Can anyone tell me why even after all these years in my life, it is still a struggle for me to get any reasonable writing/blogging work done at home, in spite of the fact that I have the space set up to be able to do so.
For some reason, I always find every excuse in the book to lie on the couch, go to the kitchen, open the fridge 500 times to seek something to nibble, go into the bedroom for an unknown reason, go into the bathroom, recollect chores that needs to be done and so on and so forth.
I will end up sitting for 15 minutes and faffing away 5 hours over nothing. I have tried different strategies, and they work for a little bit only for the cycle of parading around the house being busy doing nothing kicks in again.
Yet, when I go to the library or a cafe, the reverse is the case. I can sit for 5 hours straight getting stuff done. The challenge is that where I live presently is some distance away from the libraries and the cafes around me are not so conducive; I often end up buying and eating snacks that I could do without eating.
How do you get your blogging, writing work done? Would love to borrow ideas from others.
I love this time of the year; yes indeed, it could be the most wonderful time of the year for a whole lot of people – but truth be told, this statement might not hold the same sentiments for everyone out there due to personal reasons. However, that’s not what my post is about.
I totally love the Christmas season not only as a firm believer and practicing Christain, but I also love the gaiety, the cooler atmosphere, the sense of wholesomeness et al. Nevertheless, this is one of the seasons that I find financially stressful where I find myself struggling to make the frayed ends meet and to satisfy certain obligations which entails buying meaningful and useful gifts, travel, upkeep etcetera.
Trying to choose the right gifts of family, friends, colleagues can become tedious especially when the money math is not mathing as it should, and you are struggling to ensure that you get something that they would appreciate and use. In all honesty, this year I simply decided that I would not go overboard with all the Christmas do’s and to keep things as simple as I possibly could.
I started making my purchases a bit earlier by not leaving my shopping to the last minute and from September I was adding gift items to my budget and sourcing for bargains/shopping deals. This approach has been immensely helpful. It was not only about the economics of things, but it is timesaving, less of a headache and allows one to exhale.
No matter how you are spending your Christmas – with loved ones, alone – or not at all, I wish you great compliments of the season and hope that we don’t lose sight of the reason for the season and stay kind to each other.
Isn’t it just wonderful when your body starts having aches and pains out of the blues and for no just cause. These days, I can step out of the house with no troubles and come back home limping – not due to a fall or such thing, but simply my aching joints choosing to protest.
I recall yesteryears when I could twist myself into a pretzel, do deep squats without needing the ambulance and hold yoga poses that would make my present older self hyperventilate. If I must say so, getting older definitely requires more maintenance and one cannot slack off if they wish to age well and not have rigor mortis set in whilst they are still alive.
I have tried to cultivate the regular habit of exercising for at least half an hour or more, but my default mode is that my brain tries to get out of the exercising if it can. Since my gym subscription has expired and I am yet to renew it, I have resorted to good old-fashioned walking in the interim and for the first time, today, I did some chair yoga though I didn’t complete the session, I hope to carry on with it on a daily basis and see how that goes.
Honestly, a whole lot of stuff that we often took for granted when we were younger becomes a lot more hassle with time that right now, I find that I am so much more grateful for the little, mundane things that I never used to bother about before.
Hope you are keeping body and bones together. Much love.
Life has been doing what it does best and though I planned to write every day, somehow, due to mental fatigue and challenging changes in my work life, my work life balance has not been balancing at all. Thus, it has been a struggle to keep up with my blogging alongside all the other social media platforms that I am trying to juggle.
Yet each day, I went to bed, ridden with guilty about not writing and couldn’t simply shake it off. So, I decided to shake the dust away and get on my dear faithful blog to say howdy, only to my horror, I couldn’t access my site. I tried my password multiple times and my backup codes from the 2-step verification, zilch. I downloaded the verification app to my phone, did all the required rigmarole but to no avail. I got stressed and quit trying.
