re currently the leading team, so you might as well back a winner. My MasterChef crew have joined, as have a bunch of writer/magazine/actor mates. Stay tuned in February. They’ll be sharing their sober thoughts here.

It started when I attended this charity cocktail event.  It was a thoroughly ra-ra affair with much champagne flowing to keep conversation loose and women vertical (without the numbing effect of booze, I swear, we couldn’t stand as long as we do in heels). However, I wasn’t drinking.

When you don’t drink you confuse people.