Four-letter words don’t offend me. But the one four-letter word that I have battled with is: rest. 

When it comes to that four-letter word my natural inclination is to resist it with the ferocity of a toddler being told to take an afternoon nap. 

What is it about this seemingly innocuous word that sets off the stubborn two-year-old in me?

I’m not sure if I’ve figured out all the answers to that question, but I’ve figured out some.

Last week our little pack of two humans and two doggos spent five days far from the crowds; maddening and otherwise. 

We discovered this wonderfully unpopulated 28 hectares of nature some years ago. It’s a rustic retreat where we start each day with a bit of mountaineering down to the clear river that borders the property. The four-legged pack members morph into mountain goats as they bounce from one boulder to another, tails in the air and noses to the ground - absorbing the criss-crossing stories of the veld.

The rocks eventually spill out onto river sand and, while we’re still navigating the last of the rocks, the only evidence that we have dogs are dusty mirages dancing above the path - followed by the sound trail and echo of a plop and a splash telling us they’re swimming in the river.

After a few minutes of them swimming in the natural pools we follow the path that meanders next to the river. They disappear into the surrounding bush proving that they take “bundu bashing” literally. 

Rest or Work?

Leading up to our time away my husband and I were aware of the mound of work we were leaving behind, so we started to plan what work we were going to take with us. Luckily we course-corrected two days before we left; deciding to rest and recuperate so that we could make a renewed, energised charge at the mountain of work when we got back.

We almost fell back into our old habits, but we were really grateful for the complete downtime.

For most of my life I’ve had the energy pattern of a toddler - manic activity followed by collapse. I used to say that I was only aware of my energy tank as “full” or “empty”, nothing in between.

Mid-life, burnout, and a bunch of life skills I was lacking, eventually led me to a point where I was evaluating my life and decided I needed to change the way I was living. I took a sabbatical to figure out how I was going to do things differently moving forward.

Part of that exploration and figuring out how to manage my energy tank led me back to the word rest.

I love words and I love fiction. Reading is more than escapism, it’s meeting new friends, travelling to the past, the future, different worlds. But the most powerful story that affects my life is the narrative running in my head.

The sabbatical kick-started an exploration of the stories I tell myself on a daily basis. 

The Archaeology of Personal Narratives

Some of those myths and legends are so old that it helps to work with a narrative archaeologist - like a psychologist or life coach. Telling our stories, talking, in a therapeutic space is a powerful experience because it shifts the tales living in our subconscious to our conscious mind. 

And when that shift occurs, it brings the storyline to our awareness, where we can work with it, evaluate it, decipher its meaning and choose what the meaning of that scenario is going to be in our future. This allows for a shift in perspective to take place. Shifts allow us to move forward.

When I allow myself to consider different perspectives I open myself up to the possibility of seeing myself, my role in the plot, the meaning differently. In this way we liberate ourselves from remaining trapped in the same old story. 

Think about it, stories are being imprinted on our brains before we even understand language - parents, siblings, extended family, genes, family trauma - these are all buried within and affect us, consciously and unconsciously.

Overlaid onto our biological and emotional plot lines are the cultural histories we are born into. It’s a real mishmash, and we just keep adding to it as we journey through life.

Stories have meaning, and we give meaning to the ones that we’re told and interpret them based on a million filters. It’s not so much what we’re told, but what we perceive that we were told.

The Parable About Preparing A Roast

There’s that lovely parable about a young woman who learns to prepare a roast by watching her mother. When the woman prepares a roast for her new husband she cuts off a choice part of the roast before cooking it. Her husband asks her why, and she tells him that’s the way her mother taught her to do it. On investigating this further, questioning her mother about the origin of this method of preparation, she finds out that her mother’s roasting pan wasn’t big enough to hold the entire roast. That’s why her mother was cutting off a portion of it!

Sometimes we act in ways that don’t make sense when we question it further. However, often we are so accustomed to the behaviour we continue in the same vein until something or someone makes us question it.

These tales are codes running our programming.  Unhelpfully, we can’t just reveal our source code. It takes some investigating. Luckily our behaviour gives us clues. Our beliefs, our values are all held in what we tell ourselves. Our actions are ultimately based on these beliefs which originate from our interpretation of these stories.

So, for me, I had to look at my toddler-like behaviour and ask what am I telling myself about rest that makes me resist it? 

