Beauty

After enduring what feels like endless weeks of whipping winds and dreary rain soaked days, today I woke to sun streaming through the curtains and a blue blue sky. Days like this, the beach calls me, and I was rewarded by one of my favourite seas – an incoming tide with ruffle waves stacked upon each other.

It was so unexpectedly clement that I took my hoodie off, and felt the gentle, winter crisp wind on my bare arms for the first time in months. And just to clarify: I was wearing a T-Shirt, it’s not like I was wandering around half undressed, as I just realised that sentence could imply.

My inner misanthrope is going to be outed: these clear winter beach days are the ones I love the most, because I get the place all to myself. Or almost, as a man walking his wilful Jack Russell Terrier crossed my path twice.

Apart from that, I was alone to try out photography angles and subjects, accidentally trailing the sleeves of my hoodie in the muddy sand in the process, contemplate the sea (reminding myself that the tide was coming in, so standing still for too long doing this was going to result in wet feet) and taking time just to feel the wind, listen to the waves and to appreciate being alive.

Skywatch Friday

Endless Introspection #1

I keep meaning to do things. I want to do them. I really do. But I'm not doing them.

I'd put it down to being tired, or feeling low, but I've been recording my moods on Mood Maps, and I'm feeling good, full of positive energy.

Why aren't I doing them? Often when I find myself not doing something it's a sign of a 'should' masquerading as 'want'. But these are things I genuinely want: I want to start writing some articles before my course starts in January, I want to make a start on my own self designed blog, I want to declutter my room to make space for my own work area and to lesson the chance of being eaten by a monster that's formed itself from the soup of junk that spills out of crates and off shelves and from floor piles.

I know I'm not a lazy person – I hate feeling idle and unproductive, so this not doing is abrasive, irritant.

So why do I find myself, stuck, staring out the window at the rain instead of doing what I really want to do. It's actually taken me about a day of irritated, dissatisfied reflection to realise why.

I want it to be perfect, I want myself to be perfect.

I want to write flawless articles. I don't feel I'm at that point yet. I might have a first class degree in English, I might have successfully taught English – but somehow I still feel inadequate.

A little voice says: wait till the course starts, what you do now won't be anything like what you'll do in a year. That sounds like a good argument to part of my brain – the part that can use it as an excuse to shuffle inside it's comfort zone and think – best be safe, don't make a mess, don't make a fool of yourself. Wait till you're really ready.

Unfortunately this philosophy would ultimately mean that I'd spend the rest of my life in suspended animation, constantly waiting to be good enough to start practising. I know that as soon as I'd ticked off one thing I'm waiting for that would be make me good enough, I'd find another.

So my mantra at the moment is: perfection is unobtainable, just do it; perfection is unobtainable just do it; perfection is unobtainable just do it.

Why is that so much easier to say than to act on?

Palimpsest

OED: PALIMPSEST: noun: a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.

figurative: something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

Palimpsest is one of my favourite words, and one that I don't use often enough. I was reminded of it when I was photographing these irresitable subjects: the fading and moss crept sign and coppiced plant supports.

In my current mood of introspection, inevitably I ended up thinking how most of us are our own palimpsests, layers of experiences, memories and emotions, and how often we can cede control of the writing of our lives to other people. What's exciting me most at the moment is taking back that control, choosing which parts of my life to write in bold and which ones to scrub out and replace.

My World Tuesday

Chinglish Signs: Entrance to the Shanghai Pearl Tower

I had completely forgotten I'd photographed this sign, but once rediscovered I had to share it. Personally I never leave home without my baleful biology, sword and smell of effluvium. Thank goodness we decided not to go in.

Carpe Diem

Today my leisurely email and coffee wake up was disrupted by finding out about the sudden, and unexpected, death of a fellow Samaritans volunteer, who I’d been working with since I joined earlier this year. We’d only met ten or so times – enough time for me to appreciate his kindness, desire to help others and interest in the world.

The effect has been the emotional equivalent of a sudden cold drenching and stupid surprise you can have a perfectly normal phone conversation with someone one day, and within a week they can be dead.

And I have to confess to a selfish appreciation of how lucky I am to be alive right now. I’ve been taking the second looks at the sky, the cats, the world in general and appreciating the fragile beauty of the ordinary.

Instead of getting crabby in the Post Office queue, I reminded myself that it didn’t really matter, it wasn’t worth wasting the amount of time I have getting angry, and that plenty of people would be happy to swop grievances. I felt appreciation for the human bonds that make us send Christmas cards, rather than being impatient and wondering why what seemed like everyone else had decided to post their mail at the same time I did.

My mantra for today has been carpe diem, and I’ve been thinking of all the little things that I’ve been putting off doing, waiting until a ‘perfect time’ to do them. I suddenly realised that if I do this too long I’ll waste all my tomorrows waiting for something that doesn’t exist.

Skywatch Friday

Doorways: My Yard

When I was living in Shijiazhuang this door became one of the silent background elements of my life. Like every other apartment block in our area, the yard surrounding the building was edged with a rows of brick built sheds, which tended to exhibit various degrees of ‘looking like they might fall down right now’. (These are pretty much Chinese Shed Premium Edition.)

Waiting for coffee or pasta water to boil in my kitchen I would half watch fellow residents wrestling their bikes in and out of the sheds, reassured that the compulsion to keep stuff that is broken or no longer needed but might come in handy one day is cross cultural.

Mood Mapping #1

What are these mysterious maps? Charts of hidden treasure, or random doodles that I’m inflicting upon you owing to some whim? Perhaps both. They are copies of my Mood Maps for the past week.

Mood Mapping is one of those so-obvious-why-did-no-one-think-of-it-before ideas: tracking your daily moods on a simple chart, and ideas to help you control your mood. There’s so much I want to experience in life and having moods that can tend to ping between despair and elation is, well, not that helpful.

I forgot to do it on Thursday and Friday, mainly because I was so exhausted last week. If I had had any ‘should-ish’ qualms about leaving my job, following the Mood Maps and seeing my anxiety and stress levels down in black (or pink, or orange) and white, would squash them like the vermin they are.

The main thing I’ve gleaned (or rather remembered) this week is the striking obvious yet often forgotten fact that if I don’t sleep well I’m good for nothing. There are two reasons that I haven’t been sleeping well: stress and anxiety, and allergies.

The stress and anxiety came from doing a job where I had little control over what I was doing and little or no time for planning: often I’d be telling students what work they were doing at as I was reading through the sheet for the first time myself. When I went into work in the morning I had no idea what I would be doing that day, and wouldn’t know until 10 minutes before I had to be at my first class.

Compare that to the Mood Maps from the weekend! Even on Sunday, when I was lacking in energy owing to sniffles and allergy related sleep disturbance, I still felt positive and was still able to do, even if I wasn’t as productive as on Saturday.

Now I just need to work on controlling my allergies more. Seeing the impact a night of broken sleep has on my mood the next day has really motivated me to remember to take an antihistamine before bed and consider what changes I might need to make my environment.

This is a fascinating way of tracking and controlling your moods, and I’d highly recommend checking out the book or the website for more information. I’m continuing to track my moods this week, and will be for the rest of December. The insight into how my moods is going to be very useful when I’m juggling work and study and life in 2010.