 “Take some leisure time” she suggested. “Leisure?” I thought, that stopped me in my tracks.
Here I am on this journey to me and, while I’m a few deliberate years into the journey, I got rather distracted this last year with mum’s rapid decline and recent death. Now there is this moment of readjustment, trying to remember “where was I up to?” Except I’m not starting where I left off, that is an illusion. Life continued, my journey continued, I just stopped tracking it quite so much. Mum is basking in the fullness of her energy now, consciousness reconnected with our source, in the light, however you want to put it. Yet here I am. In truth, I think part of me went too, and felt its warmth. That part of me isn’t quite so sure how to renter into the world. As my mentor reminded me, I came from that source almost half a century ago into a world, a family, for whom war was familiar. It’s probably no coincidence I listened to two audio fictional books on the plane recently, stories about the atrocities and struggles of the Second World War. Those were real in my life as a child, with parents born just as the war ended; yet rations, fear and struggle continued for some time. I recall vividly the fear I felt when Britain went to war in the early 1980’s over the Falklands. At the time I was deeply in love and the threat of conscription suddenly loomed over the relationship. While that threat was never realised, the memory demonstrates to me just how real the threats all seemed. Then came the other wars, the war against AIDS, the war against drugs and the war terror, all perpetuating more fear. Our life is a mirror, it plays back to us where our energy is dialed in. And so I have known defense and fear all my life. This part of me that reconnected with our source, it knows no fear, and it has no desire to take on the energy of defense. But I have no mental template for that. In my recent article about doing what fuels you and dumping the rest, I cited an example of saying no to the onerous task of organizing the school’s annual fair. That was all very well, but the question was how to say no without defence, without inadvertently starting a war. It was an interesting exercise observing draft email after draft email. Each time the defences lessened. First came spewing forth the (literally) years of indignant thoughts on the topic merged with a defensive intonation and a mix of suggestions for improvement. Finally came the version where I just sent my apologies, explaining that, with mum’s recent death, I just haven’t got the energy for something I don’t like. It was like a scene from Nashville watching singer Juliette Barnes get all angry with her fans for judging her then, finally, taking a breath, feeling into the pain and just throwing up her hands and saying “you know what, I struggle with depression, I need to figure this out”. In fact that scene was just life mirroring to me where I am at: letting go of defence and done with navigating icy waters. My mentor is right, it’s time to let in the warmth and the light. But how do I carry that into this world? And so, stopped in my tracks, all this passed through my mind as I contemplated the word leisure. She is right of course. Taking on a more leisurely attitude will reflect back a different world than the one I’ve been experiencing until now. But what is leisure? I guess for some it’s walks in the forest, playing tennis or being more social. Not for me, and there are only so many times I want to walk on the beach no matter how I love it. Another ah ha moment waited in the wings as my mentor asked me what kind of mother I'd like to be for my children. Funnily enough it was the same question Juliette Barnes got asked in her scene too. It was like the universe was playing back to me the important parts of the conversation I’d had. The kind of mother I’d like to be is one who is in harmony with her environment, who fully understands the natural world and the part it has to play in aiding human growth and life. To understand human potential and how to leverage the amazing capacities we all have that most believe belong only in sci-fi movies. I’d like to be the kind of mother that can say to the creator “I know you made us in your image, I know your design was flawless, I see the perfection. I can do this, you got it right, I have got this.” That is what leisure is to me, where glee and awe and inspiration lie, to discover the secrets that unlock all of that. So as Juliette Barnes was advised to take a deep breath every time she felt anger and, instead, feel the pain behind it, the advice given to me was to take 5 minutes to myself to contemplate, to relax, every time I felt compelled to some sort of action – or at least 5 times a day. And so as I wonder whether leisure is indeed the antidote to the life of defence I’ve known until now, I am left in no doubt that pursuing all that interests me will help me find the way into calmer, warmer waters that are filled with light. As you contemplate what leisure might mean for you, consider a world in which you could feel a more leisurely attitude about everything you get drawn to, where others feel the same. It just feels different doesn’t it? Much nicer, certainly the kind of world I want my children to experience and for us all to enjoy. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.
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 As my brother and I were talking about what motivates people, he said “it’s simple right, some people get their energy from doing things that would make others feel drained.” Right. It’s one of the basics of the way we are each wired.