Coming From A Long Line Of Strong Women

Something that was recited to me regularly was that I come from a long line of strong women. I also describe myself and my friends in this way. On closer examination I realised, that at some point in my life, I started equating being a strong woman with not having to rest.

When I say that out loud it seems ridiculous. But somewhere  along the way that’s the meaning that I attached to that description - or part of the meaning I attached to it. 

When I realised that I believed that I also realised that I didn’t believe that! Maybe it’s more accurate to say that when I held that belief up to the light it didn't stand up to scrutiny.

Logically I know that I’m a human being, and we need rest. Otherwise, sleep deprivation would not be a form of torture.

The stories we tell ourselves aren't necessarily based on logic, they’re based on the meaning we give them. Logic doesn’t have to feature in the fantasy world of our unconscious.

If I was boarding a flight and was given the option of a pilot who’d been flying non-stop for 24 hours or a pilot that was refreshed, clear-eyed. I’m not going to tell myself the pilot who's been flying for 24 hours is in the zone. I’m going to bench that guy in favour of the fresh mind, the rested body.

So why wasn’t I treating myself that way?

I wouldn’t think of the pilot as weak or not strong. I’d think the rested person was better prepared and ready for the job. So why wasn’t that applying to me?

Mid-life Crises?

I’m not sure that I’m a fan of the term mid-life crises. I think I prefer midway evaluation point because that’s really the gift of this life stage. A point to evaluate how and why we operate the way we do and course-correct, if we want. An opportunity to learn new skills, to do some life maintenance.

Okay, so the infamous they say that realising you have a problem is half of the solution. The next step is changing the behaviour. 

I think I’m a fairly intelligent, logical person but even once I knew that my behaviour was based on, not only an illogical belief, but one that I don’t even believe any more, it was still hard to change the behaviour. 

And that’s the challenge of the mid-life evaluation. I had been doing it this way for such a long time. That underground neural pathway that said strong women don’t need to rest was well and truly rutted in my mid-life brain.

Every time I realised that little train of thought was chugging along its usual path, I’d have to slam on the brakes and say, “no, no little train you have to use the new tracks, the new thought pathway”. Over and over and over and over again.

The motivation that kept me coming back to slam on the brakes, and work at a new direction, was that I knew that my old behaviour was no longer working for me. I knew where continuing in the same thinking, and acting on that thinking, led. It led me down a path of exhaustion and I had consciously chosen to move away from that because I wanted something better. I owed it to myself to find a new way, a new endpoint, a new result. 

A mantra that I use over and over again is “you didn’t take a sabbatical and dismantle your life just to recreate the same structure again!” It’s not the dramatic shift of direction that would work for everyone but one of the pay-offs for me was having that mantra to hold onto.

Moving From Insight To Changing Behaviour

So changing behaviour. That brings me to another four-letter word that I wrestle with: redo.

When I face an issue or problem it is my MO to immerse myself, dive in deep and thoroughly explore it in order to overcome it. I am not a fan of redoing, relearning, revisiting. These I resist. I have a small temper tantrum, before I pick my emotional two-year-old up and jump into the fray again.

I’m a fan of the inspired insight, the awesome aha moment, the euphoria of Eureka! The redo I could do without.

One of the things I’ve noticed in rereading my journals is that when I redo I gain further insight, greater understanding, more nuanced skill. 

If you’ve ever sanded wood you’ll know that you start with a coarsely gritted sandpaper. When you run your hand over the wood it feels better but as you rework the wood with the ever-increasing finely gritted sandpaper the texture and smoothness improves. That’s how I view redoing now.

The Importance of Redoing

Gaining a new understanding is great, but it’s the redoing that develops the mastery - the mastery of self. It’s continual recalibration that is brought about by the doing,  and the redoing.

I now view myself as an instrument and as I journey along my life my understanding of self improves, the way I work with myself gets better, I raise my standards - I’m refining myself.

A few weeks into our sabbatical my husband and I were driving to go on a hike, and he turned to me and said, “I’m afraid I’ll never want to work again”. My immediate, insensitive response was to laugh.

After I had gathered myself, I explained to him that I thought that was highly unlikely based on his history, work ethic and his personality. He had worked since he was 16, while he studied, started side hustles during his school holidays when he was a teacher and started his own business while having a full time job.

I explained that I thought the greater danger was that when we started working again we’d quickly get into our old habits of overworking.

