Budapest is a city of statues – there are statues for everyone and everything. The beautiful wide streets, flanked by stunning gothic buildings, have small parks and plazas filled with statues and fountains every couple of blocks. There is no shortage of places to sit down and have a lovely rest.
The small old city of Sarajevo where we spent five serene nights, is full of historic buildings with beautiful Georgian architecture, displaying the brutal wounds of gunfire and shelling from two decades prior. Much of the city is graffitied and dirty as post-war economic devastation still remains, and a third of the population are unemployed. The busy streets are a kalediscope of cultures, with nuns, muslims, westerners, arabs, and people from every ethnic and religious background wandering the streets, ordering thick bosnian coffees, decadent icecreams, or the local must-try dish, cevapi.
Endless fields of tall, ripe sunflowers lined the roads to our first stop – Gallipoli. Blue skies, green grass and sandstone memorials line the shores of Anzac Cove on the banks of the Dardanelle strait. I waded into the water to see the coast of Gallipoli, just as thousands of young men did in 1915. As the local Turkish man sunbathing on the pebbles said, Too many lives lost for nothing.
We visited Jerash and the Amman Citadel before driving to Petra. I had no idea what to expect in Jerash – maybe a couple of ruins before heading to one of Jordan’s treasures. But it’s a lot more than a couple of ruins – it’s a Greco-Roman city full of exquisite ruins and fascinating facts. An intact amphitheater, replete with Jordanian bagpiper and drummers, reveals the genius of ancient acoustic engineering. Put your ear to one circular niche and chat to your buddy on the opposite side of the arena. Totally audible despite the bagpiper, and distant repeats of Fur Elise piped not from an ice cream van, but the man selling gas bottles door to door in modern Jerash.
I’m searching for something – and I don’t know what it is. But I do know what it isn’t. It isn’t physical. Or psychological. It isn’t health or wealth or happiness – although they’re lovely and I’d like more please. I’m not looking for religion – I need something far more personal. The only word that makes sense to me, is spiritual.
Whatever our individual faith and beliefs may be, we all have an inner spirit. That little voice of wisdom and love that talks to us. No matter how many ugly voices are talking in our heads, there is always a little voice countering the ugliness. Sometimes the destructive voices are so overpowering it’s impossible to hear – but it’s always there.
And according to Susan David, we need to consider emotions in the same light. Not adorable – but as neither good nor bad. They are just emotions – all valid and no qualitative labels required. Apparently most of us are expert at either brooding or bottling our emotions, and we live in a world full of forced positivity where, “being positive has become a new form of moral correctness”.
Every day – every moment – of my life, I change and transform one way or another. My body constantly regenerates – most of it anyway. Some cells every few days, some every few years. And a few important cells in the brain we apparently need to treat carefully as they’re just one-timers. But overall, my body has been changing and transforming since that winning sperm first introduced itself to a welcoming ovum more than 52 years ago.
I am a master procrastinator. Yes. It’s true. When I want to do something, or necessity dictates I have to get off my butt right now, I’m an amazing gogetter. But when I’m feeling a bit blergh about something, or don’t really want to do it, I can out-procrastinate the world champion procrastinators. In fact I believe if there were such a competition, I’d be inclined to win.
I’ve been away (again) for four nights – in a beautiful shack by the sea for a couple of nights with a friend, then a couple of nights with my husband (not friend and husband at the same time – just to be very clear for anyone wondering). It’s time to go home today, but I was thinking how very calm and peaceful I feel while I’m here – for myriad reasons – and it occurred to me – I’m very much a nature gal
Ever been really excited to go to the movies? Waiting and waiting for the release date and you just know it’s going to be great because it has your favourite actor in it, and you loved the book when you were 16, and your oldest friend who you never have time to catch up with can’t wait to see it with you. Finally it’s available on the big screen and you’re too busy working, and getting a root canal, and organising driving lessons for your own 16 year old, so the movie is down to the last days of showing. Two days before it leaves town, you finally go with a group of friends.
Today I did some dream writing. It was a technique I learned through Joanne when I did her Seven Day Challenge. I was super teary and tired when I started the day today. It’s been a bit of a rough road but you know – that’s life. These things happen. It’ll be fine. I knew I needed to do some writing and couldn’t think of what I needed to write. So I thought I would do some dream writing – I want to mix and match a lot of writing over the period of this January challenge (have I mentioned the January challenge is to write a thousand words every single day? Which doesn’t daunt me in the least. But I don’t want to write the same thousand words in the same boring place every day.) So today I thought – dream writing. And I did. Dream writing involves setting a timer for a set period of time (just 15 minutes today), starting with a “prompt”, and then letting your hand flow across the page for the entire time without stopping or resting or going back at all – just an unbroken stream of thoughts. I wrote the prompt “In the clinic I hope to…” and then my hand flew across the page for fifteen minutes with the following stream of consciousness.
I’ve started reading again. Please let it be known, this is very good news – on numerous levels. In case you haven’t picked up on it before, I have a somewhat addictive nature, and one of the many ways I’ve numbed myself is with candy crush. I take no pride in this. It is a stupid, trivial, pointless game. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with playing candy crush if you’re the kind of person who pops on and plays a couple of levels every now and then. But if you’re like me and managed to get past level 3000 in a depressingly short period of time, then clearly there’s a problem. And no – I haven’t spent any money on it – just a ton of time, which is far more valuable than money.
I’ve been watching a few TED talks lately – because I can 🙂 I watched one by the inimitable Sir Ken Robinson about passion, and a particular quote jumped out and grabbed me.
If you’re doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour
The trouble with falling down a big pit is once you get back out, the rest of the world moved on and you’re still thinking about the pit. Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy to be out of that dark place! But I’ve forgotten how to live in the light.
