The Path Reveals Itself… The Planning Paradox
We are currently half way between Lanzarote and Gatwick, five miles high. When we arrive Rosy will head back to Dorset, and I will stay one night at Gatwick, before flying to the peninsula of Spain tomorrow morning.
Rosy and I have had a wonderful week together, each evening we made a plan for the following day which we wrote down and then actioned the following day.
Our days flowed perfectly this way…
It reminded me of when I was young and I planned every day in the summer holidays…
Our regime this past week created very busy days (this is rather an oxymoron in our case) as the busyness was a week full of yoga, pilates, stretch and relax and spa-ing!
We did make some trips to the gym too, and each day we journeyed to Famara beach. I love to run along the sand and in the surf. Rosy joined me for one of the days; we ran together to the end and back.
Famara has a magical vibration, energising and free. There are many windsurfers and kite surfers who enjoy the big waves, as well as this beach being a place where nakedness is embraced.
I watched a couple with not a stitch on, race down the beach and straight into the sea.
It was a beautiful sight to witness. Human beings, being in nature.
For Rosy and me it was our first holiday together alone since 1976, and for me the first holiday for four years since Anadi and I made our decisions, on a holiday in Santorini in 2013, to become nomads….
Our lifestyle has resembled two people on holiday, of course!
But we have been working as we travel.
And now my possessions weigh only 10 kilos. And I don’t own any shoes. My feeling is that these things have occurred because of changes within me, as they have almost happened of themselves.
Although of course they took planning and processes…
But the impetus for the changes came from somewhere inside me.
And this is how it is, all we must do is keep looking within.
Everything comes from within as we are aware, but it is often tempting to look outside.
Even plans, like Rosy’s and my daily plan must come from within.
It could be described as the ‘planning paradox’… To experience the illusion of life on planet earth, we live things out, we plan and organise and prepare….
But if we relax, let go of tension and listen with our inner ear, then the path reveals itself….
When Rosy and I arrived we didn’t have any idea that we would embrace the yoga and pilates classes, even booking private pilates tuition… But the plan emerged and has undoubtedly been transformational on many levels.
And so my decision to shed my shoes completely, to let go of more possessions and to take a sabbatical from my work has emerged from an inner process of clearing.
I intended to take a sabbatical when Anadi and I married three years ago, but it didn’t happen. In fact my work simply grew more and more instead….
So that was the inner plan then, it wasn’t the sabbatical’s time after all…! this time, my sense is t
he sabbatical is ready, it is emerging from within me… Time for more space for my inner journeying, as I run, write, travel…
And vlog of course!
There is no past and no future… There is only now, and therefore we can re write our imagined past and create our imagined future. We can do this by going within now, to the place of silence where there is nothing blocking us from our true expression…
I have been running all of my life – it feels I was born to run. In the running step I experienced freedom and my true expression. I came to see that I needed to ‘get out of the way of myself’ and let my energy flow through the running step; allow it to express itself in the dance and the motion of running. I ran for England and GB for some years. My first international was in 1979, a three mile cross country race; and I continued to run at international level until 1993. Two of my best results were first place in the Dublin City Marathon in 1985 and 7th place woman, 3rd British woman in the 1986 London Marathon in a time of 2.36.31, which gained me selection for the Commonwealth Games.
As a little girl I ran barefoot for many years, and then I put on shoes to race around the world. Fifty years later I am travelling the world as a nomad with my husband Anadi and I have taken off my shoes and I am running barefoot again….
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