What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?
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When I see prompts like this I always wonder what type of response is expected. Is it the commonplace being dressed up as the significant or is it the extraordinary event? First, as the title suggests, the idea of being truly alive needs to be interrogated.
There is an element of bad social media hashtag to the phrase ‘truly alive’. It’s the type of thing an influencer, or would be influencer, reaches for to try to get attention and traction. Alive is a binary, you are or you aren’t. Yes, there are times when life is more interesting or more exciting, but to be ‘truly alive’ is essentially a meaningless piece of hyperbole. It could mean something that frightened you, overjoyed you or made you feel a sense of awe, but unless you were alive in the biological sense of that word you would have nothing to judge it against! It could be small moments that create core memories that stay with you for life, although like any other memories the way that we remember them will differ from anyone else involved. For this prompt, then, I would like to move away from ‘truly alive’ and the big social media events that I might post on Instagram and focus on those small moments.
A human life is made up of experiences that inform and shape our characters. Your reaction to stimuli when you first meet them will, in many cases, determine your attitude to particular events or people every time you come across them subsequently. In this blog I have reflected on all manner of ideas, events and feelings and I think I have learnt quite a lot about myself through this reflection. My focus has always been a deep connection with a person, a group of people or an event. So, for example, I have a very close knit family and they are the centre of my life. Outside of them, I have few friends, partly through basic nature, partly through the force of circumstances, such as spending a significant time abroad, especially in my thirties, and in those far off analogue days losing touch with everyone and everything that made up my life prior to marriage and teaching English as a Foreign Language. I have a deep desire to fill my life with music, reading and writing, as hearing new songs, or very familiar ones, and learning new things keeps me young in mind if not in body. If I have to decide on times when life is most intense, it would probably be when I go to live music.
When I go to concerts I feel lifted by the presence of so many people there for the same reason I am. It’s great to go to see the acts of my childhood, but the real lift is often to be found when going to acts with a much younger audience. For example, taking my daughters to artists like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, My Chemical Romance and Lola Young. In order, 92000 people singing along with You Belong With Me, my favourite Taylor Swift song, seeing Sabrina Carpenter just before she went stratospheric thanks to the Eras Tour in what will have been her last medium sized venue tour, belting out MCR’s Teenagers like I didn’t have a care in the world at Wembley Stadium and similarly losing myself completely in Lola Young’s Not Like That Anymore.
I look at my life and certain events are more vivid in my memories than others. They may not be remembered at all by others who were there at the time, so does that mean that they are not particularly significant in the greater scheme of things? Perhaps. However, what is significant in one life can be just as individual as the person themselves. The small moments I reflected on in the first paragraph are the ones that tend to create the strongest neural pathways in your core memory system. Events from childhood we still remember years afterwards will often develop a greater significance later on than they had at the time purely because we remember them and therefore attach that greater significance to them. That doesn’t mean they weren’t important at the time, just that we have been reflecting on them for so long that they have reached a level where they define you as a person or determine your attitude to people, places and experiences. I don’t think any of them make you feel ‘truly alive’ but they are part of what makes life meaningful. A final small example I can offer is that nearly everyone can remember their first kiss even if the person that kiss was with was only in your life for a short time. Mine was with Michele at school when I was nine years old in our form room in St Andrew’s and although she was only at the school for two years her affection and friendship represents everything I experienced at that school. I wonder if she remembers it too?
The genie grants you a wish. What is it?
This is a simple prompt on the surface, complicated by the fact that it limits you to one wish. If there were the usual three things would be much easier. Unlimited money would be nice but who knows what effect it would have on you? A bad one if the parade of appalling billionaires and politicians currently are any guide. Extra time in terms of an extended life again is tempting but I have read enough stories to know that the quality adjusted life years would be a poor return for that extra lifespan! Genies have a way of punishing the wisher for self serving wishes like those.
The wish I would make is for the gift of true appreciation for the wonder of life. I would love the gift of properly appreciating life’s special moments at the time not in retrospect. This is something I am working on but it is a slow process after years of not really appreciating my good fortune because bad things or frustrating things were happening as well. I would also like the gift of those moments to go more slowly, again something I am working on. I want to be able to take in the details as fully and deeply as possible so I can take myself back to those moments. When I meditate using the Calm App the thing I can’t do is guided visualisation. If I am told to imagine a beach or a forest I can’t. There’s no ability to bring them to mind and immerse myself in the created visualisation. I sit there looking at a half formed picture that is of no use at all.
