Let me tell you a little bit about what I’ve been up to since I was last here I have been redesigning my business to do a lot more in supporting women with their self care. But before I could do that and be credible I had to sort myself out. I’ve taken a step back and given myself time to really reflect to what I wanted my life to look like having accepted that I had lived with stress for maybe 64 years since I was 12 years old. And I needed to heal my skin. And i really am on the way.
It's been quite revealing and one of the things that’s happened is that I started to write poetry especially when I have real down time. It started with someone saying to me “Ann, I think you should write poetry” and then I remembered that many years ago I actually had. So I thought I’d be really brave and start sharing my poems because there’s a message for us all in them. At least that’s what I think.
I wrote this one on holiday when, one afternoon, I decided to be bored and just not do anything and see what it felt like. Because we’re never still are we, not still enough to be bored. We really have lost the knack of just being. I want to change that for myself and for others too so we can just appreciate being alive. I was just sitting on our terrace in Aix en Provence .. an easy place to practice boredom .. now the challenge is to do it at home, just looking at at the garden!
And how did I find it? I practised ding nothing and honestly I moved from that rather fidgety feeling of boredom to really getting the benefit of doing nothing
Anyway this is what I wrote:-
Being Bored or Being Busy
“I’m bored, Mum” you would say
“Go and find something to do, I’m busy”, Mum would say
So you would find something to do
You would learn to keep yourself busy
You would forget that you’re a human being, not a human doing
And being busy became your way of being
At some point you realise this doesn’t serve you
You never stop, you’re forever tired, you’re irritable,
God forbid .. you’re stressed
What if you could just stop
If only for a minute
Just to breathe, just to rest
But then our minds are full of oughts and should
So that time gets filled with doing
And off we go again
And we’re tired, we’re irritable and we’re stressed
But what if we could ignore oughts and should
And choose to choose
What if we chose to stop and do nothing
And be bored?
I wonder what that would be like
How about we try?