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transcending

blogging transcending

Thought pieces #1

June 23, 2013

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‘Transcend’

Verb:

to rise above or extend notably beyond normal limits

to triumph over the negative or restrictive aspects of: OVERCOME

Middle English, from Latin transcendere to climb across

from www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcend

That’s what this blog is about and it seems one of the biggest applications of this has been trying to overcome the challenges of writing the blog itself. In the context of a busy work and life schedule, to be able to carve the time and headspace for reflecting and writing here.

If that is all the blog does: document the attempts to carve this unique space then perhaps it has served a useful purpose.

One of the pressures I unwittingly place on myself is the sense of having to write full-blown pieces, fully researched and documented, edited carefully and dense in texture.

I am an INTJ, a Virgo and an Ox – so no surprises there that this should be my natural inclination with such perfectionist tendencies, shoulder to the plough approach and an introverted analytical approach to life.

Yet some of the blog posts I love are more elegant and less dense but have more impact because of this: a photograph or series of photographs and none or few words; a quote with a perfect visual image like Liv White’s wonderful Sunday Reflections; or perhaps a poem or a sequence of more random thoughts like this leading to a new direction (or not).

It’s time for some release of intensity here. I’m currently doing Susannah Conway’s ‘Journal your life‘ e-course and that may be a subtle influence in this direction towards the more natural and spontaneous.

I’m calling this post ‘Thought pieces #1’ – always scary as you don’t always know what is next with #2 and beyond, but here’s to randomness, elegance, spontaneity and more simple flow here to find a stronger and more frequently heard voice between the spaces of an otherwise busy life.

transcending

Getting through

January 6, 2013

photo(7)

When I walk with my little old Maltese dog, the southerly wind is often blowing and she trots along very strongly into the wind, enjoying her walk, ears pinned back and getting through.

The end of 2012 has felt something like that for me. It’s been very quiet here on the blog for a while; no posting, no writing. It was very busy at work and elsewhere at the end of last year and hard to get space and time to think and write. The introvert in me finds it challenging to get time and space to recharge between all the events and busyness.

And it’s a difficult time of the year. My brother died tragically 5 years ago now at the end of November. Since that time it’s generally been a time of getting through in many ways, but it’s always hard in the lead up to Christmas as we seem to quietly relive aspects of those terrible days for much of November and December. It was also my brother’s birthday in December as well so you think of what could have been.

Christmas has never been the same and there always seems to be a sharp contrast between happiness, family and appreciation, and sadness, loss, and the gaps left by those we loved and love still, but who have left us. There’s a sense of pieces missing and a constant tinge of sadness. I suppose it is like that for many. There have been moments of just losing it in between it all, the familiar waves of grief coming back again but it’s always quietly, when on my own and no one is looking as it has mostly always been.

So it’s been a matter of getting through, ears pinned back through the busyness and events. Sometimes I am aware that I deliberately keep myself busy. There are times I enjoy, especially the precious time with my family and the end of year appreciation and camaraderie with work colleagues, but I am always glad when the busy times are over and I can look forward to the start of another year. I love relaxing after Christmas and into the new year with time and space to read and reflect, watch the cricket, go to the beach, take some walks and generally wind down.

I’m also taking solace in the words from a little book, ‘Be Happy: 170 ways to transform your day‘ by Australian author Patrick Lindsay. A gift from a dear friend at Christmas, it’s a gorgeous book with simple reflections and quotes “to inspire you to find the best in yourself and the world around you”. My eyes went straight to:

Be happy…

Put the past behind you

You can’t change it,

so don’t wear it like a chain.

Understand it.

Learn from it.

Turn the experience into a positive.

Use it to look ahead.

This has become my purpose, my raison d’etre and is why this blog is called ‘Transcending’. Sometimes though this may be as simple as just getting through a day, a week, a month, a year. I try not to beat myself up too much when I need some time just to reflect and remember, to just pin my ears back and get through and when I cannot write or blog as much as I might like to.

But it is good to be reminded also to look ahead and not get caught up in the past especially what cannot be changed.

