Odds Off

I once read a book about an elderly man who was faced with the reality of losing his speech along with most of his movement. He was asked how he would communicate. His answer was simple. “With touch and eye contact as our eyes are the mirrors to our souls”. I pondered over this for a long time. I thought about the awkwardness of silence. Could it be that we feel uncomfortable in silence as the words aren’t there to distract us from the real emotions and feelings floating within us? Do words and movements give us the ability to project a confabulated truth of how we really feel? Is this why people often don’t keep eye contact and why police officers and detectives seek the truth with simply face to face communication and minimal words. So it is with these thoughts I wonder to what point do we believe words? At what point do we stop kidding ourselves of the perfect speeches we receive when the actions clearly don’t match? Do we believe empty words because we deeply want to? Because we he...

It was 16 th December 2010 when I decided to give myself a year to go on a year long life discovery. I chose to be a student for a year. So I feel it is only apt that I write a blog on this important day in my journey as this is my so called “last day” to actively soul search and the most remarkable thing happened just before midnight. Something popped inside me and I found my feet. I for the first time in my whole life felt entitled to set boundaries. Set my own boundaries of what I will accept and what I won’t. I found my inner voice telling me what was healthy for me and what wasn’t so on the same evening I spoke up to two people that are incredibly important to me. I did not do it with malis in heart I did it out of love. Love for me and for them. I did it as I have always been so insecure that the idea of potentially loosing someone for airing my view has been paralysingly scary, but not anymore. I went to Costa Rica and learnt that I am actually OK as a person and I work my butt...

Confidence can often be misleading. People can go on stage, walk in a room and sing in front of thousands and look utterly confident. Yet deep inside they are trembling. They are slowly torturing themselves. Others can actually feel confident in such situations yet feel insecure inwardly. They can feel uncomfortable yet look as if they have simply arrived home. I find myself sometimes in the latter category. I can walk into a meeting with my head up high and not worry about who is there or the crowd I need to entertain about electronic goods and the new software upgrade that makes this new model to die for! I can mingle with figures of high regard and hold up a counter argument as I view them as simply fascinating people who have got to where they are. I don’t believe they are any better than me or that I am better than them. I believe we are equal as people just the achievements and attitudes towards life are different. Yet I can find myself starting to feel incredibly insecure if I f...

This morning I was reading about the mind, about how we live with this internal functionality called the brain. Without it we would not live, we would not have electric pulses shooting down throughout our body enabling us to do what we want. However I have come to realise throughout the years that simply because we are attached to our brains it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to always do as it tells us, as it acts as our best friend but simultaneously acts as our worst enemy! Whilst it enables us to move our hands, walk and talk it also enables us to think. The problem with this I have come to realised is that just as unaware we are of moving our hands, legs, jaw etc. we are unaware of our thoughts. We think away but unfortunately we can’t often stop the damaging thoughts until they have taken over and we are in a pool of darkness. We don’t seem to have the mechanics of dislocating the thinking mind like we would move our hand if it was burning from the open fire. However through the...

Whilst I was in Costa Rica I wrote on my blogg that I would not look around me as a cocky confident lass that knew what was around. I would open my eyes a bit more and walked around my own area as a tourist. I have done this. I went on my own into the Corf Castle countryside after dipping my toes in the Purbeck swimming pool and drove until I found this amazing recommended pub. I was the only person there as they had closed shop but the landlady allowed me to have a ½ pint and sit outside even though they were closed. I took the lady up on her offer. I sat down with my cloudy bitter and a packet of cheese and onion crisps. I looked around me and I was amazed at the sight around me. Green hills and thatched roofs, castle ruins to my left and an old pub to my right. I had been for a walk with Matt the day before and sat in the grass bank of the Jurassic coast looking out to the ocean! As I sat there in the beer garden I felt an over whelming flow of contentness of being home. I realis...

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation about changing. Not changing clothes or nappies or hair colour but about personal development. Changing who you are. It made me wonder a lot. Can an experience change you forever? Does something simply go SNAP and you have changed? Or do some of us have to grow and learn the lesson along the way? Or are these “changing circumstances” intertwined like a strangler tree uses its roots to take over the other tree? I personally don`t know. I grew up with two conflicting arguments. First one: It is important to change with the times but the second was don´t change for anyone! Surely if you change with the times you are changing for others? Then I ask the question when do we know when we need to change or when we should change? When is change good or bad? Do we lie to ourselves a lot and believe we have changed when simply all we have done is learnt a lesson? Do we kid ourselves that we don´t need to change because we know that with change comes a l...

I discovered today that I have no problem making self discoveries about myself but I struggle keeping them. I couldn’t tell you how many times I have made a new years promise to cut out the ice cream and to only eat one rather than the whole package of yummy biscuits… Have I ever stuck to it for more then two hours… the answer would be no! I have the intentions of keeping to it but I find that I give in and then beat myself up about it. I then feel bad having not stuck to a promise I only made to myself and before I know it I am eating two tubs of ice cream to drown my sorrows….. It becomes a vicious circle.. and today I finally figured out a way out of it. Cut myself some slack. I started thinking about how there were things I would have liked to do differently. Things I wish I could have said, things I wish I could have done and so on and then I realized that when we are younger we get cut some slack. We are excused for making “mistakes” or as I would call them learning opportunities...