Category Archives: Inspiration

Walking it out

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Yesterday I had one of those frustrating days. I woke up tired, with a furrowed brow, and I don’t think either affliction left me all day. My housemate turned the hot water on (twice) just as I put my face under the shower, then he beat me to the washing machine. Neither of these things would normally bother me, but he obviously sensed my irrational annoyance because apologised to me and I found myself feeling irritated that I’d been such a cranky pants*. Then I walked all the way to the train station and realised I’d forgotten my wallet as I went to pay for my train ticket. I had to walk all the way home and then back again, only just making the next train, and only just making it to the class I was teaching at midday.

And it went on like this all day. Practicing yoga myself at home frustrated me because my body was tired and reluctant to hold itself in a headstand or twist too deeply. A cup of tea and a cupcake melted the frustration just a little but not enough that I could concentrate on doing anything useful.

Finally at about 5pm, after a full day of wearing my cranky pants, I decided to go for a walk. Walking to the park I was aware of how heavy my legs felt, annoyed that I still wasn’t better after last week’s sickness. But already the walking-for-the-sake-of-walking was eating away at my irritability. My tired legs managed to carry me past the play equipment and cafe at Sydney Park, and up the hill to my favourite spot. (From the top of this hill you can look one way and see planes flying over the airport, and the other to see the cityscape of Sydney. I’ve spent many hours sitting here by myself, writing or mulling over things. And also some time being photographed doing yoga — this photo is an outtake from that shoot. You can see the tiny white speck of a plane just to the left of my head.)

Off came the shoes. I moved off the path and continued my walk in the grass. Within about three steps my frustration was all but gone.

I often do this barefoot walking in the park. I’m not sure why it took me so long to realise this was what I needed yesterday. Ambling along on the grass has helped me work out countless life/boy/money/writing problems.

I wandered along until I reached a part of the hill that had a view of the man-made lake and I plonked myself down. I sat there and thought about all the things that were frustrating me and was finally able to use that irritable energy to achieve something.

For me, frustration is usually the precursor to a period of action — something that pulls me out of whatever situation is frustrating me in the first place. Of course, I’m only just working this out now — and I’m not always quick on the uptake. Sometimes I have to collapse into a sobbing mess or go flying over the handle bars of my bike before I realise that I need to stop and take a look at the irritability rather than just trying to bury it.

I don’t know what it is about walking that manages to let me both acknowledge the frustration and work through it. And the barefoot thing makes the walking even more powerful. For a while there I was getting an hour’s walk in twice a week, because I was teaching in Marrickville and it took half an hour to wander there and back. I rode my bike each way for a while (until I took a spill), but I realised that I preferred the walk. The walk gave me time to think. And after a while I seemed to save up my most convoluted problems for those walks.

Now that I don’t teach in M’ville anymore, I think I need to make sure I’m still getting my thinking walks. Regularly. Yes, for my mental health, but also for my work. As I wandered yesterday I thought about things in my personal life that are frustrating me, but I also thought through a number of professional issues and some writing problems.

I’ve heard of companies who have their meetings walking around a park. I think they’re onto something.

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* Luckily, my housemate is due to go off to Byron for a few days today and so was in a “nothing’s botherin’ me” mood yesterday. I’m not always a grumpy housemate. Promise.

The people in my head

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how many people I have living in my head. Characters, I mean. Fictional ones. Some of them I’ve been getting to know for more than four years now, others I’ve just met.

A few weeks ago I was talking to one of my students about some characters from a story she’s writing, and halfway through my spiel on character development I realised how strange it might sound that I was asking her to let these people live in her head. She noticed my hesitation and called me on it, as teenagers are wont to do, and laughed a lot when I pointed out how crazy I sounded. I’m pretty sure she does think I’m mad (not just because I talk about people living in my head), but she seemed to understand what I was saying about character.

My characters get under my skin. I care about them just almost as much as I do about people in real life. I see them in real-life people — a gesture here, a phrase there. But I don’t think any of my characters are based on a particular person. They become people in their own right.

