Simplifying
on trying to remember that a simple life is the one I want to live
Dear Musers
Since M has gone back to work, I have been trying to find my new groove, something I talked about in my last newsletter. The first couple of weeks, I kept banging into myself as I filled my notebook with words and ideas and opened more and more browsers. I am now at the beginning of week three and it is beginning to feel a little more like something that sits comfortably with me.
At yoga on Saturday, my teacher took us through a beautiful meditation and it took me to the last time that I felt the most peaceful state, the most ‘me’ I had experienced. It was 2010, the year that M and I took the kids for a ten-month camping trip around Australia. I sat with the feeling of red dirt under my feet, birdsong in my ears, sun’s warm cloaking me. I thought about what made that year so great, most likely the best year of my life. Being together as a family, free of jobs and the mundanity of domesticity, being out in the open, meeting new people, using our bodies to do simple things like fetching water, collecting wood, creating shelter, watching the sun rise and sink every single day, having a state of constant awe of nature and creation, breathing fresh unpolluted air continuously, living simply.
I turned that last one around in my mind and knew that this was it. Living simply was the one thing I had wanted to keep when we came home from our trip. M and I had talked about it as our landcruiser drew closer to Melbourne. We wouldn’t get caught up in it all again. It would be hard, we thought back then, but we were going to try. We wouldn’t get caught up with all the shackles of things, the overly full calendar, the taking too many things on. We had parented in a way that wasn’t generally going with the usual flow and we didn’t really care about keeping up with what everyone else was doing, hell, we hadn’t even kept up with what everyone else was doing/having on the road, so it wouldn’t be too hard stopping ourselves from getting caught up in the race. We thought.
(You can read more about our trip here)
Soon, our calendars filled with activities, events. Our house began to refill with things. And slowly, we lost sight of that beautiful simple life. Something I have yearned for since.
At the end of last week after two weeks of being my own boss, I made some notes in my journal about the week gone and the week ahead. The first point I wrote was: No more multitasking! This is not rocket science, but is something that is so easily forgotten or we combat it with But I’m great at getting all the things done all the time. But at what cost? A scattered mind, exhaustion, lots of things done in a mediocre way?
I’m not alone in thinking that multitasking may not be the way to go. An American Psychological Society article found:
multitasking may seem efficient on the surface but may actually take more time in the end and involve more error. Meyer has said that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone's productive time.
And another American Psychological Society article of a study:
indicates that multitasking may actually be less efficient — especially for complicated or unfamiliar tasks — because it takes extra time to shift mental gears every time a person switches between the two tasks.
What changes have I made?
I am taking the moment to read, quietly, without notifications or reasons to be doing anything else. When I am working on one thing, like drafting a newsletter, that is all I am doing. The other things can wait. I use my little timer to do bursts of 25 minutes of work with a five minute break. I time block my tasks. I do a brain dump at the start of each day and apply the Eisenhower Matrix to the tasks to focus on the Urgent and Important tasks first.
I shuffled my schedule to make the most of my energy levels in the day. Mornings are for creating, afternoons are for working. My days are bookended with walks in the morning and gym or swim in the afternoons. But, I remind myself, I am approaching them with the notion of exercising while still enjoying the beauty of the walk, the pool. Learning to be present in it instead of rushing through it while already thinking about next thing.
I’m clearing out things that are crowding me in, making little spaces in the house with things that make me smile. I’m spending time with people I love and being present in that moment.
I’m taking regular moments in my garden to watch the visiting magpies wash themselves in the birdbath, resisting the urge to capture it on my phone to share online. Letting that moment to be with me and the magpies. Reminding myself that these are the moments to just be.
Check out this post on Instagram by Financial Simplified that shows how to make the most out of your day.
This poem Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris spoke to me this week:
Reading
My current reads are The Odd Woman and The City by Vivian Gornick (recommended by Charlotte Wood who is now on Substack), Everyone has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (audiobook) and Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty (also audiobook that M and I are listening to together).
I have finished reading North Woods by Daniel Mason and it was possibly one of the finest books of nature writing that I have read, on par with one of my all-time favourites Greenwood by Michael Christie. As soon as I finished, I wanted to read it again.
I finished Held by Anne Michaels a week or so ago and I loved it for its poetic language and how the writing on the page almost had a ghostliness to it.
Living on Stolen Land by Ambelin Kwaymullina is an essential read for every Australian. It is a short collection of poetry that reminds us that we live on stolen land that has never been ceded and we have a responsibility. This feels deeply timely this week as we head into yet another year of needing to talking about how 26 January is not a day to celebrate.
Writing
I’ve cracked open that ugly first draft of my contemporary manuscript and I’m happy to report that I don’t hate it. This week, I am moving through the early chapters and doing some character interviews to delve into what drives them.
Retreats
February and April are full! I am so delighted that they have filled up and am now in the preparation stage for February. I have a lovely mix of writers coming including one all the way from Perth.
This week, I created a new instagram account for the retreats and will be slowly creating more content on there. I felt like there was a need for me to have a slight delineation between me as a writer and an organiser of retreats. If you haven’t yet followed, please give me a follow.
Do you want to gift someone a paid subscription? Follow the link to see how to do that
Five things
My email inbox is full to the brim of rubbish emails from the online shopping I did for Christmas (and just generally for the family). When I mentioned this to M, I realised from his blank face that this is not something he is familiar with. Is this just another form of women’s labour?
From Think Bespoke’s latest newsletter, I watched this short video on the 72 hour cabin. I want to go there, but for more than 72 hours.
I loved this post…
Have you been confused about what are Notes/Chats/Threads etc? Substack haven’t made it easy with it all, but this post gives a super quick overview
That’s all from me. Thanks for your continued support. I do value this highly. It encourages me to keep going. I hope you have a great fortnight.
Til next time
x Meg