We continued our discussion during our hike, and we discovered another interesting belief that we both shared. We regarded ourselves as hard workers and part of our resistance to the word rest was that somewhere, in some way, we equated rest to being lazy.

As we explored this belief we realised that part of considering ourselves to be hard workers was about proving ourselves, and that we’d internalised that as part of our identities. We also realised that we no longer needed to prove to ourselves, or others, that we were capable of hard work - we now knew that. 

Additionally, it was our old way of thinking. We were now more interested in, not only, working smarter but feeling better, being well-rounded, inspired, fully functional people.

Learning to Rest

Again, even though we’d had this insight, we both battled with the word rest. What we discovered was that it was easier for us to encourage each other to rest than it was to accept that it was okay for us, as individuals, to rest. 

This resulted in us entering into a pact. We loved each other, understood the benefits of rest and when we needed to take time we would do that - and in doing so, in treating ourselves well, we were giving the other the permission, the license and the encouragement to do the same. So now we saw taking a break ourselves as a way to support the person we loved most to do that same.

We all have these narratives running on loops in our minds, and sometimes we need to revisit them and evaluate if we still attach the same meaning to them that we used to. A shift in perspective may enable us to see ourselves not as the victim of our lives but as the hero.

The stories we tell ourselves, have been told to us, are powerful and determine how we see ourselves, our world and our beliefs in what we can achieve, feel and be. Change the story you tell yourself, and you’ll change your life.

Are The Stories You’re Telling Yourself A Cage?

That tape playing over and over again in your head can be a cage, or it can be a stage. 

Change the soundtrack and make it the recital of your own choosing. It’s just a story after all. Start writing the one you want to live.

Let’s be less concerned with living the dream and start living out our dreams. If we want our dreams for our future to be different from our current paths it requires us to have the courage to take charge and be the authors of our own lives.

I don’t know about you, but when I get to that third stage of my life I’d like it to be different from the first two acts. Not because the first two acts weren’t thrilling but because in the stories that I love, the arc changes, grows, deepens when the main character develops into the hero they were meant to be.

One of the features of middle age is an awareness of how much time has passed and how quickly it’s passed. At first this can be terrifying, but it is also an invitation, an opportunity to evaluate what we’re going to choose to leave behind so that we can focus fully on what’s important to us moving forward. 

It instilled in me a commitment to making the next cycle Cathleen-centric. To learn from the past, and action those lessons in my present, so that my future will be the story of MY life, not some unconscious myth that was imprinted on me before I had a voice, a choice.

Fixating On A Particular Narrative

The line my husband and I had started to fixate on before our trip away was “we have so much work to do”. Resting allowed us to reframe that narrative. 

Having so much work to do was just part of the scenario. That we would work better after relaxing was also true.

Picture that saying putting your shoulder to the grindstone. When we do that our view is limited to what is directly in front of us. We can’t see ahead of us, to the side of us or the progress that we’ve made.

I’m sure you’ve had a problem that you can’t solve, but when you walked away from it and engaged in something else the solution popped into your head. Like when you get great ideas in the shower.

When we rest, let our bodies and mind unwind, play, it provides space to allow creativity and solutions to flow in.

Fixating on one thing is like plucking only one string on a guitar. We have many strings and the harmony of our life is better when we play all the strings - do different things. In doing this, we activate our full capabilities, bring our full selves to each endeavour.

Reframing the narrative allows us to see the whole picture.

Nature’s A Great Reminder That There’s Time To Rest

One of the benefits of resting in nature is that nature is a constant visualisation of ever-evolving cycles. Reminding us that there’s a season to our world, our lives. Time for work, time for rest and a time to redo, undo and just be. Be present, enjoy this moment - the hoot of the owl in the darkness, the cries of the jackals that accompany the setting sun, the dome of the starred night, the early bird song that calls forth the rising sun.

Like the bonfire we built every night to protect us from the winter chill and meditate on the flickering flames, rest is the wood that feeds our fire  to charge again.

My husband and I consider ourselves to be animal lovers. We have had five dogs over our twenty years together. Four of those have been rescue dogs.

Rescue dogs are often mixed breeds. When adopting one, especially if it’s a puppy, you’re not quite sure what mix of breeds you’re getting. With an older dog, you can normally get some idea of the breeds involved by the look of the dog.

The rescue organisation will try to help as much as possible with their best guess, or based on what the person who surrendered the pups told them, but that’s not always reliable information.