I often get my students to do writing exercise to help them get to know their characters. I realised the other day that I’m very bad at actually doing these exercises myself. Oops.

One of my favourite character-writing exercises comes from the Voiceworks blog, Virgule.

Answer these questions about your character:

1. What is your character afraid of?
2. What does your character do to de-stress?
3. What makes your character angry?
4. Who was the last person your character talked to on the phone?
5. In what position does your character sleep?

Whenever I give this one to my students they laugh at the last question. Perhaps rightly so — it is an odd question. But odd probably because it’s such an intimate thing to know about someone. I don’t even know what position my brothers or my parents sleep in. I sleep on my back, one leg straight, the other bent so the knee falls out to the side; the hand of the straight leg rests on my belly, the hand of the bent leg out to the side. I don’t seem to have a preference for one side. How do you sleep?

I’ve been thinking a little about some of my characters, and how they might sleep. Have they always slept this way? Does their position change when someone else is in the bed with them? Why do that sleep like that?

And this is why I like this exercise so much. The answers often come automatically (given that these people really do seem to live inside my head), but they bring with them a bunch of other questions.

Direction and disruption

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I’ve been quiet here, I know. I’ve been busy with various types of work, I guess, and I can tentatively say that things are starting to move down a path I’m pleased with.

But more than that, I think I’ve been quiet here because I’m not quite sure what to do with this space. I started writing here as a space to share fiction I was working on, just in little bits and pieces. Then I tried to make it a little more about the process of writing and reading. Then motivation and inspiration crept in, closely followed by food and yoga. And now it’s just a completely muddled space, with no real direction. Which, funnily enough, is how my life has been for the last six months or so! Haha…

I’m still struggling with the direction thing. Even though I say that things are moving, slowly, along a path that I’m pleased with, I feel like I should maybe be thinking a little bit more about where I’m stepping next. I want to do so much. I want to write, I want to teach yoga, I want to cook, travel, play music. I want to work with sound again. But how on earth does one fit it all in? How does one find the motivation to be proactive with so many things?

One of my favourite bloggers, Claire, wrote recently about feeling like almost everything she was doing only to a ‘good enough’ level, and I must admit that rang true for me.  Can one person really do everything that I want to do? Does it just take good planning?

A couple of weeks ago I was house-sitting for my parents in Canberra, and it gave me a bit of space. I wasn’t working any of my usual contact hours with students (yoga or otherwise), but I still had quite a long work-to-do list. Part of me wanted to put it aside and really try and nut out some kind of plan for how to move forward. I struggled for a few days, deciding what to do, but eventually I put aside all my work and wrote out some plans. Nothing particularly ordered. I just listed each of the major things I want to do with my life and then rambled on and on underneath the heading until I thought maybe I’d worked out some kind of plan.

Most days I went for a walk with Bert.

And I talked to him. Asked him questions about my life, about the direction I was going in. He just grinned at me and lept up on a ledge or ran off into a bit of long grass, but it was nice to just be able to talk nonsense and not have anyone judging me. (Unless of course there were other people about that I couldn’t see — the spot up behind my parents’ house is pretty secluded.)

At the end of the week I was excited. I had some plans for next year, and it looked as though I was going to be able to do pretty much everything I want to — including travel and more study.

But then I came back to Sydney.

I’d been away for nearly two weeks by this point, and it’s taken me nearly another week to feel settled again. I haven’t been sure what to do with myself, how to fill out my days. It’s a combination of quite a few things that have left me feeling like this, not the least of which is the fact that, even though I’ve got some idea of what I’m going to do next year, I don’t know what I want from the next three months or so.

So I’m not done with thinking and planning yet. I’m hoping it doesn’t take me too much longer to move on from planning to actually doing…

Watch this space!

Teaching

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I never wanted to be a teacher. Actually, I was a little bit insulted when my careers advisor suggested it while I was still at school. I was an arrogant teenager then — I think my reluctance was partly because I thought that teachers didn’t “do”. Which is actually totally untrue.

