White space

This afternoon, after having had only two hours of sleep last night, I walked into the local pharmacy and leaned on the counter with an air of desperation, announcing, “I have a cough that is keeping me awake all night. I heard from a friend who heard from her sister about some medicine I can take that stops the spasms. She says it is magic, but also that you probably won’t want to sell it to me. She thinks it starts with R.”

The pharmacist laughed out loud and said, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.” Then she handed me a bottle and added, “Welcome to the wonderful world of R—.”

So I am optimistic about actually getting some sleep tonight.

Ask me in the morning how that went.

I know why I have the persistent cough, it’s no great mystery. It’s because I’ve been working way too many hours and going out way too often and staying up way too late for either my or my body’s liking… all of which is wont to happen at this time of year.

This situation is somewhat ironic because, just last week, I shared my “12 Calm Days of Christmas” booklet online, which is all about building mindfulness, white space and self-care into the silly season. If only I’d listened to my own advice, I probably wouldn’t need to take anything that starts with R before I go to bed tonight.

Why are we so bad at listening to ourselves? Or to applying to our own lives what comes so naturally when it’s time to care for others? My mother always used to say, cleaners have the messiest houses. Librarians watch a lot of television. Teachers have the most unruly children. Or something to that effect.

(Which, come to think of it, doesn’t say a lot about me since I’m neither a cleaner, a librarian nor a teacher, but my house is a mess, Netflix is getting a solid workout, and my children have been known to show unruly tendencies. Sometimes. Bless them.)

But you take my point, don’t you? It’s a lot easier to give advice than follow it. Or to put it another way, when you do something all day, the last thing most of us want to do when we get home is to keep on doing that same thing for a new crowd.

Not that I walk around all day telling people to be mindful and look after themselves… but I do blather on about those things quite a bit, don’t I. I even wrote a feature article for Good magazine a couple of months ago, on the importance of building ‘white space’ into our days. Stop typing and just DO, Naomi.

So I have decided to make myself accountable to you. There are things in life that we can control, and things we can’t control. The fact of the matter is that this time of year brings a lot of social engagements and, despite my introverted soul wanting to shrink away from them, it would be rude (and possibly not healthy) to hermit myself completely. So here is what I will do:

• Starting tomorrow morning, I will be obsessive about my nutrition. Life gets so exhausting and busy that it’s all too easy to fall into bad food habits because I’m too tired to cook, but right now my body needs extra TLC and so I’m going to fuel it properly. Even if the Christmas cake I baked is realllllly good. Even if ‘salad’ means just plonking a few chopped up veggies on a plate: there’s a whole lot more nutrition on that plate than in the nachos I order from around the corner.

• Starting tonight, on the nights I’m NOT going out, I will be in bed, lights out, by 10pm. At the latest. That’s going to be a tricky one to stick to but I’m strict with my children, so it’s time to be strict with myself.

• When we are out, I will be more conscious of the way the waiters top up my wine. I’ll stick to a three-drink maximum, no matter what.

• This weekend, I will tidy my house. Not just the usual clean, a proper tidy up, where things get sorted and put away in their special places. I find a clean environment helps me clear my mind but, also, that the opposite is true: a cluttered environment leaves me feeling stressed and out of control.

OK I’m sure this list could grow, but I actually want to achieve these things, so I’m going to be kind to myself and stop there. Please feel free to hold me accountable, and ask me how I get along with these goals as we creep towards Christmas. It helps me to know you are there. (Just click on the title of this blog post to view it in your browser if you’d like to comment, or else feel free to email me directly).

And in the meantime, how are you going, dear friend? What does December look like for you? How do you cope with the pressures of this season?

ps. Clearly the photographs in this blog post are not from the weather we are experiencing here in Australia. Last week, it was 41 degrees Celsius, with high winds. (Then again, tonight it will get down to 8 with rain, so I guess you never can tell.) I snapped these photographs in Scotland almost a year ago - some of them from a moving car which is why you see a bit of blur - and right now they are just the clean, white, open spaces I need to see, in order to breathe.