Dogs are driven by instinct which is influenced by their breed. Characteristics that only come to the fore as they mature. It’s better, for the owner and the dog, to work with a dog’s nature and temperament than against it.

Part of the journey with a rescue puppy is that you’ll only discover their innate instincts and characteristics as they mature.

For me, discovering my own nature has taken some experimentation as well.

I felt so different to my family growing up that for years I was convinced that I was adopted. The likelihood of that explanation was dispelled when complete strangers would walk up to me saying, “you must be your mother’s child because you look just like her.” 

Adding to the complexity of me not relating to my relatives was the constant disruptions to my external environment with our regular moving from town to town and city to city. This forced my focus to be on figuring out each new external environment.

Then I repeated the pattern.

It was always assumed that I would study further after high school but, when I thought about the options of what I would study, I couldn’t make a decision. None of the options stood out to me. However, when I thought about travelling and backpacking that really lit a fire in my belly.

So in the middle of my last year of high school that’s what  I decided I was going to do.

My decision was not well-received by my parents. My dad told me that this would be the stupidest thing I’d ever done. My mother told me that I thought I knew everything. I responded, “No, it’s because I feel like I know nothing about myself. I need to find out.”

My inner voice spoke in dissent from the voices around me. It’s the first time I recall listening.

Essentially I was figuring out who I was by comparing myself to those around me. I was looking for some commonalities and, so far in my life experience, I hadn’t found enough to satisfy me.

Travelling helped me with that. A world away I discovered people from all over who thought like I did, with interests that held my attention, conversations that stimulated me. The world I unearthed was big, beautiful, exciting and textured. I blossomed in that environment. In those foreign lands, I no longer felt foreign to myself.

That quiet voice inside me that said, “go, explore” served me well. Distance and new surroundings gave me a new perspective not only of myself but of what was possible.

I decided I liked exploring. I liked travelling.

As most independent travellers will tell you, you can have some of your best experiences when you get lost. The other side of that perspective is that you can also have some of your worst.

In surveying the unknown I discovered lots of good fits for me, but I also found myself lost, turned around, trying to figure out how I got there.

One Saturday morning, soon after my 30th birthday, I sat surrounded by packed boxes, labelled with where they came from and where they were going to.

I’d had a lot of experience moving homes but this was the first time I was leaving a marriage. As I waited for the moving truck to arrive, I wondered, how the fuck did this happen? How did I end up here?

A few months prior, I had spent a week in bed crippled by a raging fever that I just couldn’t seem to break. I often joke that if I bump my toe, I’ll run a fever. But this fever felt different. This fever said, “there’s something up, Cathleen, pay attention!”

Part of me didn’t want to face it. The fever persisted. I was laid out, unable to move, exhausted. A physical mirror of how I felt inside. I needed help. Eventually, I picked up the phone and made an appointment with a therapist.

When I saw her the following week she asked, “why are you here?” I spoke for 45 minutes in answer to that question. I ended my monologue with, “I need to understand how I got here because I never want to do this again.”  That, and subsequent sessions, provided me with some answers.

But the driving force that propelled me to that morning, making another move, was that it felt like the pilot light of my spirit was about to be extinguished. A little voice was telling me to get out of there! Go!

As I’ve written about previously, I had already lost my voice, wasn’t writing, wasn’t journaling. But this felt like next level shit. This felt like my survival was at stake. Not my physical survival. The survival of my essence, my vitality, my spirit.

Whether you’ve lost your keys or your way, you’ll know that often the first step is to start retracing your steps.

As I sat there contemplating the existential question, what the fuck, Cathleen? I took a moment to review.

I knew I could be happy, I just had to turn to my journals for evidence of that. I also knew that I didn’t have to be in a relationship to be happy. This gave me a glimmer of hope because, at this point, I thought I would be alone, would want to be alone, for the rest of my life.

I told myself that my standards were too high. My idea of what a relationship could be was too far-fetched. It was never going to happen so best get used to being alone. Happy and alone was preferable to married, unhappy and lonely.

I entered into a pact with myself. I promised myself that I was not going to compromise on the ideal of what I thought a relationship could be. I was not going to squish myself to fit into a relationship where I couldn’t fully be me. I was not going to make myself small so that someone else could feel tall. It was going to be my ideal or bust!

That promise was the shield to my pilot light that I took with me.