And brings me to my point. Teaching has taught me far more — about writing, about words, about reading, about yoga, about myself than I ever thought was possible. Case in point: last week I taught a yoga class that was based around the theme of dharana, and I read out something from an old issue of the Good Weekend about how multitasking is actually really bad for our concentration. So of course I started thinking about how much I multitask. Or attempt to, anyway. And I realised that a lot of my frustration over the last few weeks at not getting anything done could simply solved by actually concentrating on one thing at a time, rather than flitting from one thing to the next and back again to the first.

I tried it this last week. I left the house so I couldn’t be distracted by the kitchen and its need to be cooked in, and I took one project a day up to my favourite cafe. I let myself be okay with the fact that I wouldn’t get anything done on the projects I hadn’t brought with me, and I put all my effort into the one I had.

I got so much done. And by the end of the week I really felt like I’d achieved something.

Teachers definitely “do”.

The other great thing about teaching is that you get to explore things you are interested in but might not otherwise have got around to looking at; and you get to re-visit other things you might not have had an excuse to otherwise. Last week I got to read both Friedrich Nietzsche and Roald Dahl.

Trouble

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I haven’t been all that well for the last couple of days. I think I’m slowly fighting off a cold or a throat infection, or something equally thrilling. So today I’ve tried to take it slowly, ignoring the guilt that usually comes with not rushing around trying to do a thousand things. I’ve had a very quiet day, listening to music and doing a little research here and there for some classes I’m planning and some things I’m writing.

Over the weekend, I went up to Maitland for the birthday party of a very good friend of mine from high school. It was a lovely weekend — I hope she had as nice a time as I did. And perhaps because I spent some time over the weekend reminiscing, I’m now listening to a Coldplay album that I played to death throughout high school. At some point I either bought or was given the sheet music for their first album, Parachutes, and learnt to play and sing a number of the songs, just in case having them on repeat on my CD player wasn’t enough. This was one of my favourites.

Throat infection or not, I’m about to go and sit at the piano to try and play this song again.

(Happy birthday Rylie!)

Lucky

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Every now and then I realise just how lucky I am to be enjoying my days as much as I do. I’ll be honest: I’m poorer than I’ve ever been. But I can’t really complain because the work I’m doing is something I enjoy, and, more than that, I feel like it means something.

On top of that, because I do most of my work in the mornings and evenings, my days are slow, and usually see me pottering about the house cooking, writing, reading, researching.

Don’t get me wrong; I have regular moments of overwhelming fear or upset, when I wonder what on earth I’ve done (or how I’ll next pay rent). But when I find myself sitting down to a piece of toast and a cup of tea at four o’clock in the afternoon, or cooking myself a warm lunch, I can’t help but feel privileged to be able to live this way.

Today was one of those days. I had a productive day: I did a few loads of washing, I got my groceries done, I cleaned the bathroom, I cooked a couple of meals, I chatted to my brother on the phone for a couple of hours about life and thinking, and I did some yoga. Then it was dinner time. And now I’m doing some research for a class I’m teaching. My idea of a perfect Monday, really.

Follow your dreams, people. The obstacles along the way are well worth the struggle.

Music obsession

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Have you ever found a song that you just listen to again and again? And again? It happens to me every now and then, and right now, this song by Radical Face is it.

Ryan over at Pacing the Panic Room (a blog I absolutely love) used this song in some work he did for a couple at their wedding. The video is worth watching — it’s put together beautifully, and it’s full of heart-string-pulling lovey-dovey moments. (I’ve watched it a few times now.)

In other news, I went to the Sydney launch for harvest magazine on Friday night. On a cold night, a glass of wine and readings by two of the writers published in the current issue of the magazine was exactly what I needed. Elena has a review of the issue up on With Extra Pulp. Check it out.

I’m hoping to get posting here regularly happening again. I’ve been led astray by the need to find work, and by cooking. P’raps I’ll put up some recipes for the stuff I’ve been cooking. It’s been pretty yum, if I do say so myself.

For now though, back to the song.