I have been talking to a friend about out hopes and dreams and schemes for the new year. She asked me not to scoff when she said she had set her compass cosmically, declared her dreams to the Universal Power and was quite content to leave it in the Hands of the Higher Power. Of course I wouldn’t scoff, having lived the major portion of my adult life like this!
It took me back to the heady days of feminism for me and a book that was doing the rounds at that time. We were big on personal development in those days, lived under avalanches of books telling us how to live emerging only to paint slogans and burn our bras at bonfires held on the sabbath. One book that sat in bookshelves all over my feminist landscape was called Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway.
I never read the book because my father raised us up with that motto, he always got a vicarious thrill out of his kids taking life threatening physical risks in the safety of their own back yard while mum stood at the back door and prophesised that our latest backyard thrill was “All Going To End in Tears.” Dad invented a forerunner of the bucking bronco when I was probably nine. A forty four gallon drum hitched to some poles by ropes attached to four poles grew out of our sand pit one day. One lucky kid was plonked onto the drum where dad had attached a rope handle while the rest of us took up position at the ropes and shook them like hell until the kid fell down and broke its nose or arm or hit its head on the return swing of the drum. In my mind the idea that thrills would end in spills and tears merged together at an early age. So with apologies to Susan Jeffers, I never felt the need to read that life changing best seller of hers. The title of the book did however become a kind of motto to live by and its still valid today. I usually begin the New Year with a motto to live by or a line of poetry to follow, resolutions are so last century and only seem to concentrate on whats wrong with you instead of what is fabulous about you. And at this stage in my life, I am only interested in how to expand into that.
But my friend talked about gratefulness and how we should count our blessings before we ask for more and I agree. New Year is a time to count your blessings before you charge off into the new year with a list of demands like a shopping list at an end of season sale. It’s important to find things in your every day life to be thankful for, she said. The practise of being grateful for small things is easy in India and somewhat more difficult in the West. Every day I am home, I wake in gratitude to my father who bought his seven kids home to New Zealand and saved us from the horrors of growing to adulthood in a teeming city, that he showed me the way to my home. But mostly these days I am grateful to be growing old. I am grateful that my days are now less the work of digging in the garden and more about preserving the bounty of the season. I am grateful for this wisdom that has been earned and I am grateful even for this middle aged blindness. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldnt be sharing this tip with you so please be aware that the trick to loosing one kilo in one second only applies to middle aged women.
HOW TO LOOSE ONE KILO IN ONE SECOND