Showing posts with label freelance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freelance. Show all posts

Monday, 11 May 2015

A Monday afternoon's musings on non-specific things while eating a chocolate brownie

After feeling particularly cheesed off, I eventually took off for a walk in the hope that some fresh air and different surroundings might help to shake off my low mood.

My brain feels like it's flatlined, I feel strangely irritated and easily roused into a bad temper. I'm tearful, fed up and I don't think I can simply put that down to Friday's general election results. It's just a temporary, passing mood, one that will go as quickly as it came.

I'm now sitting at a table in Blue Skies, waiting for a large coffee and a gluten free chocolate brownie. I have no particular allergy to gluten, but always err on the side of caution seen as my stomach is so sensitive these days. I have a large cookie in a brown paper bag - a purchase to take me over the £5 limit and avoid the 45p surcharge. 

It's bright and airy in here and the sound of voices, mostly children and young women, serve as a calming influence to my agitated state. They're probably students, out on a break from the drudgery of lectures. When I'm like this, it's good to sit on the sidelines, not quite part of anything and yet strangely still part of the milieu. I'm sat smack bang in the middle of the room, on a four seater rustic wooden table. Some children have come in and sat in front of me with, I'm guessing, their grandmother.



The boy is now swinging on his chair. I can remember doing that at school. We were absolutely forbidden from doing it, but I did it anyway. I think someone must have fallen off the back of a chair once and gone flying. The thing to do was to push your chair back while you were sitting on it, and push it back so you were balanced on the 2 back legs. A precarious balancing act that could end in disaster.

Those long, hot summer days when the future was so far away you could only imagine it into something exaggerated and fantastic, and create possible scenarios that you knew could never really happen.

But there we are...fast forward to today and here we are, musing on the past, the present and everything else in between.



Today has been an escape, a short one which I'm hoping will help to give my brain enough time to recuperate from my irritated mood. A trip out which might inspire me to come up with new ideas or refresh already existing ones. 

We can live in hope.

And anyway, it was an excellent excuse to eat a chocolate brownie.......and a moment like that is never wasted.

I think Winnnie the Pooh makes a valid point when he says that sometimes listening, doing nothing and not bothering can have its own value. And I always agree with whatever Pooh says.






Monday, 4 May 2015

Rest, relax and breathe

It's that time of year where you go through what you hope will be quiet period, to be shortly followed by another rush. It'll be similar to the rush that's gone before, where you're wishing things would slow down a bit. Then the slow bit arrives and you're suddenly asking yourself when it'll get busy again because you're bored. You know what it's like. You can never really appreciate where you are on the hamster wheel, you have to be constantly thinking where else you should be.

And no matter how much you try and kid yourself with self-employment, everyone's on a hamster wheel - only difference is you get to choose how fast or slow you go round.



But for tomorrow at least, it's going to be different, it's going to be restful, a time to collect my thoughts, a spot of marketing, tidying up and  some appreciation of being in the moment, rather than focussing on what will happen tomorrow.

There'll be a review of the first 4 months of the year and the tidying up of loose ends, invoice checking and counting of figures. An assessment and review of the general picture of things. A setting of scenes, a focus on details.

And after that...



I have promised myself during this quiet period that I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts. I'm not going to be rushing to the next job, I will endeavour to savour the moment, meditate, do some yoga.........

Oh puleeeese...




That really isn't going to happen is it? I'll last until Wednesday and then I'll start pounding the walls screaming, and then as I get stuck in again with another round of work and clients, I'll be complaining about how I never get a holiday. 

I detest yoga and meditation leads to boredom followed by sleep. Give me a set of weights and a pair of running shoes any day. Running is my meditation. 

We can't change what we are...but we can try to work with what we've got.