I took a call recently and the woman on the other end of the line began; ‘I know it may seem a bit late in the day but thirty years ago when I was working in the Building Society, I sat in one of your training programs and I was thinking today that I never thanked you for changing the way I thought, all those years ago.’
Who hasn’t been on a long journey and said or heard this? The urgency to get to our destination becomes the imperative.
Getting there, wherever there is, has always been a driver in my life. But it isn’t the bee’s knees. In my search for outcomes, destinations and goals, it’s easy to lose touch with the here and now.
I had a conversation I wasn’t expecting with a bloke I know recently. He asked me, ‘What do you think women around the world were marching for on January 21st?’
Siting around on New Year’s Day discussing the previous year, one of the group said, ‘It’s been a terrible year’ and rattled off all the celebrities who have died in 2016 and all the things that will change the world, Brexit, Trump, Trump, did I say Trump? When my husband said, ‘Well it wasn’t as bad as 1665.’ (more…)
It’s a beautiful, hot Queensland summer day at the beach; the water is clear, see-through green. Calm. I look down at my toes, digging into yellow sand. My friend and I are bobbing around in the soft waves; hats perched on our heads, sunglasses shielding our eyes from the glare of the mid-morning sun.
We talk about work, children, food, Chinese New Year and the year of the Rooster, then the mood shifts and my friend asks, ‘Have you two always been good together?’ She looks towards the beach umbrella where my husband is laying back in a chair reading his Christmas book.
I was talking about intimacy with a friend this morning. She was mourning the lack of intimacy in her relationship with her partner. I asked her how she rated the intimacy she has with herself; being tender, kind, forgiving, loving and gentle with herself. (more…)