Assembling your tools
2020 was quite a year. We were been pushed outside our well-trodden grooves and flung way out of our comfort zones. We learned how to really wash our hands and how to stay put. We rearranged cupboards, drawers, goals, relationships…and how we navigate all these places.
Last year stripped us right down to the bones and the basics. In that time of retreat, many of us took stock of the lives we’d built (and sometimes, of what remained of those old lives), and a few things emerged with complete and utter clarity: Life is not infinite. People and connection are important. We need much less stuff than we thought we did. There is nothing as important as being well.
Feeling well shouldn’t be a luxury. Health, vitality and pleasure should be accessible to us all. Self-care, self-soothing, meditation and resilience are essential skills, in work and in life.
“Feeling well shouldn’t be a luxury. Self-care, self-soothing, meditation and resilience are essential skills, in work and in life.”
Lockdown’s silver lining, for those of us who were lucky enough to safely shelter in homes, was the forced slowness. As much as it grated for those of us used to living at top speed, that slowdown offered a glimpse (a memory, even) of the past. A remembrance of quiet afternoons, of reading for hours, and of living intensely in the moment. Those chunks of time quietly dismantled walls I’d erected in my own memory and I found myself remembering what life once was like. I found myself writing long paragraphs for no reason at all, and for no eyes but my own. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal mused in the 17th century. Well, 2020 showed us.
For years we have glorified manic productivity and multitasking and equated prioritising time for ourselves with laziness or indulgence, but it took a push away from the adrenaline- and cortisol-fuelled race of the perpetual doer for me to look around and think, ‘well I don’t really give a fuck about any of this. None of this makes me happy.’ The relentless striving for a physical ideal that isn’t my ideal or the exhausting individualism that is a capitalist society’s trademark, of equating wealth to goodness and integrity… it is some absolutely wild shit and in trying to keep time with it I’d just burnt myself, my body and my brain right down to the ground.
Here’s the rub: there is no magic pill.
Our bodies don’t work that way. They work with routine and repeated actions. They work in cycles, with the sun, the moon, the seasons, and the years. They work with the forces of nature and with currents and depths that are far beyond what we consciously comprehend. Well-being takes time, as does everything worthy.
Build your own Toolbox
You’re here. Now what?
The toolbox is yours, to use as you choose.
Start with The Roadmap, a guide to the season that’s intended to help you navigate the energy and qualities of this time and the changing weather, both inside and outside.
Every week a new chapter will appear with one tool, one practice or recommendation. These will be small, manageable tweaks. Use these tools as-is or modify and adapt them to make them yours. Use them all, or pick and choose the ones that speak to you and that feel welcome to you.
Later this year, when the season changes, another chapter will begin.
Pick and choose the tools you choose to keep in your Toolbox.
Build your own set every season. Try one tiny tweak a week and see where that takes you. What feels good? What doesn’t? Take the time to dial into your own intuition and trust the guidance that you receive. Honour the natural cycles of your body, and its need to move, to sweat, to rest. Being well isn’t about a relentless push, or about trying to shape-shift into something you are not. Sometimes it is a high-intensity sweat, sometimes it is an afternoon nap, and sometimes it is making time for chatter with a valued friend. It is shifting the focus to how you want to feel, and then going after that with the tools available to you. If you’re keen to make a change in the world and in your life, you must first learn to listen to your body, and then to take care of it, and this resource can help you do exactly that.
Ultimately, all you need is you, and the will to do whatever it takes to feel good and live with grace and vitality. Everything else is just a bonus.
“If you’re seeking anything outside of self, you’re taking the long way home.”