After another two weeks or thereabouts, I decided to give it a go again, still the same tedious experience going back and forth and unable to access my blog. As a last resort, I wrote an urgent SOS to helpdesk and oh la la, they responded faster than I had anticipated. The initial directions that they gave me didn’t work – guess whose fault it is? Mine of course. ‘Cos, sometimes these techie things can stump the best of us, and I am not even in the ‘best of us category.’ I shamefacedly went back begging for help, and they handheld me and bailed me out with another set of instructions which I followed carefully, whilst holding my breath and voila, here I am back on the blog. Thank you so much, Happiness Engineers.
Phew! It’s been a minute with life’s ups and downs. Enough of me for now. How are you doing? Hope that life is treating you kindly?
Advise to self. If you don’t use it, you most certainly lose it. Writing is like your muscles, when left to idle, they become flabby, weak, tired… I sit in front of my laptop with the little imps on my left and right shoulder squabbling to gain my attention. Arrgh! Said the imp on the left, ‘You no longer have the words. You can’t seem to think of what to write. Why not wait till early tomorrow morning when you feel perkier and up to the task of tasking your brain? Sounded like a very good and friendly idea to me.
Wait a minute! Squeaked the imp on my right. This same dumb reasoning is what has kept you in this rut all these days. Many early morning plans set for tomorrow have come and gone and we have lost count of the tomorrows. I don’t truly care if you’ve got nothing to say now, but say something, anything. JUST SAY SOMETHING. Each day say something, ‘cos I am tired of how I am compelled to listen to those nagging, guilt-ridden inner voices of yours complaining and reminding you that you have simply sat of your wide butt and done nothing about the thoughts dancing in your head. I have heard their whispered threats and witnessed your sad countenance. I am fed up lady. Say something, he or is it she urged.
So, this is me saying something; a befuddled attempt to get back to my daily blogging. Hope you are doing well? Happy Easter to you and your family.
You are starved. Famished for words to satisfy your hunger. Mishmash, mumbo-jumbo, incoherent and sensible words tumble around.
A meaningless mess of words that I don’t know what to do with, all attempting to fall out in no sequence whatsoever.
A search for thoughts. Scratching the surface of the mind, several impressions leading to rabbit holes; where Alice in Wonderland is waiting for a visit, where the wizard’s cauldron bubbles with mischief, where sanity beckons to peace, where desire meets passion, where laziness meets the propensity to procrastinate, where nothing becomes something and something becomes everything. Where…
Welcome to my brainbox. Where fun stuff and nonsense often happens.
Friday arrives here in the UAE and we all feel – I guess most, a sense of relief, elation and excitement especially as most places, except privately owned businesses literally shut their doors earlier for Masjid and an early start of the weekend. Of course for the Emirates of Sharjah, that sense of elation arrives on Thursday as they now practically operate a 4-day work week and 3 days of weekend which is particularly enjoyed by those in government establishments and schools.
I think the 4 day work week is truly great and much better way of creating more work-life balance, and I daresay it is likely that those who are enjoying this extra day of weekend perk are far more productive than those of us who have to reluctantly hightail it to work on Friday for just a couple of hours which is largely spent around the coffee machine.
There’s this psychological button in my brain that the thought of Friday switched on. It signals to me a whole 2 and half days of simply unwinding and minding my personal affairs. A time to put the alarm clock at bay and to try to snooze a bit deeper though my body clock has more or less set itself and wakes up despite my best intentions to get more delicate snores in.
Fridays through the weekends make me feel like I have a bit more life to live and not just the constant survival rat race. I am still trying hard to find my Eureka moment and a magical wand that will crack that code that pushes me to enlightenment, unprecedented breakthroughs, abundance and growth and to subdue the feeling of gravity pulling me down into the abyss of constant strive to stay afloat and not drown in the sea of bills and just these extra hours off gives me a sense that ‘I will get there soon.’
I suppose I have grown so used to the universal staple diet of Saturday/Sunday weekends that they don’t feel as euphoric as a Friday half-working day. Friday has slowly become for me, not only a day that I let down my hair and put on my dancing shoes – sometimes only in my mind – but also a day that leads to a much need soul-satisfying me time.