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Ode to doing nothing

In the beginning, the silence is uncanny. You can’t hear anything at all, not at first. But you have to let yourself go completely still.

Then you realise there are birds in the distant trees. Nearby, a cicada calls. Then the wind picks up and trees begin whispering to one another, and now you can hear the creaks and cracks that are the growing pains of the ancient bush. Hidden rustlings of secret creatures, the crunch of bark underfoot, the hum of something winged buzzing just past your ear.

And you realise the silence is actually a cacophony, and that the empty landscape is a crowd.

We have been staying on a friend’s farm, in the Macedon mountain ranges about an hour outside Melbourne.

The fields at the moment are, appropriately, autumnal gold. They might be the freshly-shorn fields of an autumn harvest, but then again they might just be the visible remnants of a brutally hot summer. Either way they are, undisputedly, gold. And more beautiful than you could imagine.

Smooth gusts of wind make patterns in the grass in gold and sand, as though unseen gods are passing by and gently stroking their hands over the grass. As perhaps they are.

In the afternoon I take a walk through the trees and then sit down amid the grass to listen to the wind. One of the horses in the bottom paddock spots me and nickers hopefully, wanting carrots. I’m empty handed, but I walk across to him and stroke his soft nose, then bend and breathe into his nostrils, the way I was taught to do with horses when I was a child.

His earthy, honey-breath is achingly familiar, and I feel a stab of love for my own beautiful old horse, Starbrow. Did you know that horse-breath smells like honey? I used to sit in the grass in our own paddock as a teenager, and Starbrow would wander over to pass the time. I’d breathe in his honey-breath, and stroke his nose until his eyelids drooped and he fell asleep on his feet, with his head in my lap.

Those were days in my life when sitting still meant actually doing nothing. I wasn’t multitasking, I didn’t carry a phone, and I didn’t even own a laptop. The only ‘data’ I was consuming was the touch of the wind on my bare arms, the sound of lorikeets bickering in the trees behind us, the sandpaper prickle of the bracken where I sat, and the scent of this sleepy old horse with his head resting on my crossed legs.

On the weekend, we sat still again.

We sat in the shade of a tree beside the dam, while the children fed about twenty ducks that felt like a hundred ducks, three pushy ‘bin-birds,’ and one very courageous magpie. When the children were all out of food, the ducks retreated to the shade of a willow-tree on a little island, and Scout and Ralph retreated to our spot on the banks of the dam, where we all proceeded to do… nothing much.

Scout leaned against us and methodically worked away on the friendship bracelet she’d been taught to weave by the little girl at the Girl Guides stall at the markets that morning. Ralph emptied the bag of cars he’d purchased for $1 at the same market onto the ground, and began digging a dirt track in which to race them.

And Mr B and I talked. We talked like we so rarely get to talk these days, about nothing, which felt like everything. We told each other stories, shared jokes, made plans, and dreamed dreams. And as the afternoon slowly unfolded it felt as though we were rediscovering each other. Mr B and I are always good friends, but the roles we play throughout the day (our “jobs,” if you want to think about this in career terms) are so different from one another that we can easily go through life feeling more apart than we actually are. But that afternoon under the tree doing nothing was a reminder of how much we shared, in opinions and in ethics and in life, despite our separate daily experiences.

It was a lovely gift, and something we could only have experienced because we gave ourselves permission to do nothing. In that afternoon, I felt a rush of affection for the man I married.

Right now I’m working on an article for a magazine, and it’s about the way that building “white space” into our days can free up our creative ideas and inspiration. Or, to put it in terms I heard at the My Open Kitchen gathering last year, “While ever you are consuming, you are not creating.”

It’s a subject I teach on and a subject I’ve been researching for this article. But sometimes we have to live something, don’t we, before the lesson can move from head to heart. Finally - finally - on the weekend, I stopped. At least for a little while. And I learned my own lesson.

White space - boredom - unplugging - stopping - doing nothing… no matter what you want to call it, it’s the stopping that can kick-start the new beginnings. In creativity, in ideas, in love, and in life.

Wouldn’t you agree?