Sherdie

It wouldn’t be right to let the day pass without a little public congratulations to those crazy Slowfeet kids. Forty years and many adventures later, they’re older, wiser and have excellent children.

Here’s to the next forty.

Let’s review. I forgot to put a couple of things on the list, so I should add those on for completeness.

• Marinate roo (for dinner – Australia Day, natch)
• Sort desk
• Put all the things away!
• Make gyoza skins and gyoza
• Go to Sydney for a decadent weekend
• Get my first som tam of the year (yum) at Chat Thai in Thaitown (still not as good as the Parap markets but that’s mostly just because I’m a wanker)
• Sip chilled wine with chilled people in a chilled-out courtyard
• Eat an incredible dinner at Sokyo (Moreton Bay bug sashimi holy moly)
• Have an amazing coffee tequila shot
• Be exceptionally hungover
• Have a breakfast tagine in Balmain (amazing, really, I should have taken a photo but was far too hungover)
• Pick up a salted caramel lamington from Adriano Zumbo
• Watch a middle aged woman with a small dog sneakily leave her dog poo in a bag on the footpath – possibly not realising (or more likely not caring) the entire verandah of the the pub across the road was watching her
• Watch the poor owner of the shop she left the bag in front of come out, pick it up, and look quite disgusted
• Go to a fabulous party in the penthouse at the Meriton and watch the Chinese New Year fireworks from above
• Swan around in my new dogstar splurge dress
• Eat a platter full of German pork products for breakfast (well, part of a platter) and rediscover my love of sauerkraut. And my love of crackling, although it never went anywhere so it’s not really rediscovery, is it?

Failed on the following:

• Knit like a mofo
• Repot shiso
• Split bromeliad

Will rectify those shortly. Just as soon as my liver stops whimpering.

Far out, internet, I’ve got a four-day weekend ahead of me.

And one of those days I have all to myself. No plans. Just me. And a to do list.

It says:

• Marinate roo (for dinner – Australia Day, natch)
• Knit like a mofo
• Repot shiso
• Split bromeliad
• Sort desk
• Put all the things away!
• Make gyoza skins and gyoza

This is what my life has become. And it’s ace.

So I’ve got a busted right wing.

Well, not technically busted. Technically lacking mechanical stability. And not technically my wing, being as I can’t fly, but in fact my shoulder.

You get the general idea though. I can do most things as long as I don’t, you know, move my right arm. Lift it or suspend it in the air or try to use it or lie on it.

For how long? Well, until it stops hurting, apparently.

Approaching it as a reason to slow down and look at things. Consider things. Chill out. And make the Architect hang out all the washing (line’s too high, no way I can get my arm up there).

You know what’s tricky? Making 4 litres of kimchi with your left hand.

Yep. Tricky.

But totally worth it.

Two months between check-ins. Oops. This is the part where you tell me I’m doing it wrong, I think.

Am I doing it wrong? Not too sure. Talking to a dear friend just now, I said that I feel like I’ve made it through the tunnel and into the light. So something is working. I’ve been chipping away at this, whatever this is. This complex muddied thing that needs shifting. Making little spaces here and there, and then filling them up with light and love and softness to crowd out the stress and sad and crunchiness. Lots of reframing things as choices, such as working late or on weekends because I’m choosing to. Lots of trying to sneak around the ego and adrenaline thing, which is still hard, but getting easier with practice. Being okay with doing things less than perfectly… I really suck at.

I’m excited about keeping on with all of this. Keeping on carving out those little spaces for myself. Doing things for no other reason than I want to. Not doing things for no other reason than I don’t want to. Ridiculous that those two statements should seem at all remarkable. Still, that’s what I’m working with. And it’s making everything (paradoxically even doing the stuff I don’t want to do) easier. In October, I’m going to learn how to make cheese. Why? Because it makes my heart quicken (you should follow that link, and read it).

A way to go still, and a few more navel-gazing blog posts ahead. But progress, for sure.

Borrowing heavily from the amazing Havi, a check in on a drizzly Sunday. We had a huge sleep in after staying up late watching trashy TV. I’ve got my washing on, rice soaking and some plans for an afternoon of cooking and baking – lasagna, chicken stock, banana bread. Contemplating a stroll in to the Valley to get umeboshi and ghee and tamarind chutney… but I might settle for a skip to the corner shop for milk. The Architect is looking at buildings and bikes and random things on the internet. A lazy Sunday indeed.

