Motivate Yourself

I am very aware that I've ignored my spiritual side for a long while and the hole it has left inside me keeps me aware that it's something I need to get back to.

Some might say that as I get older, it's natural that I would want to make sure there was something 'after', however I know that it's not that.

Buddhism isn't a religion as such, it's more a way of life, one that I have felt drawn to since my early 20's. When I lived in London, I used to go to the Buddhist temple in Wimbledon and felt such peace there, the monks so devout and yet at the same time so full of fun and life.

When I moved up I found somewhere in Wales, but have only managed to get there once. While I would love to go again, but life seems to get in the way all the time.

Likewise my Wiccan side gets sadly neglected, even though I have a supreme love of the earth, and often talk to the goddess I feel closest to, I know there is more I could do, more I want to do and yet, as with everything else in my life at the moment, I feel I am freewheeling, not really making an effort in any area.

Perhaps this is the menopause? Perhaps there is no excuse and I'm just damned lazy. This provokes feelings of guilt because yes of course I'm lazy! If I wasn't then I would be doing all the things I so badly want to do. I need an injection of passion. Not the sexual kind, although that would be nice thank you very much, I mean more of the passion for life, passion for a cause, passion for being. I can meditate really well.. I can do long periods of time doing absolutely nothing!

I need a kick.. a reason to fight.. a passion. Does anyone know if they sell it on ebay??

I so need to change myself, my life, my direction. All I now need is the motivation. I suspect I need to feel I'm worth it, worth fighting for. How do you suddenly change that inside of yourself? Does self esteem come free if you buy two slimming products at Boots?

I'm going to make an effort to find the motivation somehow, hopefully without giving over my life savings to a lifestyle coach, no matter how good they are I don't think I'd get a lot of motivation for £56.43!

Be excellent to each other.. however, I need to be excellent to me now.

Can I have a Word?

Words are powerful things aren't they.

They can:

Make you laugh, make you cry, scare you, arouse you, sicken you, hurt you, soothe you, uplift you, delight you or plunge you into despair

They can turn around and bite you.

They can be twisted, hurled, shared, bad, good, murmured, shouted, whispered, spat, held back, spun into yarns, used to draw attention to you, and away from you, they can be heated or cool, firey or icy, soft or hard, damning or exalting.

You can chose them carefully, or like an avalanche watch them spill from you without thought of harm to others or yourself.

You can use them as a weapon, or as a first aid kit, harm or heal, to build friendships or to tear them down.

Too many words can destroy something forever, too few can have the same effect.

Words have started wars, and ended them.

They can have more than one meaning, the same word can be insulting or exciting, depending on the way its said.

They can tell you more about the person saying them, than the person they are meant to be about.

The old saying "better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and prove it" might be corny.. but corny is just another word for "well used truth"

I love words, they can also transport you into other worlds, other times and places, they can be springboards for your imagination to take flight.

However they can also be used to write lists, which are really the product of the devil. A list of things to do invites failure. A list of wants invites greed. Horrible things lists!

When it's time to go...

As often happens, when I sit with a blank page before me, I have no idea what's going to appear. I have no particular idea in mind, no moan or rant, so I sit and wait for another muse to unfold. I am feeling that I should comment on the untimely death of Mr Jackson, being that we were both born in the same year. Last night, when I first heard the news, and then subsequently felt the need to wait up for an hour until it was confirmed, I remember feeling shock, then to an extent numb. The thought processes were along the lines of:

"Oh dear, same age as me, in fact 7 months younger"..

"His heart? Wow and he looked so healthy and slim"..

(looking down prodding chest) "Hey in there, you ok? I know I don't treat you well but hang in there ok?"

"he must have died alone"

Strangely I think it was the last thought that I found the saddest. The initial reports last night were that he was found by a member of staff, not breathing. An icon, a legend, a man who has had friends appearing out of the woodwork all day to pay tribute to him, who liked to surround himself with people, died on his own, with no one to ease his passing.

Somehow I can't see his life as a happy one. I don't know the whole story and I doubt anyone ever will, but the things he put himself through, the loneliness, the mental health problems which he obviously had. He was a battered tortured soul and I although I feel sorry for those he's left behind, I can only feel that at last, the poor vulnerable man is finally at peace, where no one can hurt him anymore.

Having said all that, he has brought pleasure to millions, his songs while not all to my taste, they were successful and fit their time. The video that went along with Thriller was groundbreaking and amazing in it's originality.

