So much for checking in regularly on my adventures with sageing this year! It’s the end of September, and whilst I have been steadily reading and working through the books I laid out to guide me on this path, much of what I have been unearthing is too personal to share in such a public forum. Combined with having Mr Collier home for a solid year and my desire to spend a lot of face time with him and settle into this life rhythm with him, I haven’t made the time to write much for either the blog or my newsletter. However, I have started synthesising my expedition into some shareable points.…
-
-
Tackling the second half of life — Sageing is my word for 2024
Each year I select a word or phrase to guide me through the year and provide a focus for growth. This year’s word is SAGEING. I first read this term in a comment on Elizabeth Gilbert’s newsletter where the commenter described it as the act of growing older and wiser, i.e. becoming sage-like. I hadn’t heard the word before, but it would not let me go, so I have known since the middle of last year what this year’s word would be! I did a little digging and found a couple of organisations with this exact focus to help me understand a little more. According to Sage-ing International, sageing is…
-
6 things I learned about going slower
When I slow down, I can dive deeper—and that’s how I prefer to live. — Cait Flanders In 2023 my word for the year was SLOW. If you’re new to my blog, you can catch up with the posts throughout the year about my journey here. To summarise what I learned before I share a few of my favourite quotes collected throughout the year, here are a few takeaways that have found permanent homes in my mind: Slow living is, above all, an act of self-preservation and self-compassion. If you wish to slow down and are looking for some more practical suggestions, Courtney Carver provides a fantastic list to kick-start…
-
Fast or Slow? You get to choose!
This year, I have been exploring what it means to wrap a philosophy of slowness around my life. I haven’t posted about it as much as I had expected, but that’s ok! The focus continues, and I am here to update you now. The concept that has been messing with my head for the last six months is that some things cannot be slowed down. I mistakenly and very naïvely thought everything could be slowed down to a more manageable pace. Wrong. Not everything can be slow, but conversely, not everything has to be fast. Certain things fall into either end of the spectrum, and there is a whole range…
-
Does Slow equal Lazy?
I have been trying to write this article for several weeks now, which in and of itself is not really a problem. What has been tying me in guilty knots is that I had set myself a publishing schedule and was not sticking to it. I kept putting it off because I was too tired or more interested in painting or whatever. I have procrastifaffed left, right and centre. I called myself lazy. This guilt is silly because I am not being paid for these posts, and nothing happens if I don’t post on schedule. And yet, I have been berating myself for not publishing when I told myself I…
-
Slow down, you move too fast!
My word for 2023 is SLOW! Which is kind of odd, because I like to drive fast. Ha! I chose slow because it feels like the natural next step after last year’s word – Presence – where I discovered that presence is simply paying attention. The thing is though, I cannot pay attention if I don’t slow down and perhaps even stop from time to time; life is going by at warp speed, and I want to see if I can put on the brakes a little. My choice was reinforced towards the end of last year when my physio guy kept telling me to slow down with my weight…
-
Presence – my word for 2022
To say that 2021 didn’t go as planned is an understatement, and I’m definitely not Robinson Crusoe in that respect. I don’t think there’s a person on the planet that can say everything went as they hoped it would last year. My word for the past couple of the years was Consistency (2020, 2021), and I discovered that there is a point in a pandemic, when one is in lockdown, that consistency can become somewhat of an obsession around keeping routines and the like in order to feel like everything is under control, when they plainly are not. But on the flip side, having habits to rely on certainly did…
-
Kindness Revisited
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness – Seneca After a year of having kindness as my guiding theme, it seems to me that kindness forms a rock-solid base from which to operate in life. I have become stronger in a softer kind of way, not just with myself, but with those around me. I have been far more mindful of my first reactions to things, and I think the year has smoothed off some of my rough edges, without sacrificing the inherent sass and cheekiness in me. Throughout the year I saw unbidden reminders in my social media feeds and in books and…
