Frogs and ice cream.

2020 was a big year.

Right?

I mean it was extraordinary. Like nothing any of us had ever experienced.

For Al and I 2020 was a year of big decisions and massive change. Many many walks in the woods or by the ocean .. talking.

Talking.

While others were furloughed and learnt to make sourdough, or were working hard on the front line to save lives and everything else in between .. we, like so many others went through a process of a dawning realisation that our world was about to shift unrecognisably.

This is my journey … Als was different … same facts, same decisions to be made but different thoughts, feeling and challenges.

Al and I had been running a thriving jewellery school for nearly 18 years. An incredible adventure that began in my parents garage in the New Forest with a tiny set of hand tools and a few hand built benches, and grew to become a beautiful centre of creative metalwork. Often described by our students as a ‘sanctuary’, a place to be free, step out of normal life and return to a sense of oneself.

We were so often told we were ‘lucky’ and we were ‘living the dream’ … and in so many respects we were.

We worked for ourselves, made our own decisions and were surrounded by wonderful, happy creative people all of the time. Our ‘commute’ to work was straight out of a Disney movie, twenty minutes through the most picturesque Dorset countryside with deer and hares in the fields and frequent visits by ghostly barn owls. We may as well have had tiny blue birds helping us to dress in the mornings and tying ribbons in our hair!

And then 2020 arrived.

And like everyone, we closed for lockdown.

Individually Al and I began to realise that, as much as we enjoyed our work, as wonderfully fulfilling it had been.. after nearly eighteen years …we were tired.

We needed a change. As simple as that.

Terrifying.

Mortifying.

Feelings of excitement washed in waves intermittently through tsunamis of fear and doubt.

We had always run our school, for almost as long as we had been together … alongside working as practicing jewellers .. it’s what we do.

Who are we if we don’t do that?

For me, it felt like that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when ‘Junior’ has to step out into thin air to cross the invisible bridge to reach the Holy Grail.

Trust.

Close your eyes, take a breath… step out into the abyss and trust that all will be well.

More than well.

Wonderful.

Not easy.

Sleepless.

Anxiety.

So we did it.

We could see that the situation with covid meant the immediate future was unpredictable. In sheer practical terms continuing to attempt to run the school during this time had the very real potential to cause a lot of stress and cost a lot of money.

So we took a picnic to the beach and talked for hours …

And hours.

And made our decision.

Then we talked it through with a dear friend.

And then we talked some more.

Terrifying.

Exciting.

Needed.

Liberating.

Done.

If I am truly honest I floundered.

I felt as if all the familiarity had been snatched from my world. Everything that had felt secure, rhythmic and meaningful was gone.

The school, in so many ways had also been my sanctuary. I knew it inside out and back to front, I was mostly surrounded by friendly faces and over the years had learnt how to cope with the not so friendly ones.

So I found myself on high alert all the time, my fight or flight was turned up to maximum volume… sleepless…

Could I really exist without this part of my life that had occupied so much of my brain space for so many years and that we had worked tirelessly to build? Was there ever a time before?

Like a little snail peeking out from my shell, I slowly began to allow myself to accept the change and even admit that it was due. I needed the shift and the idea of turning all of the creative energy that we had given away to others for so many years to our own artistic projects was extremely exciting.

There’s a song.

Based on the teachings of Burgs.

In it he says, ‘The truth is, the only real needs are food, shelter and companionship And everything else is a bonus.’

These words had such a powerful impact on me at this time.

In a year where we felt an insecurity about being able to hold on to all three of these things, their importance became paramount. The most basic needs..

Everything else..

Is a bonus.

I had food.

I had shelter

I had companionship.

I was ok.

I just needed to focus my energy on making sure I continued to have food, shelter and companionship.

All will be well.

Long term goals became unimportant. Another new pair of converse became irrelevant.

Like a little velociraptor my intense focus became fixed on now. This moment. Today.

Today, right now, I have food, shelter and companionship.

All is well.

And the next day the same…

Although I have read many Buddhist and mindfulness texts in my life, it was this journey that truly taught me the power of living for each moment.

I am fortunate enough that in my life I had never experienced such uncertainty… both globally and politically but also personally.

It was not a comfortable feeling.

But the concept of re-evaluating what is truly important in life, what actually really matters was in its way, liberating, and in many ways shocking. Shocking to observe a past self, from what felt like a distance, like some weird out of body experience, and see how much energy, time and money had been spent in the past in the pursuit of ‘stuff’. The need for more.