I felt released; as if I stepped out of living in an etching into the colour burst of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting!

That little voice may only have been able to squeak, “go” but I was really pleased that I had listened to it.

Nine months later I started dating my now husband.

On paper, this relationship didn’t seem like a natural fit. I was a financial manager in the corporate world, he was a maths teacher and eight years younger than me. I was 31 and he was 24. A number of family and friends offered unsolicited advice that I should know better and move on.

But something about this relationship felt different. Everything about this relationship felt different.

The first time we went away together I realised how easy it was being together, making decisions together, having fun together. I checked in with him and he felt the same way.

What we were discovering is that it is easier to partner with someone when you collaborate well together. We were both active participants in co-creating the relationship that we wanted. We valued each other and the relationship we were creating.

My now, not so little voice, said to me: this IS different, this is what you want, it may not work out but let’s find out. So we did. And it is. Actually, it’s even better than I thought it could be.

Turns out it wasn’t that my standards were too high. I just needed a person capable of meeting them. I could be fully me - tough cookie and vulnerable little girl.

“On paper” has meant nothing and what we have is everything.

I’m dark-haired and fair-skinned. Most of my teenage years were spent in a beach town where being blonde, blue-eyed and tanned were the ideal. I almost get burnt at a full moon.

Sometimes feeling like we don’t belong comes from what we see in our external environment. At times, even if we look like those around us, we still feel like we don’t belong, connect, relate.

We are regularly bombarded with messages about the external - look this way, buy this and you’ll feel wonderful, act this way to fit in.

We grow up with Disney movies where you can see the evil nature of the person or creature by the way they look. Hollywood, Bollywood is constantly trying to represent internal feelings with exterior, visible things.  

External messages are continually telling us this outward thing will make you feel this way inside. I think that’s the wrong way round. I think when we listen to our internal message, that small voice inside, our experience of our outer world will change. 

We will feel true to our nature, authentic. Working with our characters provides harmony, congruency, that working against it can never achieve.

Paying attention, acknowledging what we are drawn to, what we are driven to. Moving more towards ourselves quietens the feelings of unease. The feeling of discomfort is a calling from your true self. Answer the call instead of hushing the voice.

Our internal selves, our feelings, our mental health has an enormous impact on our life experience. Trust that knowing voice. Get to know it.

Glennon Doyle, in her spectacular book “Untamed”, writes about how she took her family to see a cheetah. She describes how the handlers bring out a Labrador dog to run after a scruffy stuffed toy on the back of a car. This, the handler tells the crowd, will remind the cheetah how to do it.

The cheetah watches the dog run after the stuffed animal and then it’s the cheetah’s turn. Explosive speed reveals how the cheetah is made for this. Afterwards, the cheetah can be seen in the background, caged, staring at the horizon.

It’s an impactful story, as is the whole book, but the image, that feeling of that cheetah looking out that cage to the beyond...that sense of freedom she had for a moment when she realised her full potential...when she was utterly and thoroughly herself...that gets me every time.

It’s so easy for us to see the difference between the cheetah and the Labrador. But it’s not that easy for that cheetah. She doesn’t know that there’s a logical fallacy to assuming that she’s the same as the dog. She just has this feeling of unease. That’s all she has to go on.

That’s often all any of us have to go on. A feeling of discontent deep within us. A gentle internal nudge. A gap, a hole, a wistful questioning. It’s nebulous, imprecise and often defies logic; which is why we often brush it aside, stifle or ignore it. 

The thing is if we pay attention to it. If we seek it out, if we go within, if we quiet the noisy yapping of the dogs...we may hear the low hum of a purr, the swish of our tail, feel the shiver of spotted fur, tension in our feet, our body waiting to leap.

Don’t let the Labradors around you convince you that you’re a Labrador. If you feel different if you feel like that’s not you, if you yearn for something else, if you feel caged, trust that feeling. Listen to your inner voice, your intuition, your spirit; whatever you want to call it.

Don’t participate in silencing your inner voice. Don’t gaslight yourself. Stop telling yourself to be happy because the Labradors around you are happy. Maybe what makes them happy was never meant to make you happy.

Maybe you have to strike out, alone and explore the wilderness beyond. Maybe get lost, turned around. 

Learn to hone your inner voice. Maybe it will start as a murmur. Maybe if you listen it will grow into a whisper. Lean in. That’s your call and when you hear that call in others you’ll know that you’ve found your coalition of cheetahs.