It made me smile today when someone said it was cruel that he had died so young. I'd like to think that people generally class 50 as young, (I do!) however I think it was more because he was always perceived as a boy, a Peter Pan figure who certainly would have been at home amongst the Lost Boys.

Just a man, that's all he was, a human male, no more or less important than any other human who died today. There are people grieving, mourning the death of loved ones, each to be remembered in someone's heart. There are people celebrating the birth of new loved ones, children who will grow, some to become, I'm sure, the superstars of tomorrow, some to scratch a living any way they can.

I hope none of them die alone. Goodbye Michael, rest easy now.

Where are you from?

I had rarely given thought to this question while growing up or busy bringing up my children. It wasn't until my girls were grown up, that I started to think about how little I had to pass down to them, about who they were, where they were from. Sure I could talk about their grandparents, but further back from that was a mystery to me. My mother had told me stories that led me to believe that the path to our ancestors was so broken as to be impossible to follow.

It occured to me, that now, with the internet, it would be easier than it had ever been to start to get an idea about my ancestry. I knew that somehow back in my paternal line, there had been a change of name, apparently involving a German who came to live in England during the years of war. So I was fairly sure that side of the family would lead to a dead end (sorry, couldn't resist).

I joined all the sites I could, found out about ordering certificates etc., and set off on a journey of discovery that even now entralls and fascinates me.

First of all, I have been surprised by the amount of family that have got in touch. Cousins and second cousins that I never knew, or knew when I was tiny and then lost touch with. Complete strangers have turned out to be somehow connected and as the tree grew, I began to realise just how far and wide a family can spread. Australia, America and Europe all came into the picture, discovery that the unknown German not only took a mistress when he came to England, he also gave her four children, all of which started out with his name (Horwitz) but only one kept it, the other three assuming her name, which came down the line to me.

I also found that the first name Louis was very prevalent on the maternal side and that my mother had been less than honest, and in fact had come from an extremely large family which spread out over Southern England. My German ancestors mistress however was the biggest surprise, her ancestry moving to the North of England, quite near where I have settled, and the picture above is of Hoghton Tower, near Preston which apparently is an ancestral home!

Now although I can't leave them anything so grand as an ancestral home, I can leave them the knowledge that they stand on ground that their ancestors have walked for hundreds of years. I have given them roots, an identity. As I continue the journey, ever completing the picture for them then it also gives me a certain amount of peace that I am surrounded by my own history, my own roots and family, a connection to the land I walk about on and eventually will be scattered on.

Home.

Dreamers

Have come to the conclusion over the years that imagination is probably the most important thing that a human being can have and also the worst. Everyone has imagination, even those who claim otherwise.

It can however work for, or against you. It can help you play, it can help you dream, it can give you hope, imagining what 'might' be if a series of events take place. It can help you decide on a course of action, showing you the best possible road to take.

It can take fear, and grow it to the point of panic, chasing those fears and forcing you to confront a myriad of possibilities, each one more gruesome than the last, until you are almost paralysed and unable to move forward.

In my case, as well as the above, my imagination tends to take me down very strange roads, often showing me the absurd and ridiculous. It tends to do this at very awkward moments, so that in the middle of a most important meeting, it nudges me, forcing a smile to my lips or on a couple of singularly embarrassing occasions, making me laugh out loud that i've hurriedly and very unsuccessfully tried to turn into a cough. I managed to stop a meeting doing that once, the coughing fit, that was there to cover the laugh, decided to put in an oscar winning performance, which had my ex-boss running down the corridor for water (which of course I found even funnier - more coughing - more concerned looks etc etc).

My daughter suffers from the same affliction. We are very alike in many ways and I can see the light of laughter in her eyes, listened to the stories of her being told off for laughing at the wrong moments. She hasn't managed her mothers level of control just yet!

We both also suffer from the darker side of the imagination. We skip our way through the bright possibilities of a situation until suddenly we realise we are in the shade, the path in front of us in shadow, uncertain. We are unable to turn our backs, we need to see what is down there, the dark possibilties of that same situation and that haunts us. Once there of course, it's very hard to remember the brighter side of things.

We are by no means unusual. We also do not suffer mental health problems. This is the way most people think, to a greater or lesser degree. What it does mean for us is that it is all too easy to hurt us. We have already worked out all the possibilities of "I'll call you.." If you don't we don't condemn you, we condemn ourselves as our imagination has convinced us we weren't good enough to call.

We demand honesty, because that's what we offer. We know how much anything less can hurt and destroy something that could potentially be great.

This blog didn't really have a direction, more of a muse I think. Rambling can be such a comfortable thing to do sometimes....