Always..

More.

So I stopped.

Not with a virtuous mindset, or some ‘holier than thou’ epiphany but with the necessity of pairing down expectations to be able to make our new life work.

I have a habit of being a tad focussed … ( insert Al laughing hysterically at my understatement!) ..when I set my mind to a concept, it’s all or nothing. Extremes. If I choose to abstain from a food, for example, I will never touch it again. If I decide on a principle .. it will be unwavering unless someone can argue against it convincingly. If I choose to get fit, learn yoga, lose weight ..then that is what will happen. No compromises. Focus.

In 2020 my intense focus turned to rebuilding our life, not wasting anything, money, food, time…

All we needed was food, shelter and companionship.

We were good.

It was a good feeling. To really begin appreciating how little we actually needed to be completely happy.

But there was a tiny ‘but’ starting to form in my mind …

After many months of knuckling down, I started to realise that although I am fully, completely on board with Burgs teachings …I felt I wanted to add something to his philosophy.

We need Joy.

The little things..

Not the mindless shopping for more boots or T shirts (two of my biggest vices !!) but the important things. The things that truly make you smile, or have meaning … the things that you will still love in six months or two years.

The things that make your heart beat a little faster.

Ice cream.

Days out.

Time with family and friends.

The T-shirt you still can’t throw away years after it’s become unwearable

The special things that you think hard about before you buy, that hold meaning, love or just simply make your heart smile.

Memories.

… and kittens… of course.

I began to realise that like everything in life, it’s about balance … in my typical way I had intensely created the experience of the extreme of knuckling down to the concept of stripping life back to its hare necessities, food, shelter and companionship…

May I just interrupt myself ….

This is, of course, bare necessities in a affluent Western society where I live in a nice house in a nice part of the country and can order my vegetables to be delivered to my door …… THAT kind of ‘bare necessities’ ….. I have absolutely NO illusions as to how fortunate I am to even have the privilege to understand the concept of choosing to pair my life back to some kind of minimal principles!!

Thank you… I’ll continue…

I found myself rediscovering things I already had… that I was so used to seeing I just didn’t see anymore, and I saw them with fresh eyes, like they were new to me.

I truly learnt to feel gratitude for everything that I already have and to find my joy there too.

Now, I’m not preaching …. And I am definitely not perfect (please see my new Doc Martins that I really didn’t need …. But oh my gosh they’re cute!!) but I have learnt that sitting in my garden and hearing the tiny little chirping song of a frog makes me as happy as any new dress I’ve ever owned …

Finding Joy in the small stuff.

Frogs.

We need less, but we need joy.

Balance.

To me, living a life without joy is as wasteful as endlessly buying unnecessary ‘stuff’

Each moment we are alive on this planet is a memory… a breath, a moment as precious as the memories already past.

Each second in time will immediately become set as a fixed event in time, an unchangeable frozen moment in history, your history. You’re already creating the dusty photo album that your future self will nostalgically flick through ….

So surely, the most precious thing in the world is this very second and making it the best it can be and surely to do this, all we need is food, shelter, companionship… and a little joy.

I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts the other day …’Welcome to Nightvale’, a surreal, bizarre, funny, horror-ish podcast (very difficult to explain but definitely worth a listen if you enjoy the bizarre) .. and not usually a podcast that imparts wisdom to be honest…

But.. as I was listening to the wonderful Cecil Baldwin’s meanderings I suddenly realised he was saying something rather profound … I’ll leave you with this …

‘ Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the tabletop, and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid, single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held.

It is impossible, no matter how blessed you are by luck or the government or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind, it is impossible not to feel a little sad looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take.

The village glimpsed from a train window, beautiful and impossible and impossibly beautiful on a mountaintop, and you wondered what it would be if you stepped off the moving train and walked up the trail to its quiet streets and lived there the rest of your life. The beautiful face of that young man from Luftnarp, with his gaping mouth and ashy skin, last seen already half turned away as you boarded the bus. already turning towards a future without you in it, where this thing between you that seemed so possible now already and forever never was.

All variety of lost opportunity spied from the windows of public transportation, really.

It can be overwhelming, this splattered, inert wax, recording every turn not taken. What’s the point, you ask. Why bother, you say. Oh Cecil, you cry. Oh Cecil.

But then you remember, I remember, that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment that it is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now, where we never can know what shape the next moment will take.’

‘Welcome to Nightvale’ - Nightvale Presents.

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