In theory, as we all derive our energy from different things, you’d think there would be no opportunity for us to get bored or resentful or depressed in the world by things that we do, instead there are endless opportunities to fill our cups. So why are so many of us doing things that deplete rather than refuel our energy? As I’ve cited many times before, the number one regret of the dying is all the time they wasted in life trying to please others. With my mum’s death recently it’s reaffirmed my commitment to spend time doing the things that matter to me, and trust that any gaps I leave will be ably filled by others who love what I hate. When I left the corporate world a few years ago, I remember vowing to myself that I was done dancing to the beat of another’s drum. No more mind-numbing meetings, having to cross and uncross my legs, or waggle my foot around just to stay awake. No more politically correct conversations or being nice to people who were just downright nasty. That was the idea. Like many of you, there are things that I do that are not high on my list. I try and be mindful though about not making compromises and making myself miserable when I have a choice. For example, for those of you who have read my musings over the years, you’ll know a perennial issue for me is our annual School Fair. When we joined the school, I eyed the sentence (on the commitment form we had to sign) about supporting fundraising activities with suspicion. When I queried it, I was told “oh it’s nothing to worry about. The only thing you really need to do is to help with the School Fair each year, each family has to do 4 hours on the stalls and bake cakes etc”. Mmm. Big understatement that was. The Fair, it turns out, is a big community event attracting thousands of visitors. It’s not just a few bake stalls. There are lots of good old fashioned fun activities like candle dipping, a coconut shy, a flying fox, a ‘stack-a-crate’ climbing challenge and other interesting games like the lemonade bike. Then there’s the centre stage entertainment, the crafts (it’s the parents who make all the crafts to sell and there are rather onerous specifications and quantities), the food stalls, the rubbish and zero-waste management, the car parking, on and on. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots to love about the school my kids attend. Most importantly, it’s packed with staff who really give a lot to the roles they are performing. The head teacher is passion personified when it comes to the children and the education they are providing. But I’m under no illusions; the Fair is a big project. I have enough experience of projects under my belt in the corporate realm to know the size of this job. For me, just the thought of it drains my cup so fast you’d think it was a sieve with 5cm holes in it. Equally, I know there are others who thrive doing this kind of thing. Now I have no real idea why the Fair has come to be run the way it has but, however it has come about, it’s become practice for Class 2 parents to organize the whole thing – and guess which class my daughter is in this year? It may be that the Fair was initially the brainchild of a dedicated group of parents, or at some point it all got too much for staff worn out by the myriad of other activities throughout the year. Regardless, at some point since the inception of the Fair, someone decided it would be a good idea to have Class 2 parents organize it all. So do I have to buy into this? The school has never been explicit about this onerous task, yet here it is. Should I ’suck it up’ because others have? Or should I expect to contribute because it’s a worthy cause? Whatever the reason, trying to push a boulder uphill is never a great idea. For my part, organizing the Fair is simply too much to ask; it’s too draining, taking too much mental, emotional and physical energy away from my focus on parenting especially, never mind the other hats I wear. What I do know is that I have no specific obligation to take part in this project, other than perhaps peer pressure created, in the main, from others’ perceptions that they have no choice. Yet the parents do have a choice, as does the school. It’s perhaps better to cast the net wider and, rather than expecting a set of 26 parents in one class to take on 25 different and sizeable project roles, allow those in the wider community - who might actually feel like they want to (and have the capacity to) take on these roles - to come forward. We are all motivated by different things, so you’d think there would be no shortage of willing volunteers for everything that takes place in our world. And there is, there are those that love this type of stuff, so why – as in so many walks of life – are people trying to decree how things happen and perpetuate it just because it’s become the norm? There was an article I wrote last year, called Win-Win-Win Giving, talking about how giving is something that should be about ease and joy, not sacrifice and duty. The win-win-win stuff, when you inspire or empower someone doing something you love, and get the warm fuzzies from having helped. At what point do we say ‘enough is enough’ if it’s how we feel? How many examples are there like this in your own life, where you are dancing to the beat of another’s drum? Where you are trying to be superman or superwoman, instead of realizing that less is more? Yes we may face peer pressure, and perhaps pressure from other quarters, but really, the most pressure we put on ourselves comes from within. Our own desire to look good, to fit in, to have others think well of us. Instead of being a martyr to something where we’d rather be poking our eyes out with a pin, we need to learn to step aside; there are others who would get a lot out of taking up the mantle. And if there isn’t, one would have to question the need for the task anyway. It’s not that I want to see our School Fair fail, I want to see it thrive. Rather than walk around with an all too visible “I survived the Fair” attitude for the rest of our children’s primary and intermediate school years, I know the best way forward is to let those who want to take up the reins and lead the way with energy and enthusiasm go for it. Sometimes the best thing we can do is simply to get out of their way. We have been born with unique desires, talents and traits that can serve this world in so many ways. Instead of trying to be a square peg in a round hole just because we think the world needs us to be, how about we each take that square peg and inspire the heck out of others by finding the best 4 corners to fit it in? I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  Having spent two days this week in Hong Kong’s Disneyland, what really struck me was the way in which people were all using their devices. There we were sitting on Cinderella’s Carousel in Fantasyland, going around and around, up and down, and pretty much every adult was holding out a device trying to capture the moment. Really?
