Tarragona, Catalunya, Spain
I am not long back from a break in beautiful Salou + Tarragona in Spain. It was pretty much perfect, the sun shone, the beaches were beautiful, the days were long and unplanned. I got up and practised yoga on a sunny balcony, I breakfasted on fresh food prepared by someone else, I savoured my coffee in the sunshine. The hotel wifi didn’t work so I took an unplanned digital sabbatical and the sky didn’t fall in.
The days stretched out but the week went far too quickly. As holidays always do.
I’m one of those people whose brain runs faster than they can keep up with. I’m full of projects and ideas (let’s open a studio! let’s write a novel!) which can often leave me feeling drained and overwhelmed. I get exhausted easily and find myself too tired to do more than flick mindlessly through TV channels or internet sites. I stop paying attention to the world around me.
But when I let my brain take a little break from its endless searching for new projects I begin to notice things. I didn’t miss this little internet world at all while I was away (sorry internet world, it’s not you, it’s me), because I was busy smelling the jasmine, eating fresh tomatoes (that taste so much better than force grown tomatoes in Britain), walking on the beach, noticing the barman who was the identical twin of a friend of ours. Noticing. Paying attention.
And I’ve noticed something else.
This paying attention, this letting my brain have some time off its internal dialogue to connect with the external now has opened me up. Ideas for the novel just kept coming, ways of linking the story together, new characters popping up out of nowhere. My client bookings have all come into alignment allowing me a better structure to my day and time with my little vegetable garden each morning (finally it’s growing!). I have new therapists and teachers joining the team. I’m getting up early to practice yoga and meditate to start my day in the stillness I always crave but often forget to make space for (we’ll see how I maintain that during the winter months!).
What we don’t have time for we need the most.
I rush from appointment to appointment, project to project, idea to idea. I never think I have the time to just pay attention to my breath, the flowers in the garden, the people passing by. But actually I do. I have more time than I think, because when I take time to pay attention it opens up a space in my world and in that space the real work begins.