OK genie, I am ready to tell you my wish and I am going to make it as specific as possible.
I would like you to grant me the ability to fully appreciate the good things in life at the time by immersing myself in those moments, slowing down time and recalling them in vivid detail afterwards.
Is Christmas going to be a bit difficult this year with the cost-of-living crisis? Do you want to get some tips on how to make your money go further whilst still giving everyone a magical Christmas? Maybe these tips will help.
Christmas on a Budget
I first wrote this three years ago and it is arguably even more needed than it was then with certain world leaders taking decisions, like going into unnecessary wars and making worldwide trade as difficult as possible that make poor people poorer and rich people richer. If you are struggling the article I am linking to is full of excellent advice for anyone who wants to enjoy Christmas but has less money than this time last year.
What are your favorite side-hustle ideas?
I have a problem with the idea of a side-hustle, quite apart from the name which is pure management speak. What it does is to send or reinforce the message that everything you do must be part of the capitalist system. Out go the ideas of hobbies or volunteering and in comes the idea of constant working seven days a week, fifty two weeks of the year. It tells people that unless they are working for money their time doesn’t mean much any more. As such I will ignore the idea and I will continue with non earning hobbies and volunteering.
I blog but I will not monetise it, another awful word by the way! For a start I can’t imagine anyone would want to pay to read my ramblings but I would also lose the fun of writing the blog. The pressure of producing posts that people are paying for would make me concerned that I am not giving them value for money and if someone unsubscibed I would immediately assume it was something to do with me.
Today I am starting a volunteering post with a charity called Coram Beanstalk. I will be going into a school to help with reading. My role is not to teach but to encourage and to guide the pupils I help to find the joy in reading that so many of us already feel. I couldn’t imagine being paid for that. Again, how could I relax and develop a proper rapport with them if their success or failure could impact any money I might earn? Clearly it shouldn’t be something I should be paid for and I wouldn’t do the job on that basis.
So, no side-hustle for me. I will keep my love for writing and helping pupils to enjoy reading. It might not make me any money but that is definitely for the best.
What are five simple exercises to do at home?
I am going to ignore the arbitrary number in the prompt. Why? Well, ascribing numbers to fitness is at the heart of many of the problems people have when trying to set up an exercise routine. It’s like the 10000 step rule, only adopted because the creator of the fitness tracking watch realised it sounded good. He called the watch Manpo-kei or 10000 steps meter. It sounded like a good target and the Kanji for 10000 – 万 – looked vaguely like someone running. So, over the years producers of fitness tracking equipment decided to keep with the original ‘goal’ until it was given the status of a fitness threshold. Actually, the sweet spot in fitness and cardiovascular terms is around 7500 but that doesn’t look or sound so impressive.
So, what are my exercises. Funnily enough I have hit upon a new exercise regime around three weeks ago just by experimenting and seeing what worked. So, I had been doing yoga for quite a while but that wasn’t really working well enough on its own. My answer was to go back to the old school Bullworker and combine both yoga and Bullworker training in one workout. Turns out they complement each other perfectly. I start off with the Bullworker then I warm down by way of yoga. The effect has been very clear already. My musculature is improving in leaps and bounds and my flexibility is being helped by my increased core strength. I do these exercises 5 or 6 mornings a week before breakfast and they are a great start to the day.
There is a third element to my fitness regime that has proven to be the secret weapon, gardening! Yes, you read that correctly. I have been set the task of clearing the back garden which had become overgrown and full of brambles. I now go out there 4 or 5 days a week and much to my surprise I really enjoy it. The exercises I get from gardening is not set in the way that the Bullworker and yoga are as gardening is literally organic in nature! I might be clipping back brambles one day and then the next I might be digging up roots (see below) and the day after I might be clearing and preparing a section along the fence so that I can plant vegetables and pollinators for next Spring. The different muscle groups I use with gardening mean that I am developing my strength in my legs and back in particular. I haven’t been this fit in ten years and I am totally focused on continuing this combination of exercises for the foreseeable future.