If your internal voice is a bark and you’re surrounded by Labradors, good for you. But if it sounds more like a purr and a growl to you, maybe it’s time to consider that you’re not built to run after stuffed toys. 

Maybe those spots, those moments of quiet when you hear the call of your spirit, are telling you that you are different from those around you. That in fact you’re lost, you’re not home.

Maybe it’s time to look to the horizon, to trust your call to explore.

It was a perfect Californian day. The children were swimming in the pool and the country club’s adult guests sat perfectly poised, ringside, on loungers. Bright white tennis outfits contoured firm figures and dark sunglasses hid stares, glares and the effects of the continuous stream of drinks flowing from the clubhouse.

I stood on the plush lawn next to the pool as the woman I au paired for circled me; pacing and shouting. Her raised voice punctuated by children torpedoing from the high diving board into the pool.

It was Saturday afternoon and she had casually informed me that I needed to babysit on Sunday morning. It was her habit to give me very little notice when she needed me to babysit. This weekend, being Father’s day, I had assumed that the children would spend it with their parents and had made plans with friends.

This was the first time I’d pushed back and I hadn’t anticipated the behaviour this would trigger. As she continued to berate me her two children joined the circle chanting, “You’re in trouble! You’re in trouble!” 

I was painfully aware that all the sunglasses were pointed at us. She was fully focused on me and was pacing in time to her children’s chorus.

Trapped by the bodies orbiting me, I waited for a pause in her temper torrent. Eventually she paused to take a breath.

I slipped in, addressed the children and told them to get back into the pool, which they did. Her last words had been, “I told you that you have to be able to go with the flow”.Turning to her I said, “it’s easy to tell me to go with the flow when you’re always the one creating the current.”

I went on to explain how I was affected by her behaviour - never being able to make plans because she might decide she needs me.

As it turned out this was a turning point, and a moment of real insight for me, that changed my life.

As a teenager I realised I had an incredible capacity for anger - a real temper. 

I experienced the force of my ignited anger like a monster, or demon, awakened within me. It would rise like a Disney villain up my spine, stretching me until the pressure of the ignition burst out of my mouth blasting everything in its path; with the indiscrimination of dragon’s fire. 

It felt like I had to unhinge my jaw to liberate the force of fury detonating inside me. Releasing that buildup of internal pressure was a relief. But, afterwards, I just felt unhinged.

Growing up with a parent whose wrath I experienced like a napalm hose, I knew what it was like to be on the other side and the pain it caused. Being on the receiving end of someone’s behaviour and then watching myself acting the same way was traumatizing and so I tried to go a different route.

I didn’t have the skills to address it and so I just shut it down. Put a lid on it and just avoided expressing anger.

The Californian incident was the first time I had managed to feel my anger without it overpowering me. Also, I had managed to express myself in the moment without becoming deranged. 

Even though it was a low point in my relationship with my employer, and an embarrassing public spectacle, I always look back at this incident as a real breakthrough for me.

Before that day I had experienced my anger as an ignition. It was like watching the frames in a movie: lit match + accelerant = fiery explosion. No cool striding off with flames in the background - anger levelled me and those around me.

Blowing up was a relief but the aftermath was disastrous. Emotional debris outlining the site of the blast, indicating that something died here today.

Having been wounded in emotional explosions myself, I knew what those around me felt and also how I felt about myself. I didn’t want to inflict that on myself, or others.

Now, I realised, it was possible for me to talk about my anger, whilst feeling angry but not behaving in a demented manner. This was life changing.

It’s most definitely an ongoing process. But I’ve learned alot about myself and what works best for me. I’ve become my own emotional bomb expert.

Timing is key. There’s a beat, a breath - it’s really shorter than a pause - where, with practiced observation, I can arrest the eruption. 

The detonation is not inevitable. There is a window during which I have a choice. At first that window was very short - honestly, a fraction of a second - but as I practiced the window period became longer. 

During that moment I make a choice: how am I going to proceed? 

This small but powerful question reminds me that this is my feeling and I can choose what I am going to do with it. I am in control of it. 

This reins in my instinct, my learned behaviour, my impulse and asks: what am I going to do with this? It changes my knee-jerk reaction into my chosen response.

It changes the focus off the other person’s behaviour and focuses me on my choice.

Some days I misjudge the timing and I have to say “I need a moment” - to walk away, gather myself, breathe, assess. 