What do Friday’s look like in your neck of the woods?
P.S. As I get older, I do understand the fact that money and material things certainly make life easier and less stressed, but I have also learnt certain valuable lessons during infernal times of financial constraint that the true depths of peace and joy that we experience in life can never be attributed to what we own materially. It is borne as a fruit of the spirit.
Life is an interwoven maze of our experiences. Days blur into each other creating our past, present, future and indeed, life is truly what we make of it.
The past is done and gone. A mere recollection that serves, hopefully, as a compass and guide in our present. A memory bank of moments lived which we sometimes relive in nostalgia or regret. The past we can never return to nor regain no matter how hard we try or how much we want it.
The present is what we live and inhabit and the culmination of our presents make our past, which is why our presence in our present deeply counts. This is where the key to our happiness lies. Staying fully present and living our best moments in the now – no matter how mundane our day may seem – so that when we look back on our recollections – which we tend to ruminate on – we will have fonder thoughts and reasons to smile and not sigh nor wince in regret.
The future is an illusion of time that we do not have. The future is infinite. We postpone everything to an imagined future when all we truly have is ‘NOW’ This is the bane of most of our lives: waiting, postponing, planning! When we truly get to understand that
Live all aspects of your present time as well as you can. Give everyday that you receive the best of you and life will reward you in the same coin.
Laughter. Music for the soul that’s absolutely contagious. When you see someone laughing at a joke that you can’t hear, chances are that you will smile anyway – even if you don’t realize it.
You do know that laughter improves your overall health? It is a strong medicine that triggers healthy physical and emotional changes in the body. It is a stress buster that diminishes pain, boosts mood and improves our emotional health, strengthens the immune system and grants us a better outlook to life – it even adds more years to our lives.
When we were younger, we laughed over little things countless times a day but adulting makes us become unduly serious about life, with laughter growing less frequent in our lives. Just like the way that we seek out food to fill our belly’s we must seek the nourishment of humour and laughter. Have you ever wondered why comedians never go out of fashion? People pay them to make them laugh.
Sweet peals of laughter trigger the release of endorphins – the body’s natural feel-good chemicals and these endorphins promote an overall sense of well-being. We cannot undermine how much laughing is good medicine for the mind and body. A powerful antidote to conflict and stress. These peals lighten your burden, uplifts your spirit, relaxes your whole body, helps you connect to others, inspires hope and lightens your mind of anger and unforgiveness.
A recent fad I learnt off boasts that laughter burns calories, though I wouldn’t ask you to quit your gym subscription, your daily dose of walking or to join a laughter fest, but finding ones’ funny bone is worth its weight in any priceless gem that you can think of. This priceless serum is absolutely free. It comes without any manual and fun to use.
How to bring more laughter into your life Laughter is your birthright. Babies start smiling during the first weeks of life and laugh out loud within months of being born and even if you did not grow up in a household where laughter was a common sound, you can learn to laugh at any stage of life.
Set aside special times to seek out humor and laughter, as you would with any hobby that you are interested in cultivating. Eventually, you’ll want to incorporate humor and laughter into the fabric of your life, finding it naturally in everything.
Spend time with fun, playful people. Those who laugh easily at themselves and at life’s absurdities–and who routinely find the humor in everyday events. Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious. Even if you don’t consider yourself a lighthearted, humorous person, you can still seek out people who like to laugh and make others laugh.
An essential ingredient for developing your sense of humor is to learn not to take yourself too seriously and laugh at your own mistakes and foibles. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, we all do foolish things from time to time. Instead of feeling embarrassed or defensive, embrace your imperfections.
Life brings challenges that can either get the best of you or become playthings for your imagination. When you “become the problem” and take yourself too seriously, it can be hard to think outside the box and find new solutions. But when you play with the problem, you can often transform it into an opportunity for creative learning. It is important to use humor to overcome challenges and enhance your life. Laugh out Loud!
a cooking pot and twisted tales 