I’m looking forward now to what 2013 will bring. It’s something of a tabula rasa at this time, a wide open space on which to inscribe and I’m starting to plan and prepare for what it might bring. I look forward to travelling with you this year into what our mutual journeys might uncover and contribute. I hope your year is full of positives and light.

calmness for a new year

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transcending

Back to a new everyday

November 14, 2012

I’m well and truly back now into my usual life, work role and home and it’s so busy, as usual!

When I was away, everything was new: new job role, new people in my life at work, new place to live, new places to enjoy, new restaurants, new wines, new towns. It was all new, new, new and there was so much to photograph, to write about, to reflect on plus time by myself to do it.

Now I am back to long work days, my familiar work-team, my home which I love and back to being closer to my family and my little old dog.

Like all experiences that take you away and bring you back, you do not return unchanged. I worked in a higher level position that gave me more experience and confidence in my ability; I often yearn for time alone and enjoyed it but I found that it is very much about what I choose to do with my time that makes the difference; I am loving where I live more for having been away; and I am valuing those around me more, having missed them and re-appreciated what they give me and what we share.

It’s also not without its challenges though coming back: it’s full on, long work hours, some challenging roles and tasks, more travel each day which now feels longer and not as much time as I would like to enjoy where I live.

A conversation last week with a family member last week was a little tense; it was about their new life choices and ended up also somehow being about ours. In the wash-up of the conversation, I found myself saying, ‘I love the work that I do, I love where I live’. And it is true, I do love my work and I love where I live and these two things make up a critical part of my life. In coming back, in all its busyness, it’s been a time of quietly reappraising both.

Especially in relation to my work role and the satisfaction that I gain from it, some thoughts from Susan Cain’s ‘Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking‘ has been of immense value in settling back meaningfully into all this busyness.

The first thought is about finding your “sweet spots”:

Once you understand introversion and extraversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favourable to your own personality – neither overstimulating nor underestimating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can organise your life in terms of what personality psychologists call “optimal levels of arousal” and what I call “sweet spots,” and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before. (p124-5)

It’s about being optimally stimulated, aware of this and setting up your work, interests and social aspects so that you are in the sweet spot. I love this thought of crafting your life with some awareness to make the most of moments and modulate the inputs. It also makes me appreciate the value of my working life as an integral part of what stimulates me: the strategy, the creativity, the innovation and the writing it entails every day; they are all activities I love and value highly.

Related to this and especially to the concept of introverts who love their work is the concept of flow:

…an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity….The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings. (p172)

Introverts especially are encouraged to find their flow by using their gifts such as persistence, tenacity and clear-sightedness and to value their talents. It’s as if we are encouraged to lose ourselves in the flow of our own applied talents, rather than to be so busy in comparing ourselves to others or to see this as work per se. I am finding this a valuable thought as it is so easy to underplay one’s own style and strength in a busy environment:

So stay true to your own nature. (p173)

It’s a useful thought as I come back to craft a new everyday.

What are you doing to create a new everyday? I’d love to hear!

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family history transcending

The journey back

October 7, 2012

To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.

Chinese proverb

It was a day when I felt a bit lost. For a number of reasons, I was drifting, moving between, floating, without roots, between one place and another, one state and another.

As a result, I ended up with one precious commodity – time – something that seems so scarce: some wide open, spaced and sacred time to fill. Though not in the best frame of mind, I set out to fill it in a meaningful and productive way. I was driving, heading west into the sunshine and mountains, music sustaining me and opening me up as it always does; Tom Petty singing:

It don’t really matter to me baby,
You believe what you want to believe,
You don’t have to live like a refugee.

And then Echo and the Bunnymen pumping out:

If I said I’d lost my way
Would you sympathise
Could you sympathise?
I’m jumbled up
Maybe I’m losing my touch
I’m jumbled up
Maybe I’m losing my touch
But you know I didn’t have it anyway

Won’t you come on down to my
Won’t you come on down to my rescue

Then Matchbox 20:

Baby, baby, baby
When all your love is gone
Who will save me
From all I’m up against out in this world

It was that sort of day, the music and lyrics exactly corresponding with my somewhat disconnected state; the sunshine somehow leading me along.