It reminded me of a futuristic drama I saw on TV a few years ago of an extreme version of everyone living through their devices, one that didn’t paint a hopeful picture for the human race. But is it actually a bad thing, I wonder? I have explored this idea of changing social norms before, in so far as technology is assisting. There was an idea in there that the present and the future are born of our past desires. But it’s more accurate to say, I think, something I heard a few years ago “wherever we give our attention to will be our greatest contribution in life.” Certainly your desires can create your reality, if that is where your attention is. But if your attention is on the lack in your life of what you want, that too creates more of the same in your reality. That leads me to wonder where the collective attention has been previously focused in order to have created a reality where we have become fairly obsessed with objectifying each moment of our life? And is that even the right way to look at it? Well, as I was holding up my own device on the carousel, I really took stock of that moment. I wanted to get a picture of my daughter, as I do often, to send to her grandparents. Others I know share photos and videos on other social media platforms. The point is that there is a lot of attempting to capture the moment, and is it happening at the expense of fully giving our attention to the moment? From my vantage point, I know if I’m taking a picture - and it doesn’t stop there, there is the editing and sharing process – I’m distracted. Distracted from actually being on the carousel and taking in my daughter’s experience, even just listening to her and answering questions. That doesn’t even count the whole process of ‘notifications’ if the picture is shared more widely. I also take an abundance of pictures in the hope of capturing just one or two of those gorgeous moments of delight spread across the faces of my kids. Or as a record to “help them remember the moment. In reality though, it ends up in thousands of digital records I never really look through, and creates a disruption to them actually really ingesting their own moments which allows them to etch it in their hearts forever. And what is her experience in all of this? She is there trying to enjoy the moment and I’m constantly trying to call upon her to “smile for the camera”. There was a ride called something like The Star Wars Experience, it amounted to having your photo taken with (in our case) R2D2. There was no experience, no moment to actually admire this fully recreated robot and interact with it in any way, simply “smile for the camera”. The same was true when we met Mickey et al, although in those instances we happened to be dining and my device wasn’t handy so my eldest daughter got to interact with them, which was much more fun for her. So we have this strange situation going on where, at any given time if you look around, you are likely to see people with their attention immersed in their device rather than in their present surroundings. I’m not sure how different that is to life before devices, as the expression “wake up and smell the roses” alludes to, we have been guilty of living in our heads rather than in the moment for much longer than devices have been around. Our heads are where are generally ruminating about the past or planning the future. Maybe our devices are just a more physical signal to the rest of the world that “no one is home” than previously? Not that either is desirable really. Even as a child I remember walking to the local shops and seeing how many people I could get to look at me and say “morning” or afternoon and that was in Scotland in the 1970’s. People tend to be cocooned in their own little world. There are more questions than answers here, but what I do know is that it just doesn’t feel right. I want to live in a world where people look each other in the eyes and smile, they connect. I want people to feel connected not just to their own life, but to others around them as well. Not in a way that we can point to the number of contacts on any given platform, or ‘likes’ of a post, but in a way that truly fills our cup. The kind of world where we can walk down the street and openly greet our neighbours and strangers and actually see each other, and be seen. Perhaps we have created this very visible situation to help really highlight how far from being present in our own experiences we have drifted? Perhaps our children will balk at having had to break from their experiences in order to “smile for the camera” so much that their desires to fully experience life will be more acute? Is why we share a matter of connection? Yet in pursuit of that through our devices we become disconnected with the essence of who we are. We are missing the natural world around us, and the opportunities to feel our connectedness with everyone and everything beyond the ‘friends’ we have online. I want to ingest each moment, and my kids to do the same. For my part, I’m going to take less photos, and be much more mindful of the way in which I use my device from now on. Real life is there for the taking, it’s so much more than a 2 dimensional moment, real life is multidimensional , it smells, it tastes, it sounds, it feels and breathes, it just can’t be captured in a can. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  Currently in Scotland, we visited an old textile mill. It’s not any old mill, it’s the World Heritage site at New Lanark, a short drive from where I was brought up, marked by the philosophy with which it was run by Robert Owen in the early 1800’s.
