Today is more difficult than usual! I feel utterly blocked, stuck in mud, cannot begin anything, cannot finish anything! Each task meets with frustration, another failing goal/ lack of tool/ unknown words. And yet, looking at what IS working today, I realise that I was hugely rewarded by the cleaning organising, cooking and fixing, and managing to communicate with a neighbour, already... if in doubt about the way forward, almost always a bout of clearing up/ out will suffice to return me to the centre!
I realise my mounting frustration is partly around simply the lack of familiarity: it is a joyful freedom to embrace the new and the exotic, but after a while, I can feel my 36yr old craving for stability, familiarity and The Normal. I guess this moment requires a more significant breakthrough; my work has to adapt not only to a new country (climate, language), economic structure and so on, but to my change in personal circumstances: I am no longer a singleton bumbling day after busy day from one easily- managed engagement to the next, and always with every resource to hand: I'm now in a completely new landscape, a travel partner at my side, with whom I must work as a team.
I struggled this morning to break through this wall, and found that, as intense as it appeared to me, it was no more than a passing glitch in the matrix; a few words over the phone and scribbled (as it were) into a Word document, and suddenly there was perspective again. It amazes me how easily things shift, when they feel so impossible. The hardest part of the shift seems to be letting go of attachment to it: not wallowing. Doing something, anything, to move energy from where it is stagnating... A walk, bake a cake, wash the dishes, clear out a drawer, trim one's hair. Well, I did all of these things, and ultimately, they all contributed to the mind clearing.
Perhaps now I can return to my day with a stronger mind, emotions, purpose, intention: a dip on the road has been climbed up and out of, and my head is my own again. If I can build on this internal strength, then some semblance of order in the external might follow...
