Tag Archive | Old Hartley Caravan Club site.

The life I choose – essentialism

Mar23
The view from the public footpath just outside the Caravan Club site at Old Hartley.

The view from the public footpath just outside the Caravan Club site at Old Hartley.

So much has happened since I last wrote and I apologise for the ‘gap’. One thing that is clear to me, is that I have a huge amount to learn this year about “the life I choose”. After a run of house-sits, punctuated by my gorgeous mother having open heart surgery (she’s recovering with the grit and determination that I know runs through my own veins), I find myself again re-evaluating just what it is that I am doing here. The short answer would have to be – too much! I set off on this year of significance, in order to free myself from the tyranny of constant, frenetic, busyness, yet three months in I found myself trapped again in that treadmill feeling, and “the life I choose” felt like a distant, ethereal thing. Unable to even define it, I felt ill-equipped either to take hold of it or to make it happen. Yet here I am: A new day, a new caravan site, looking out onto the vastness of the North Sea and taking the next baby steps towards understanding what “the life I choose” really means. Perhaps just as importantly, beginning to see what it will cost me.

I heard something very challenging yesterday; that the word priority was for many centuries of usage, only singular. That it was used to mean the single most important thing. Then, sometime over the past 200 or so years, as our lives developed an ever increasing pace, it was pluralised. The competing demands of many aspects of our lives had become too complex and clamorous to contain a single priority. However, it strikes me gut deep, that the human being is not capable of prioritising many things. That believing we have many priorities, leads only to the tyranny of the urgent. A place I have lived for many years. What I mean is that unless we are honest about our priorities and reduce them down towards a list of one, we will not live the life we choose, but rather we will do whatever makes the loudest (or most uncomfortable) demands on us at any given time.

For the past 5 years I have prioritised my business, Custom Canine Care, over everything else. Perhaps initially that was essential to make it happen, but for at least the last couple of years I have allowed it to become something that has demanded priority, rather than me giving priority to it as a conscious choice. It shouted the loudest and most urgently. I feel that it’s important to note that in my heart, the business is not my priority. My children, family, close friends and Pete (who fits into at least two of those categories!) would all trump the business. So would my health and well being. That they haven’t been prioritised in any practical sense was more about them demanding less than about me wanting to give less. This year, is in many regards about breaking that cycle – and it’s hard. Only yesterday, I had to say “no” a longstanding client, who I care about a great deal. It was painful…

I am currently listening to a book called Essentialism, by Greg McKeown and am finding it to be one of those “right place, right time” books for me. He teaches that the pursuit of less is more likely to enable us to achieve more of the stuff that is important to us. I began this year with so many things that I wanted to achieve/begin/work on. If I continue to do things as I have over the past 3 months, I’ll achieve very few of them. Time to take a close look at what I want to prioritise and what I need to let go of to achieve that.

I feel that there are five main areas of my life that I should look at to determine priority.

  • Self (health and wellbeing)
  • Relationship
  • Family
  • Friends
  • Work

Each of these areas of life represents myriads of hopes, desires and challenges for growth. Things I would like to do, make happen, experience and learn. Over the next few days I plan to drill down into them and discover true priorities, and if I can… one priority for each that will take my focus until it’s done. Will let you know how I get on.

Life between house sits and my first E-book

Mar2

Today I am back at the Durham Grange campsite and it’s cold, wet and quite windy. I did my monthly sit at Mak and Fern’s house last weekend, during which, I managed to get a large area of the inside of the van propely cleaned out. Pete dropped over on the Sunday and fixed the waste water drainage pipe, which had started leaking for the second time. The pipe dropped onto the road during a journey last Summer, resulting in the terminal tap having to be removed, as the friction from the road had worn a large hole in the pipe above it. After this episode, we removed the tap, shortened the pipe (to get rid of the hole) and I’ve been using it as an open pipe and just draining it continuously into a bucket ever since. Until last week, when it began leaking from the other end of the pipe, where it attatches to the van. So Pete took the whole thing off and attached a new length of waste pipe, then added back in the old tap to make it fully functional again. Yay! One less bucket to carry around!

I can’t believe how quickly time is passing. With one sixth of my year behind me, I came to realise how little I had achieved towards my writing goals. I am not unrealistic and I know that a year will only make a small dent in all that I want to fulfil, but at the very least I would like to

  • get a Scuttling Gourmet blog based website up and running in place of the current Shunamite Rats site and create some Rat Diet E-books on there.
  • start a blog based website on the subject of setting up and running a dog service business, along with creating some short E-books on the subject.
  • write some poetry.
  • develop this blog.
  • maintain the dog blog and Custom Canine Care site.

Today I spent preparing a section of the Scuttling Gourmet for publication as an E-book, essentially un-formatting text and correcting irrelevant references to other pages and chapters. I have the whole chapter done, and now just need to reformat headings and the like to make them compatible with a Kindle reader. Then I will publish Rat Diet – feeding for longevity, well-being and in old age on Amazon. I have spent some time in past weeks, reading through the whole publishing process and it doesn’t seem beyond me. Watch this space. Of course, I’ll have to employ someone from fiver to create a cover.

Tomorrow, I’m picking up Imogen from her place of work near Durham and we are heading over to Thursby to visit Mum and Dad, before the big op. It will be lovely to have some social “time out”. March is essentially house-sit-month. Not ideal to be doing three or four in a row, but I guess that’s how it will roll at times. Next time I find myself on a site – 22nd March – I’ll be staying North West of Newcastle near St Mary’s lighthouse at the Old Hartley site. I’m looking forward to having more choice, as all the sites open after the Winter break. Being by the sea, and in an area with some gorgeous walks might lead to Old Hartley being one of my favourites.