My lovely friend Karen Willis from Sharing Bali and Beyond (I met her when I did a writer’s retreat in Bali a couple of years ago) issued her end-of-year newsletter (you should subscribe because it’s gorgeous and full of inspiration about travel and health and wellness) and something she said struck me.
Continue reading...Regular readers will know that my relationship with my mother was fraught, to say the least. It was characterised by restriction and control and violence. And fear. An overwhelming fear that I was not safe, would never be safe. And that I was not enough. Would never be enough. Of course, this is was from the perspective of a child but some 50 years later, I still bear the scars — scars that still weep with blood and tears in the right situation, which — usually and invariably — involves a man because attachment.
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Hands up all of you who have made New Year resolutions? I have in the past, but I usually don’t because I find it an exercise in futility. I mean, why wait all year to change a behaviour that needs changing, or improve your life if it needs improving? Surely if things needs to be addressed, they should be addressed sooner rather later? Later only means that stuff gets even more fossilised, ingrained, bolted on. Why decide to quit smoking or take up exercise in March and then, barring prohibitive and necessary things like surgery, wait another nine months to actually do the
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I wrote the first part of this post back in March 2014. Thought it was about time I finished it off! My career has been an endless succession of ultimately unsatisfying jobs In the late 1980s, I left a series of bank jobs and temporary employment, and got myself university edumacated at the ripe old age of 26, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. I wanted more from life than just temping and working in banks and bought into the hype believed that a university education would help me embark on a fulfilling and productive Career (note the capital “c”).
Continue reading...Lately, I have been thinking about (or is that reviewing?) the nature of friendship, and how we make (and keep or let go) friends is very much linked and related to the friendships we cultivated as children. When I was a kid, we moved around a bit: Adelaide to Millicent to Mt Gambier as my mother’s marriages went pear-shaped. I started primary school in Millicent: went first to a public school, then a private. Then in around Grade 5 or 6, we moved to Mt Gambier, and another private school. My high school (which I didn’t move from) was in
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