Stepping Stones

Originally posted 8 September 2017

Dear lovelies

How are you? How did August treat you? This week things return to ‘normal’. The kids are back to school, my husband, who is a teacher and therefore has been at home with us for 6 weeks, is also back to school. For me, this means an empty house (which needs tidying and cleaning!) so more space for creating and thinking. Welcome space yes, but I shall miss them all dearly too.

I have so much to tell you and so many pictures to show you of our various adventures in London and elsewhere but instead, for this first post back I thought I would tell you where my head is at, what I’m thinking and what my plans are. It is a way of me getting organised! Of course, no post of mine would be complete without some of my photos, so I am interspersing them as always throughout. I hope you enjoy them!

I began this new term/month/season with a jumble of ideas and tasks that already felt overwhelming but I realised recently that I visualise things as a pile, one idea or task on top of another. I do this with ‘problems’ too and it really doesn’t help me to deal with them. It makes them feel insurmountable. I find myself thinking, “there’s this, then there’s this, oh but I should do that first and I need to do that but I am not sure I can” etc. Before I know it, I have made a mountain of my chores, ideas, tasks, issues and so on. The result is anxiety and a feeling that I will not achieve anything or enough. Ooo that word – ENOUGH! It should have a neon warning sign above it! I have done so much, but not enough. I have done something, but it is not good enough. I am steering well clear of that word!

I am trying to see life differently. So rather than seeing the things I want or need to do as a large pile of trouble that I couldn’t possibly conquer, I am going to learn to see things as separate. I am going to try and see my jobs and tasks as linear if that makes sense, prioritising, taking action, beginning somewhere, getting on with one task, moving on to the next to get to my goals. Like stepping stones!

I think the best way to do this is to visualise a line of stepping stones for each area I want to concentrate on, for example, story writing, blog writing, self care and so on. If you would like to know what the other areas are, I would be more than happy to divulge. Leave me a comment below or you can contact me via the link above. The lines of stepping stones are close to each other so that I can jump from one to the other easily when I need to and some areas have fewer stepping stones because they won’t take up so much time. Gosh, this is beginning to sound like fun!

I have written myself a to-do list but also a fortnightly schedule which both include all the areas I wish to concentrate on but the schedule is not rigid. If I get a book deal, ‘story writing’ will override other tasks!

In fact, over the hols I wrote a story about a quirky kid called Sidney and I am really happy with it! It is a humourous story written in lymerick form. I now need to review it and research what to do next. I may need to find an illustrator to do a few sketches before I send it off to a publisher. As well as having lots of other stories and poem ideas I want to develop, I would like to have a go at writing a craft book at some point too. I will keep you posted lovelies!

Another area I am going to spend time on is ‘product development’. I very much want any products I create to reflect my writing and I have many ideas, starting with this poem I wrote in June this year. You may remember this blog post too where I talked about always being busy doing something but not ‘The Thing’ that might move me forwards towards a paid career? In that post, I wrote about gaps in my knowledge and needing help. As a result of that, I have enrolled myself onto an ‘Introduction to Screenprinting’ course at the London Print Studio, which I am very much looking forward to. I feel a little bit out of my comfort zone, but I really hope this will help me to develop my product ideas. I will let you know how it goes!

I do enjoy blog writing and although I may have listed this underneath the ‘Procrastination’ heading, I like communicating with you, I love writing and I need an outlet to share the hundreds of photos I take! So I will continue to write blog posts, possibly every fortnight rather than weekly, so it does not become all that I do and I can balance it with other areas.

I also want to spend time looking after myself. Without boring you with details, I have chronic asthma and I suffer from headaches (possibly sinus related) more often than I would like. Both ailments are exacerbated by anxiety and stress and possibly too much time watching or looking at a screen. Lots of reading time and creative play time (drawing, knitting, crochet, cross stitch…) is what I need as well as spending time away from any screen, walking, exploring, foraging and adventuring in search of culture and nature. So I am scheduling that in and boy am I looking forward to it! Also sometimes, I might just do NOTHING! You know, just sit and think and dream. Shhhh, don’t tell anyone!

As I mentioned, there are other areas I feel I might need to concentrate on sometimes (like finances – yuk!) especially if things pick up, but those I have talked about above will take up most of my ‘me’ time and will make me very happy! Of course, it goes without saying that being a Mum to 3 lovely kiddies, 2 of whom are under 10, being the primary carer to them during term time and running a household takes up so much time, physically and emotionally. So I will be jumping along my Mummy stepping stones as a priority and then over to my Lucylu dreams stepping stones as time allows. I hope as they get older to be spending more time leaping about along the ‘dreams’ stepping stones! Ha! I love this analogy!