It felt like a day for investigation, with the gift of time to try to find an answer to a puzzle about one of my ancestors; it’s a branch of the family I am particularly drawn to, as if working to understand their story might help me with my own. They lived and worked and in some cases, died, in the country I was driving through so I took a detour to try to find them. I found the old graveyard I was looking for, hidden behind a high hedge,  so many souls buried in the sunshine, the stones standing still and quiet as if patiently waiting for my attention.

I wandered through the rows of washed out stones. There were so many of them I couldn’t read; they were covered with moss or lichen or the words had vanished, weathered and erased away, the story lost. I felt for the lost words with my fingers, trying to trace the story and bring it back. But sometimes there was simply nothing left except a rock, blank and weathered. And sometimes there was less, just a grass space, unmarked between other stones.

I found some connected relatives including my third great grand aunt, Ann Sweet nee Honeysett, who came out in 1839 on the same ship as her sister, my great, great, great grandmother, Jane Colbran nee Honeysett. I have chased their story to Herstmonceux in East Sussex from where they departed to Richmond in NSW where they ended up, carving a new existence in a new place. The enormity of their journey and the extent of the ties they severed never fails to amaze me.

I know much of Ann’s story, her leaving, her arriving, her new family, its background, her children, the sad events, the new beginnings. I know it better than my own great, great great grandmother’s story which still has huge gaps despite my searching. It was good to find Ann’s resting place, other members of the family close by, a part of the mystery I am trying to understand.

Whether it was the sunshine that bathed my pores as I walked around scouring the old stones, or the act of connecting with these souls and their history, I found myself strangely grounded, blossoming in the linkage, surrounded by the ones I seek but cannot exactly find the truth about. An invisible thread linking us, a few degrees of separation joined and resulting in a stitching of myself.

Australian actor, Vince Colosimo, in a recent ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ episode, talked of a sense of finding his team as he searches for his family background. I know this feeling. As I have lost people in my immediate family, the desire to know more about my broader family history and the qualities and experiences of my  ancestors has strengthened as I search to know the roots of my own journey. A sense of teamwork in getting me through much suffering has been part of this, as if they are somehow helping me along.

So less of a refugee, less in need of rescue, less in need of bright lights and touched by the sun, I climbed back into the car re-energised and continued on my drive with the sound of bell-birds, the lean of curves and the guidance of trees taking me back to my temporary home. It’s as if the act of remembering, the conscious act of seeking my ancestors, my silent team of supporters, cast something of a connecting spell on the present time and I was carried up and forward once again.

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transcending

Finding ourselves in unlikely places

September 26, 2012

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

e e cummings

from ‘maggie and milly and molly and may’

It’s strange the places you can find yourself most connected back to yourself. It’s often unexpected.

As e e cummings notes, the sea for me is a perfect place to reconnect and centre. A walk along the beach collecting shells enacts a sense of also collecting myself. Whether it’s the time alone, the feel of cool sand against my feet, the touch of water, I become grounded again as I walk along the shoreline.

But I have been mostly inland of late and recently travelled to western New South Wales to Broken Hill. It was for work, a quick trip and mostly busy, but I had a strange sense of connection there. Perhaps it was the still warmth after so much cold; perhaps the wide open blue skies and sense of space; perhaps the architecture of a time I love I felt so comfortable within; perhaps being surrounded by a timeless landscape. Perhaps the light, the air, the warmth of the people reflecting the temperature. Maybe the quirky paintings, the retro pubs, the places that had stayed just so, caught in time. Or maybe just a perfect sense of timing, of time alone catching up with me in an environment I could correspond to and place myself in, like the final piece of a puzzle settling in.

I flew out likewise with a sense of warmth and light, more connected with myself and redolent with the atmosphere of a new place I will return to for more exploration of both its landscape and architecture as well as my own.

Where have you found yourself in unlikely places? Share your links, stories and reads about finding yourself in likely or unlikely places!