The bad

First full week back at work. By Friday I was stupidly tired. Not helped by a futsal game with no subs on Thursday night – about 10 seconds after I started running I realised I had nothing in the tank… and still had to keep running. Ugh (and we lost 15-1). Of course, now it feels like I’m making excuses; once you’re back at work, no-one but you remembers that you were sick and/or recovering. In the past I’ve been guilty of saying, “if you’re not well enough to be effective at work, then you shouldn’t go to work”. True… but I am well enough to go to work, just not to smash out a 12 hour day. People might think I can’t do my job, oh noes! Which leads me to…

Ego. Adrenaline. My addiction to being busy. I was right when I said this would be a big challenge. The ego thing is fuzzy and complex and circular, but I think it mostly comes from my desire for external validation (what Gretchen Rubin calls gold stars – oh, so true!). There’s a part about enjoying being part of the action and being able to influence it. A part about enjoying the ego boost that comes with being busy and in demand. And a part from that little voice that whispers to me that I have to prove that I am capable and clever and whatever else, to everyone around me (and something in there about competition). Woven through all of that is the addiction to the adrenaline that comes with those things, with being busy and frantic and rushed and smashing through and always having the next thing to deal with. I noticed this one day this week when I had lots of meetings and we had lots of media requests on a bunch of different things and (I told myself) I was the only one who could deal with all those things. I was working on draft releases during meetings, meaning I was only half there, and then trying to prepare for meetings while our media guy was trying to talk to me, meaning I was only half there. And I was enjoying the adrenaline and the feeling of being very, very busy, because it meant I didn’t have to feel weak and exhausted or worry that people thought I wasn’t pulling my weight because See! Here I Am Being Needed And Useful And Important! I got to skip along the top of things without dealing with the difficult parts of them – because I was so busy.

The good

Mindfulness is all about practice. Later on the day of adrenaline, I realised what was going on, promptly closed my office door and hung out in a standing forward bend for a minute – to get the blood back to the brain and calm the hell down. It worked, for about an hour. And in that hour I got a lot done. But as the adrenaline wore off I became more and more tired. So I went home and went to bed. Lesson learnt. And I also realised that noticing this stuff is easier when you have physical limitations like exhaustion and a burning pain in your abdomen. Silver lining, I reckon.

Seeking and finding wisdom. I love, love, love what Penelope Trunk says about this thing where busy is an addiction:

Those of you who walk around telling everyone how busy you are, get a grip. Make some tough choices and calm down. There’s a big difference between a busy day and a full day. The former is so frantic that you aren’t effective.

Seth Godin is another clever person who talks a lot about the difference between being busy and being productive. I try to remind myself of statements like “You don’t need more time…you just need to decide” in those moments where I’m gearing up to be busy again. Of course there’s Havi, always a treasure trove of ways to bring more mindfulness in and change patterns that aren’t useful. And the Architect offers me daily reality checks in his kind and direct way.

Making space. Starting small, I’m carving out little pieces of the day and making them mine. The three things I did this week were: Taking five extra minutes to go the long way through the park back to the office after a meeting. Arriving early to where I’m going and sitting outside on a bench and soaking in the autumn morning for a few minutes. Turning off the computer at 5.30 at the very latest and not checking my emails again until the next morning (this one I was less successful at).

Next

More of the same. Keep working on and refining the Plan. Create space. Get stronger. More mindfulness. I’ve been enjoying getting back in to this space too. Yay.

I’ve always been better at the big picture or the new idea than the actual doing of the thing. So what’s my actual recovery plan? In other words, finally all that HECS and those 5 years studying immunology and endocrinology and other -ologies finally pays off (plus, obvs, advice from the doc).  So. As well as that, here’s what I will do.

1. First up – getting over it (week 1 and 2, I suppose – which brings us to today).

Electrolytes, okayu & umeboshi, ginger juice with honey. Plus maxolon and panadol for when I need it. Sleep. Naps. Lying down. Very, very slow yoga. Being extremely gentle.

2. Then – getting back to normal (from now until… this one’s going to take a while, I think.)

Generally I think that your nutrients should be found in your diet but for now, I’m on a cocktail of supplements. Zinc and magnesium to help with healing my sad little oesophagus and stomach. Hardcore probiotic for my devastated intestinal flora. Iron to ward off my tendency to anemia. A giant, foul tasting vitamin B complex to support everything else. Garlic, horseradish and vitamin C because fuck getting sick again right now. Oh and calcium, but that’s just because.

No coffee. No(t much) booze. Not too much to change about my diet but probably not so much of the rich foods for a month or two.

Other things are about being nice to myself. At least 8 hours sleep a night. Slow weekends. Limited stuff on weeknights. Leave work at 5 or thereabouts. Leave earlier when I’m exhausted. Some other stuff about how I work that’s probably for another post.

Hmmm. Probably sounds fairly fucking awful when it’s listed out like that but right now it sounds like bliss (…er, one day in). When I get bored, that probably means I’m better and can move on to…

3. Keeping perspective.

I’m still thinking this through. There’s something in there about filling up my life with all the other things I love so there’s no room for work to become some sort of invasive species (it’s all about equilibrium). But thinking about what all those other things are and how that all works… makes me even more tired, so I figure I’ll work that out in a few more weeks.

Also I love my job, really love it, so there’s more thinking to do about how to make sure there’s balance but I can still keep the joy in it. I made a conscious choice to push myself hard because I believed, and still believe, that it was worthwhile. But it can’t be at any cost, and if I burn out then I’m not going to be helping anyone. Like I said before, breaking the addiction to ego and adrenaline is going to be the trick there.

