So today was the first day of official lockdown and it was a day of planning and activity as I had intended. In order to keep myself honest, I have set up an online calendar and scheduled my daily run/walk, dog walk and weights programme. I am pleased to say that I completed all three activities today.
All in all it has been a busy day. Another session of gardening, keeping in touch with family and work colleagues and organising my learning and self-development resources for the days and weeks ahead.
I don’t know if I am alone in this, but I am a magpie when it comes to self-development online courses. I buy them and usually start them, but very rarely finish them. It is not that I lose interest, but as I am generally time poor outside of work and commuting each day, everything I want to do is generally greater than the free time available to me.
Whilst I do spend a lot of time at work and on the motorway (approximately 10 hours each work day), I do know that I waste a lot of time on things that don’t serve me. Mindless hours of surfing the internet? Guilty as charged!
Hopefully the positive habits I develop over the next little while will be maintained when life gets back to normal.
So, I have decided that each day I will dedicate time, not to Facebook or Instagram, but to catching up on the blogs that I enjoy and on the online programmes I have waiting to be completed.
I have a delicious course on homemaking from Alison May’s ‘Brocante Home’ Salon, a couple of courses on how to live elegantly and with ease from the fabulous Tonya Leigh’s ‘French Kiss Life’ and a course to enrich my soul by Deepak Chopra. I can’t wait to start and complete them all!
I am so looking forward with happy anticipation to the learnings ahead. I am also mindful of the learnings I have benefited from in the past and am well overdue a refresher. So I have spent some time reviewing my collection of well loved books that have nurtured my heart, mind and spirit over the years. I have always been a sucker for self-development. I remember that when I won a book voucher as a prize at school when I was 16, I bought the book Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, when all of my friends were reading romance or had given reading away. Weird kid that I was.
Anyway, when reviewing my bookshelf, I came across an old favourite ‘Shelter for the Spirit – Create Your Own Haven in a Hectic World’ by Victoria Moran. I probably read this book about 20 years ago, but it seems the perfect choice for a reread.
I spend so much time out of my home, it is such a rare pleasure to spend so much time at home rediscovering the treasures in it. I am very mindful of lives being lost around the world (the reason we are all homebound) and also that the living situation for many in their homes is challenging.
I am extremely lucky, and am so grateful for that. As well as having a safe and comfortable home, I have the knowledge that all I love are safe and well. If I never had anything more, it would be enough.
Quietly Quaintrelle 