Chaos and the slowing down of time

Last night was spent drinking mulled wine, the evening before was spent drinking mulled wine... I have had the fire on whilst wrapping presents, and I think I have spent more time with good friends in pubs recently than I probably have done all year. It is good to not just go through the motions of existence in this mid-December peak, but to actually find my feet amongst the madness and to jump right in. I am talking about the good days here, when the universe seems to be spinning in the right direction at the right speed and timing isn't an effort - the timing of things seem to fall into place. Synchronicity between the universe and you. I'm sure that is a song..

The week ended with Friday - usually in my mind I have reached Friday by Thursday afternoon. In fact, often I say to my Thursday clients 'see you on Friday next week!' Or I make reference to the weekend/ end of the week. I am sure they either think I am disorganised, over-enthusiastic, that I take Fridays off, or that I am just simply a little bit bonkers. Whatever they think, it is fine, but I catch myself doing this almost every week and I wonder why my brain has reached Friday before the hours have caught up with me!

Anyway, this Friday I decided to take the train, which was a wonderful decision because I forget how much of the scenery I miss when I drive. I had been with one of my tutoring students in the morning, which I always enjoy - we go to a coffee shop in town first thing in the morning and it is the most relaxed way to work and teach/mentor (my role seems to switch at times). What I found interesting about this Friday was that we had agreed to spend the morning session looking at the topic of 'stress' - the body's physiological response to both acute and chronic stressors. The irony is that doing a two hour session about stress seemed to have a undeniably de-stressing outcome. I realised this as I was sat on the train en route to York and dug into my bag to find my book, and realised that in my bag I had the work on stress, and also a brilliant book that had been very kindly given to me earlier this week about mindfulness. There was something quite ironic about my carrying those two books, and I sat with the mid-morning sun shining through the train window and actually what I did was read neither. I think I put my music on and closed my eyes.

This time next week I will be happily en route down to Kent for a few days, but for now I am taking the Sunday off. I am a little sad that my yoga instructor is away today and we don't have my usual morning yoga class, but I have had the most relaxing morning drinking fresh 'Christmas blend' coffee, and listening to some acoustic 'folksy' Christmas songs. I shall spend most of the day reading, preparing a little work for some tutoring sessions this week, but mainly enjoying that I still haven't found myself a new laptop so really I have a wonderful reason to do minimal work and catch up on the small things. I might do a little yoga at home because I will really miss it if I don't. There is a strange sense at the moment of things slowing down, despite the hastened pace of that 'rush' - maybe at Christmas we give ourselves permission to slow down and do the things that ordinarily would be so guilt-inducing or so seemingly impossible because the 'to-do' list dictates so. Perhaps we can joke at work and the excuse is 'well it's Christmas - of course you don't have do do that now/of course you should go and enjoy the weekend!' Yes - of course you can drink the wine and eat that extra mince pie. It's Christmas.. Is Christmas simply what we need in order to give ourselves permission to loosen the boundaries and desensitise ourselves to the pressing numbers of the clock and time ticking away? Because it doesn't matter? Maybe we just realise what it is that really does matter instead.

Whatever it is, I have decided to go with it. I will go with the chaos and the slowing down of time.