When we say “that person really pushes my buttons” we’re talking about the inevitability of our reactions. It implies that the reaction is a foregone conclusion. Button pushed, reaction forthcoming. It’s like we’re in a two-step dance with that person - you push my buttons and I react.

Awareness, observing that moment, choosing our response  disconnects the button. What they do, reaching for the button, pressing it - gleeful evil smile in place - doesn’t matter because we know the button’s been disconnected. And that’s empowering.

That’s why this incident was a life changing moment for me because I learnt to unchain myself from the yoke of my anger - the yoke of my reactions. I don’t have to be a slave to my emotions.

There was a futility to my reactions. Okay, so the bomb went off, now what? Where are we now? Picking up and rebuilding probably but we’ve accomplished nothing. The focus becomes the bang, not the cause of it. 

With responding I can work through the anger to a resolution. Resolutions allow myself and the other person to move on. To change the two-step dance.

Sometimes in liberating myself I inadvertently liberate the other person as well. If I’m not stuck in the two-step dance, neither are they.

Explosions bring immediate relief but resolving what caused the anger brings long-term relief and prevents detonations from continuing.

Emotional eruptions are destructive. They untie the ties that bond us. Resolutions are constructive. They build on.

Realising this about my anger enables me to apply this to my other emotions as well.

Frustratingly we can't control other people - well I can't. 😂 I can only control myself. There’s real power in pushing pause on my instinctive, learned, habitual response and choosing how to proceed. Otherwise I’m just driven by people “setting me off” - like an animal chasing after everything that moves.

When I expressed myself to my employer on that Californian day she fired me. 

I walked off the carpet-like lawn and started walking across the parking lot. My face was hot and I really wanted to cry just to release the intensity of the moment and the conflict. 

Half-way to my car I heard the heartbeat of pounding footsteps and my name being called. I turned around and my employer was running towards me. 

Her demeanor had shifted. Her anger had lifted. 

She apologised for her behaviour and said she hadn’t realised how this affected me, explaining that this is how she had always worked with her au pairs. She asked me to stay and figure out what would work for both of us.

I agreed and on Monday morning we renegotiated a portion of our working relationship.

Anger often arises from conflict. If we can’t make it through the anger we don’t get to resolve the conflict. If we don’t express the anger in a healthy manner we focus on the damage the expression of anger causes - how to hurt each other - instead of working through the conflict.

When we work together to resolve conflict it can take our relationships to a new level, a better understanding and a more workable relationship. 

Previously my anger had been a blockade. I couldn’t see beyond it. Working through it, how to feel it and express it, opened me up to a new world. 

Initially, I had been such an active participant in my own feelings of anger that my feelings consumed me. Then I overcorrected and went in the completely opposite direction. 

That day I discovered it was possible to navigate between the two - it did not have to be one or the other. I was able to feel angry whilst watching and deciding when and how to engage.

I was in the moment, fully present, and aware of my own thoughts, feelings and choice. 

For me, this is why mindfulness is powerful: mindfulness is the key we can use to unhook us from the chains of our habitual behaviour. We can’t change the way we behave, feel or think if we are not present in that moment. The time to change is in the moment it is happening, or better yet, just before it happens.

However, typically, our feelings, thoughts and lives are so cluttered that we are not affording ourselves the opportunity to be present in that moment; when change is possible.

I told you that I was working 16 hour days and the only time I had to talk to my husband was at sunrise when we walked our dogs. Classic example of a cluttered life. My mental focus was directed at my clients and staff - not on what I needed. 

I had so many undealt with episodes that I couldn’t move forward until I dealt with them.

I wasn’t living, I was doing. I wasn’t present, I was thinking about the past or fantasizing about a better future.

I haven’t watched reality TV in years, but when watching programs about hoarders they often claimed that they held onto stuff because it was important or sentimental to them. “I really love that”, they’d say, as the host pulls it out from under a pile of rat faeces, rotting newspaper and old yoghurt containers. 

I was so judgemental about those people but it was happening in my own life - with invisible stuff. Those gnawing feelings of exhaustion and unhappiness were forcing me to turn inward and start considering the state of my internal hoard - a lifetime of accumulation.

It was time to start being different. Time to start living differently.

If I could arrest my explosive anger with observation and mindfulness I was certainly going to need them when facing my inner hoarder too. 

Time to Springclean.

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