Time to plant seeds
The vivid colour of summer is held, in suspended potential, within the muted earth tones of spring
When you go looking for joy, it always seems to take a step back. Planning a day out with the intention of it being magical, of it causing delight, always seems to invite traffic jams, rain, a headache just behind the left eye, something important left at home.
Joy does not like to be pressured. It prefers to float in quietly and unannounced, like a shaft of low winter sun dipping to slide through the kitchen window and illuminating the steam rising from your favourite mug as it nestles amidst the pattern of bees and flowers on the tablecloth, giving even the crumbs from breakfast a warm and comforting glow.
Joy does arrive in the big moments, of course, but usually tapping you on the shoulder when you're not looking. When you've stepped out to use the bathroom at your wedding, and you walk back in to see everyone you love all in one place, singing Champagne Supernova at the tops of their lungs. When all of the midwives and doctors have gone and you are holding your new baby in your arms as you hear a noise outside and realise you get to be the person to tell her, "That is an owl."
- Allegra Chapman
What will you plant?
April is an excellent time for planting. A lot of things can be put into the soil directly outside at this time of year, as the weather here in the UK is becoming mild enough for a wide variety of flowers, fruits and vegetables to thrive.
What struck me over the last week, as I started to gather the seeds that I want to put into the ground or into pots in the coming days, is how much of summer I’m planting in the spring. Strawberries, the very essence of warm, vividly bright days. Lettuce for refreshing salads. Cucumber (partly for the salads, partly for G&T, sipped over ice in the evening sun in the garden). And one of my favourite glorious symbols of summer, sunflowers.
Gardening is such a reminder that the potential for our future is contained in our actions today. That we have to nurture the outcomes we want long before they start to take visible shape. This is a season to be thinking about what we want to work towards, what a glorious summer would look like for us, and to sow the seeds now.
It’s time to plant those sunflowers.
Setting intention
How often do we live our lives like that? Thinking ahead to where we want to be, and taking the incremental actions needed to get there, step by step? Setting clear intentions for our actions, for our experiences and staying true to them?
I know that I’ve lived a lot of my life in a state of reaction, rather than intentional action. Things happen, circumstances change, people behave in a certain way, and I figure out how to react. That’s how I woke up one day and realised I was hurtling towards 40, living in a small seaside town that I hadn’t known existed five years ago, without any clear idea of how I got here.
Have you ever driven somewhere, parked your car, then realised with an unsettling start that you don’t actually remember the journey? It’s frightening because you feel as though, if you don’t remember it, you weren’t present, and therefore you worry that you weren’t completely in control, not completely safe. You were safe, your brain was keeping track of what was going on, but you weren’t completely present. You were on autopilot.
And that’s how we live much of our lives.
It’s not really conducive to a state of happiness. If we can’t even remember the journey, what value did it have? Just delivering us to the next point? But most of our life is the journey. We don’t want to miss it. That sense of anxiety and dread when we realise we’ve not been paying attention to a car trip is similar to the low level of humming distress we feel at sleepwalking through our lives when society has conditioned us to just keep going, never stop, just produce and consume until you drop.
Perhaps that’s why mindfulness has been shown to increase happiness. Not just because it helps you to be truly present in your life and to maximise the benefit you get from the experience, but also because it is associated with a greater sense of purpose.
A wealth of research has demonstrated that purpose increases happiness, reduces stress, and can even help you live longer. In organisations, it has been shown to massively increase engagement, productivity and profitability, as well as increasing wellbeing. When we understand our purpose, when we set mindful intentions for our actions and our lives, we nurture our own happiness and are present to the joy in our everyday experiences.
But how can we identify our sense of purpose if we feel we’ve become disconnected from that part of ourselves? Having spent a lot of time investigating this issue, I think it comes down to asking yourself five key questions:
If people were going to use just one word to describe the essence of who you are and how you show up in the world, what would it be? (You might want to brainstorm as many words you can think of that describe you, focusing on trying to be as specific to your most individual traits as you can, then group words together by themes, looking for words that encapsulate each group, then narrow it down and narrow it down some more until you can choose just one.)
If you could broadcast one message to everyone in the world, what would you want to tell them? What would it be important for you to communicate to them?
If you could make one lasting change in the world, what would it be? (To help you here, think about the causes you most passionately support, or the types of news story that make you the most upset.)
What are your main skills and strengths?
How do you want to be remembered? What will it be important for you to leave behind?
When you look over your answers, what are the common themes? What brings it all together? What do those answers tell you about you as a person and what you want to get out of life?
That may just be the key to your happiness.
Creative spark
It feels like a cliche to say the acorn contains the potential for a tree, which will grow more acorns, but it’s true. The wood in my fireplace was once a tree. It’s still standing tall for the moment, as it blazes brightly, one of the last fires I’ll light this season as the chill begins to burn away from the evenings. But it will be ash in the grate before morning. Then that ash will go onto the garden to nourish the soil. It will feed new plants, maybe even a new tree. The end is in the beginning, as Samuel Beckett wrote, but the beginning is also in the end. Life is a cycle, it feeds itself. What is ending now so that something new can rise?
Lovely flow....5 questions got me thinking ❤️
So lovely and so true ❤️