Smelling the Flowers

For an ex-smoker, I have a ridiculously sensitive sense of smell. I accept this, I have always been the same and while age has taken its toll on my taste buds, eyesight and hearing, for some reason the gods have decided to leave me this sense as a gift. I can understand the reasons behind these senses failing:

• Your eyesight starts to fade so that you can't see your looks going,
• Your hearing starts to go so that you can't hear people saying your looks are going,
• Your taste buds start to go so that makers of extremely strong cheese have people to buy their product,
• Your sense of smell goes, of course, so that as you fall into increasing decrepitude, you don't notice that faint aroma-de-wee that seems to come to us all.

(You can see the direction this blog is taking I hope.. express train to Rantsville approaching, all aboard!)

I have, over the years, become used to the fact that I smell things other people seem to miss. I can smell if rain is approaching, long before it does. I seem to be wired so that I can smell days. Saturday always has a distinctive smell (honestly it does!). I can even smell if someone has cut themselves. There is one smell however, that I will never get used to and it seems more and more common. It varies in strength, but always induces a flight reaction in me. I do anything to get away from it, even to the point of being rude.

Body Odour

Even the words have a smell! Why are we so reluctant to tell someone they smell? It can be seen as offensive to mention it, however I find it offensive to be around someone who smells. When you're in a food store and every section you walk down seems have the lingering odour of unwashed body, because let's face it, that is what it is, then it makes shopping, which is a generally unpleasant but necessary experience into a downright nightmare for me.

Am I being intolerant? Hell yes I am! Men - women do not find it attractive! I don't care if you've been grafting hard all day and your muscles are bulging. If you'd washed and put deodorant on in the morning then you wouldn't smell. The Diet Coke man, out on his building site, or fixing his lifts DOES NOT SMELL!

I'm not putting all this on to men either, although they are by far the worst culprits. Women, you know who you are..(gods I hope you do) a little anti-perspirant goes a long way after a nice wash! Please.. think of the example you are setting your children. If you don't have any children of course, are you at all surprised??

It's not only old people either so don't blame it all on them (I'm not mentally ready to put "us" there yet).

So please, have a thought for those that still retain their sense of smell, if only for the sake of your dignity. Don't make people recoil from you when they move near. It must make you feel awful - don't do it to yourselves!

View from the Window

There are a lot of times when the view from the window is far better than the view of your surroundings. The urge to take flight, to run over the rolling hills of your imagination and see what is just out of sight, the possibilities of 'maybe if' is often very attractive.

When things aren't what you expected them to be, you are faced with choices.. take the bull by the horns and try to change it, ignore it and hope things will change, or leave it all behind or decide its just not worth the effort and run. Which one to choose is the question.

When your chosen career isn't what you expected it to be and the country is in recession so little chance of changing it, your options become limited. Trying to make the best of things seems to be the order of the day, hoping that at the end of the recession you will have more control over it.

It's when options are taken away that things change again. Several work colleagues today learnt that they were to be made redundant. A common occurrence at the moment around the country, people are discovering that the life they had carefully moulded for themselves was suddenly in jeopardy. Their home, their future all seem uncertain. This time I was one of the lucky ones. Next time I might not be.

Which is when the view from the window will become very attractive, the endless possibilities of change. The challenges roll themselves out and it's up to you to rise to them. Sometimes things are easy, sometimes they are hard, but with passion and drive mountains can be moved.

So this is how this all works is it?

It's amazing what you suddenly find while clicking on links that other people have posted.

It appears I can now put my thoughts out into the ether, whether they make sense or not, whether they are vitally important to the safety and continuance of the known world or not, even whether anyone else reads them or not. Apparently also, I don't have to worry about anyone disagreeing with me.

ACE!

My life as a 50 something menopausal woman can now be told, the puberty spots that have finally appeared 35 years later than they should have done, the sleepless nights that are suddenly all too overheated, the mood swings that cause me to be completely mellowed out one minute, AND A CRAZED RANTING BANSHEE THE NEXT... ARRRGGHHH!

Of course, this isn't the only thing I am likely to write about. Being 50 something also gives me the superpower of invisibility to at least half of the human race, which provides a perfect opportunity to people watch, without getting them all excited that a woman actually might fancy them.

Married twice, gratefully divorced twice, I realise I might not be the easiest person to know, but this small space will be mine and mine alone, to rant, to gush lovingly, to muse, to occasionally scratch myself in private places.

You're welcome to stroll along with me as you see fit.