More posts about this:

Poetry: Into the light

Collecting ourselves

Life Affirming Reads – The Paris Review

For whatever we lose like a you (or a me) on Flickr

I’ll add more as they come to hand!

2 Comments
creativity love, loss & longing transcending

Rebooting

July 16, 2012

Restart and reboot yourself

You’re free to go…

Shout for joy if you get the chance

Password, you, enter here, right now’

  from ‘Unknown Caller’, U2

It was a small, old, blue, beach cottage, up the coast, hidden in trees, shells everywhere suggesting a time to be spent collecting yourself. The cottage even had a name, ‘Chill-out’, written in shells and hanging on the lounge room wall.

There were magazines, books, TV, DVDs, day beds. There was no network connection, no phone line, no internet. You could hear the roar of the sea’s thunder from the back room open out onto the air.

It was also across the road from where my parents used to live for some 15 years, before they moved back to the city about eight years ago. Since then, my brother and father have died, and I was bringing my mother back to where she lived before all this, back to happy places and old friends. My aunty also was with us; she lost her husband six weeks before my dad died. We had all come to visit and stay in this little town for most of our lives. And so we returned, and lots of thoughts came along with us, of people we loved who had also loved this place and who came here to recharge and unwind.

Having no internet was challenging. Life is all so very connected and I realised this past week how dependent on technology I am. Apart from the obvious work reliance on email, I have a strong need for personal connectedness it seems. I read the papers on the net; do sudoku and crosswords; connect with family, colleagues, friends and fellow bloggers and online friends who value creativity, reading and writing as much as I. I read a book and find out more about it online; I connect through Goodreads and find out more about the author. I find out what’s happening in the world through the news in my twitter feed. I research online content to inform my writing and read a huge range of blogs through feedly.

I write a blog, I create content, choosing as my focus ‘Transcending’ and dealing with love, loss and longing, strengthening yourself through reading, music, writing, strategy and productivity, whatever it is that gets you through, takes you up and onwards. I connect with other creative people through this and am keen to progress my blog writing during the week away. I find that without the internet, I can’t connect the parts, do the research, create the images, and even instagram fails to work.

So I take photos on my iphone. I enjoy the company of my family; we eat, we drink, we relax, we walk through a canopy of trees on a boardwalk beside the beach, we read, do sudoku, play scrabble, catch up with our old neighbour, now a sparkling blue-eyed 86 years young. We reminisce, we talk about those not with us any more as the place brings them back into our conversation and our lives.

I take two books to read that week that both turn out to be about the presence of those not there any more in the physical sense. ‘Poet’s Cottage’, by Josephine Pennicott, set in Tasmania, is all about family, ghosts, old houses and their history and the interplay between them. As reviewer, Elizabeth Storrs, comments, ‘If you ever have doubts as to whether ghosts exist, then you should visit Tasmania.’ This is true – I’ve felt this when travelling there, in old houses where you can feel a strong presence of others no longer there. ‘Poet’s Cottage’ was an atmospheric read about the past and its influence on the present.

Then I read Anne Tyler’s ‘The Beginner’s Good-bye‘ in which the main character, Aaron, loses his wife when she is struck down by a tree. He starts to see her again and have conversations with her, never sure if they are real or not. Through this, he begins to re-establish a new and different life.

It was only last night, coming home and reflecting on the week, that I realised my head was fully engaged in reading about the presence of those not there any more, of reflecting and moving on.

When we got home last night, our ipads were not connecting to the wi-fi. To get mine to work, I turned off and rebooted, suggesting to my partner, “Sometimes you just need to restart to make all the connections again.” Even when the words come out of my own mouth, I don’t get it straight away. The universe must think me so slow.

So today with time to reflect on a deeper level and stumbling across the words above from U2’s ‘Unknown Caller’ in one of my notebooks, I finally gather together what the week was about: the opportunity to turn off some of the input, unscramble the data, to recalibrate and reboot, knowing I have the password and the resources to shift up and on to what matters, with the love of those who have left us, still ringing in our memories, somehow cheering us on.

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Full review of ‘Poet’s Cottage’ coming soon as part of the Australian Women Writer’s 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge.

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