Owen was an interesting character whose ideas made for remarkably better living conditions for the workers than elsewhere else in the industrial world at the time. His philosophies on social communities were deemed strange by many at the time, and are still today aspirational. In his New Year’s address to the people of New Lanark in 1816 he said: “What ideas individuals may attach to the term “Millennium” I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness improved a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.” 202 years on, this is still true. We see ourselves as more advanced than we were back then, and yet health and money remain the top two areas of focus for individuals, and most of us are still in pursuit of happiness rather than embracing it as a state of being for the most part. He also said “If we cannot yet reconcile all opinions, let us endeavour to unite all hearts.” Wise words, but I think harmony begins within our own heart. With the recent death of my mum, whose body was ravaged by cancer, I was struck by the end of life phenomenon known as “terminal agitation and delirium”. This happens in the last hours and days of someone’s life. If you look at common cancer information websites, like Marie Curie, you will see they talk about the actual symptoms and guess at the causes, all of which are assumed to be emotional or physical. I was much more interested in the metaphysical reasons for this agitation as a person is letting go of the body and material world. After a bit of reading, looking for something that resonated, I came to the conclusion that the apparent suffering likely arises from the struggle to surrender that separate sense of self, from which emanates a feeling of utter isolation and loneliness, and fear of what will come of that surrender. Having gone through this process myself while in a healthy living state, I can appreciate that those who have been locked in their heads for a lifetime and whose sense of self is so completely identified with their bodies must find these final moments in this life pretty frightening. I know from my own journey and experiences that resisting the inevitable truth - that there is more to ‘you’ and the world around you, a greater intelligence certainly - only worsens fear or suffering. Loosening my grip on the need to fix everything, and trusting the inward feelings of peace I had found after peeling away all the emotional layers I attached to everything around me, led to a trust that things work out for the better when I get out my own way. Life is savage when we believe we have to suffer, for whatever reason, because we will; it’s inevitable. Instead of seeing money as it is, a man-made construct that means nothing except whatever value we place on it; or seeing heath as it is, an opportunity to learn from what our body is teaching us about our lifestyle and thought patterns; or seeing happiness for what it is, our natural state, we feel lacking and then suffer. Coming into harmony in your own heart with your soul, for want of a better word, is where your best life resides. This is where I’ve learned that there is no one truth, only our own truth. There is no one right way, only the way which is best for you in this moment. This means letting go of judgments, of yourself and of others, a thing my head does not like to cooperate with. Yet, as you practice being with yourself, sitting silently for a short period every day, awareness arises of your thoughts. And if you are aware of your thoughts, what is this awareness? It’s like two parts of you. Perhaps it’s a huge fountain of consciousness, some of it running into your body as a vessel but most remains part of the bigger whole. The state of terminal agitation seems to me to arise from the realization that the vessel is about to run dry, yet awareness remains, the fountain is still plentiful. In life, if we can see ourselves not as separate vessels but part of the one fountain, then we can start the process of living in harmony with ourselves, and from there this will lead to a world in which we can live in harmony. Suffice to say in the world today you can see whatever you want to see; from what would appear to be the prevalent more insular and selfish behaviours of many – which I like to think of as a crazy death dance of a desperate egoic state that knows its number’s up – to the more conscious behaviours of those who are aware of their connectedness to everything. So for all Robert Owen’s grand ideas on creating harmonious communities, I think it really is quite simple. If we endeavour to allow the harmony within us to surface, through our individual harmony we will naturally give rise to more harmonious living and communities. We can live in harmony. I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others if they inspire, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. 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