There’s also something in there about creating and keeping space, in that yogic kind of way, which seems much more appealing and achieveable at the moment. So I think that until I’ve worked it the rest out, I’ll focus on consciously creating space and stay mindful not to let that space fill up with work (it’s so tempting!).

And a final important thing is the documenting. Accountability and mindfulness. Hence this post, which is probably boring as piss for you, dear reader, and filled with the sort of minutiae about me that even the Architect won’t care to read. But right now this is more about me than anyone else.

So that’s the plan. It’s not comprehensive and has all my classic hallmarks of cobbling something together and working the details out later.

But so far it’s going okay.

Then. Here we are.

Things that have happened in the last, er, few months.

Let’s start with: I lost some weight. Some of that was on purpose. Some of that was ending up in hospital with a really nasty virus. Take it where you can get it, I suppose. I fit in to my old jeans now.

I worked a lot. More than I needed to. So close that all I could see was trees, trees and more trees. So much that everything else got moved way down the list. Despite the warnings from Mr Kettle and all. I let everything else fall. Things I love doing. Things I need to do. I pushed too far and too long and when that little virus came along, my poor, thrashed, strung out immune system had no chance.

Emerging, now, post-myopic-perspective, is a bit like waking up.

As a way to suddenly regain perspective, I don’t recommend the path I chose. Lying in an isolation ward in emergency staring at the fluoro, too exhausted to move, too sore to sleep… melodramatic as all get out, but it does give you some time to have a good hard think about the events that led you there.

Which brings us to now. Tired, still. So very tired. But that will pass. Surprised that I am not actually invincible. Weird, that. And determined to hold on to the notion that being good at my job doesn’t mean devoting all my energy to it. More that being good at my job is getting the important things done in the time available to do them. And, I’m not lacking commitment if I finish at a normal time and have a life outside of work. Tricky, that. It’s breaking the addiction to adrenaline and ego that’s the biggest challenge.

So, here’s to the forest and trying to keep it in view. Most frustrating is that I feel like I’ve been here before. This time feels different though. More serious. Stakes are higher. Something.

Let’s see how it goes.

A short one because I’m pretty tired.

The flood is over; at least, the river has peaked and is receding.

The long and heavy process of cleaning and rebuilding has started.

Today we helped people (some we knew, some we didn’t) scrape, sweep and wash sticky, smelly river mud out of their homes.

Sitting in our safe little stilt-hill-cliff house, it was easy to watch the tv and feel removed from it all. Even walking around the bottom end of the neighbourhood and seeing the water start to come in, or seeing the supermarket closed/underwater, it wasn’t very real.

Today was real. It stank. Everything was covered in brown goop. The owner of one of the houses started to cry as we pulled soaked gyprock off her walls; mud had gotten into the cavity and the walls were ruined. There were tiny dead fish and crabs mixed in with the rubbish and mud.

These things happen. People pick themselves up and move on. But the energy and the anguish doesn’t come cheap.

Bright moments were everywhere, though. Some women from houses higher up the street in Yeronga made a huge pile of sandwiches and sliced fruit, and came around the flooded houses herding people out to wash their hands, drink water, rest, eat. Someone brought brownies and Anzac biscuits to each house. A doctor living nearby went to her clinic and came back with a box of tetanus shots, administering them to a line of muddy people sitting on a retaining wall in a random front yard. Later, in West End, shovelling mud in a front yard, crews of people walking and driving past offered help.

So here I am. A pile of very muddy clothes in the laundry tub, a pincushion dead left arm and another day of it tomorrow. I sort of feel like crying. And I sort of feel like hugging everyone I see.

As a compromise, I think I’ll go and hug the Architect and cry a little bit into his shoulder.

PS: No photos of the cleanup – it wasn’t really the place for a camera.

So here we are, holed up in our house on stilts at the top of a hill, listening to the rain fall, and fall, and fall.

And then fall some more.

It’s odd to do nothing but sit and wait for the river to rise. There’s nothing really to do – my childhood disaster training was obviously effective, because as soon as I made it home today I filled up the camping water container (10L) and a couple of other containers in case the water goes, got out the candles and the camping stove, and checked that we had enough food to last us for a while. The Architect, similarly northern-Australia-disaster trained, had the same thoughts when he got home. Plus he went downstairs and lifted everything up that could get wet and damaged. He’s good value, that one.

And now we’re sitting here, kind of waiting for the internet/electricity/phone to stop working, but not really, because it’s still all a bit unreal. Despite the possibility of work being flooded, despite seeing the river keep rising, despite two hours on gridlocked buses and then giving up and walking (/sloshing) home, despite hearing the stories and seeing people panicking, despite all the messages to and from people checking we’re okay and you’re okay and they’re okay… It’s hard to comprehend.

Maybe because we’re in a house on stilts on top of a hill and the worst we’ll have to worry about is a bit of overland flow. Maybe because we’ve both been through cyclones and some sort of flooding before. Maybe because I know that the worst is yet to come, and there’s no point panicking now on Tuesday when the river isn’t going to peak until Thursday or Friday.

Anyway. I’ll see you on the other side. Stay safe and dry, people.