Category: being

If you ever feel that you do not properly understand the saying ‘time is money’, just go to book depository.

I have returned to Abu Dhabi.

I do not need to check my stars to know that today is not a good day for making decisions beyond what to have for breakfast and perhaps what to wear.

‘Mum.’ The door is pushed gently open, the words are whispered.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you started?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that’s what you look like when you’re meditating.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, okay. See you in ten minutes.’
Closes door softly, then runs down passage yelling, ‘She’s doing it. She’s really meditating.’

It’s just over a week before we leave Adelaide and return to Abu Dhabi. In anticipation of this event, I have been practising mindfulness, awareness, gratitude and have, after a great number of years of thinking, ‘I really must get back to that’ returned to meditation.

Now, according to all of the self help books I’ve read over the last six months (and if there’s one I haven’t read, I’d be surprised), this mindfulness, in the momentness, this too shall pass kind of approach is just the trick for getting through stressful times and situations. And I think at this stage we can agree that living in Abu Dhabi is stressful for me.

I’m not too bad at being in the moment and so on (yes, yes, I know I’m not supposed to be judgmental about it, where I am is where I am and so on), but I’ve got one piece of logic that I just can’t work my way through. The question I keep asking is this: if I can be content at anytime anywhere, then why do I know that I am, overall and on balance and weighing everything up, happier here than I can ever be there.

There’s a long stretch from here til enlightenment. And hopefully enlightenment can be achieved without silence.

We had a movie night last night and watched Wayne’s World. I am shocked to discover that my children managed to learn a new swear word. Honestly, I thought by now they knew them all.

It’s raining again, which is nice and not complaining and so on and so forth, but the lads are starting to go a bit stir crazy with no proper runaround for a few days now.

Manuscript going okay, thanks for asking. The draft won’t be finished by the time I leave, but it won’t be too far off. Must. Finish. Draft. Twould be easier without two stir-crazed lads under my charge that’s for sure, but since a major theme of the book is ‘how it is, is how it is’ I’m taking a bit of my own advice, and accepting the imperfections of life. Plan is, one day I shall accept all and shout never.

Do you know the longer it goes on, the more calm I feel about the whole thing. The thought of Tony Rabbit as Prime Minister is still making me fall to the ground in a dizzy heap, but by and large I’m feeling okay with it all today. I was living in New Zealand when MMP was first introduced and when the first election was held, and we were waking up every morning to the news that another person had left their party to start their own, and the world didn’t end, it really didn’t.

There’s still two weeks before we go back to Abu Dhabi and the lads go back to school. That’s two weeks to finish off this draft and get the lads up to speed with their times tables. We’re off to a very lazy start today. Even eldest lad didn’t wake up until 8.30 this morning. It’s good, we can all use a bit of a rest. We’ve been having a wonderfully sociable time these last few weeks. ‘Who are we seeing today?’ eldest boy asked yesterday and was shocked when I said, ‘No one’.

Just now, as I walked out of the kitchen my plate of toast and cup of coffee in hand, youngest lad called after me, ‘Where are you going Mum?’ and I called, ‘Back to bed’. And now they’ve pulled out the car track and I’ve fired up the computer and I reckon I’ll get an hour’s work done. As soon as I’ve finished this coffee.

Some days, it is very cool being us, and today is one of those days.

Dear Malcolm

Any tricks up your sleeve? Go on, you know you want to.

Yours &c
A woman who was looking forward to returning, but now, not so much

My dad used to like saying, ‘A wise old man once told me you can bet on the horses, but never bet on the way people will vote’.

So, although I’ve got a feeling in my bones and in my waters, I’m holding my cards close to my chest, and also sticking my head in the sand.

In the meantime, the mister is on the banks of the Limpopo River where I am sure it is not all powerpoints and spreadsheets. Another place he would never have guessed he was going to be.

We’ve got more clarity about our Abu Dhabi exit strategy now which has involved no small amount of angst and over-thinking. Well, the mister’s departure date is clear, although, because of reasons, I’m not exactly sure when I’ll be leaving Abu Dhabi for good. I’m still in Adelaide, and the mister tells me that he is telling people, ‘I won’t be surprised if tracy doesn’t come back to Abu Dhabi at all.’ Just in case I don’t. Which I will, but I can see why he might think that I won’t.

ZOMG! Pregnant Princess Mary is coming to Adelaide…wonder if she knows my blog’s tagline is inspired by her wedding invitation.

Bet whoever picks her up from the airport doesn’t have to pay the zillion dollars it costs to park in the airport carpark.

This morning I woke up and I was still an adult, and I still had decisions to make, and I still had the results of previous decisions to live with.

On the upside, my aunty has left me a glorious dressing gown in which to be an adult with decisions to make. Also, my tummy muscles still ache from laughing my way through a bloody brilliant Sunday afternoon looking through my grandfather’s slides with my cousins and their families.

Ramadan has started in the UAE. I’ve never fasted before, not in any serious sense, and I thought I might this year, but since I ended up coming back to Australia for the summer vacation the thought sort of got replaced. My religious views are a bit all over the place and follow no consistent line of thinking, but I would one day like to explore the ideas of fasting and silence a little more. Probably not at the same time, but maybe. One day.

If you’re interested, there’s a bit about the Moon Sighting Committee in this article. I’m quite taken with the idea of a Moon Sighting Committee and I do think that a world with a Moon Sighting Committee is a better world than a world without one.