People who know me well are always surprised to hear that as a teenager I hated Dickens.  Hated.  I thought his books were overly long, ridiculously rambly and life was, quite frankly, too short.

When I was 17 (the year in which, basically, I became the person I am today – I’ve been lucky like that, got it all over in one fell swoop), I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

And it changed my opinion of Dickens forever.

However, the thing about Drood is, as I’m sure you know, that Dickens died while writing it.  Most people think, like Mozart’s Requiem, that it is unfinished.

That’s as maybe, but unfinished does not necessarily mean incomplete.

There have been many attempts at the ‘constructed ending’ (usually by inferior writers) when it comes to Drood - most recently in the BBC’s rather odd adaptation – and, like really bad sewing, you can always see the join.

To me Drood isn’t incomplete.  I never walk away from reading it with a feeling of dissatisfaction.  I’d go so far as to say that it is perfect just the way it is.  So far as to say, in fact, that it is finished.**

We humans have an almost innate need for things to be done, for loose ends to be tied off, for everything to be tidied away.  Maybe it’s because deep down we know life’s not really like that.  There are nothing but loose ends in life, question marks hanging over paths we didn’t follow, people we lost touch with.  We will most likely die unfinished, a work in progress.  And, if you believe in reincarnation, have to come back and do it all over again, still unfinished.

But we are always trying to beat this. Rather than allow ourselves to be unvarnished we continue to search for new shades of polish. Especially at this time of year, when every newspaper or magazine we open, every other blog post we read is telling us we’re too fat, or too thin, or should eat more raw vegetables, or have less clutter.  Whatever it is, We’re Doing It Wrong and Need To Do It Better.

We really don’t.  Change happens over time.  Most of us change for the better without even realising it’s happened.  And sometimes it’s OK to remain unpolished.  No good has ever come from trying to finish Drood, no good came of adding that awful ending to Requiem. Lots of things aren’t broken, they’re just unfinished, so they don’t need fixing.

This year why not let your loose ends hang free?!

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** Much as I love Dickens now, I still maintiain he’s not very good at endings and often resorts to pantomime and farce to wrap up his loose ends.  Perhaps that in itself is what makes Drood so very very good.

As you know from my About page, we live in a falling down house on the very edge of Cambridge UK. Cambridge is a funny town (sorry City, it is a City even though it only has 125,00 residents – we have a charter from King John or something that proves this). If it weren’t for the world famous University, Cambridge would be a tiny and rather insignificant market town in the middle of the East Anglian Fens. When you come to the edges of it you hit flat, rather bleak countryside.

Looking out the back of our house there is nowt but fields. Above is the view from the bedroom window.

When we first moved here I was so enamoured with the space and the lack of light pollution after over a decade in London that I would walk over the fields every chance I got.  It felt as though my lungs weren’t big enough to deal with all that air!

But then you settle.  You get used to your new surroundings.  New becomes commonplace and life gets busier.  We’ve just come out of an 18 month period of being car-less and when you are cycling over 6 miles every day and on your feet all day for work, going for a walk slips pretty low down the list of priorities.

Recently though I’ve begun to realise how important it is to reconnect with our immediate environments.  How often do we go through the motions of our commute to work, no matter what form of transport it is on, without noticing what is passing us by?  When I used to work in the City, the most ancient, and my own personal favourite area of London, I used to see all the workers like little ants, rushing from meeting to meeting, never once looking up at the breath-taking architecture, the mind-blowing history through which they were walking.

And the internet doesn’t help much either.  Yes there’s a lot of connection here, a lot of support and a lot of joy.  But there’s a lot to be said for looking up from that little glowing palm-sized window to the world occassionally and looking out of the actual window.  I’m as guilty as charged with the internet thing but slowly, slowly I’m trying to let it go and have time each week completely away from the computer, completely away from work.  Time for me and the world around me.

I am reconnecting by being kind, by listening, by accepting who I am right now (a very different person to who I was even a year ago).  I am disconnecting to reconnect to the person I have become.

How about you?

bookworm, geek, yoga teacher, yoga student,
massage therapist, writer, reader, blogger, committed partner, baker,
list writer, cataloguer, bad speller, Fibromyalgia sufferer,
woman with a crooked spine, feminist, meditator, bicylcist,
short, skinny, tree hugger,
tea drinker, lover of ridiculous shoes, crazy clothes and shiny things

Every great yoga class or practice ends with Savasana, a supine relaxation which can be as short as 2 minutes or as long as 15 minutes.

Every class I have ever taught ends with at least 5 minutes of stillness, my longer classes and pregnancy classes have 10-15 minutes of Yoga Nidra.  When it comes to mum+ baby classes the quiet time at the end usually coincides with feeding time (and also sometimes screaming-your-head-off time but hey, who’s counting?).

Why?  Well yoga practice, even a practice that is mostly based in asana, works on the body at many different levels – physically, emotionally, mindfully – and some time of stillness, lying down quietly (or sitting as I know some people don’t like lying ), knowing that for the next 5-10 minutes nothing else matters and nothing can disturb you, allows the Central Nervous System to assimilate the practice before you pull yourself back to the real world and all its distractions.

If we try to live our yoga off our mats (and while I often don’t succeed, I do try!), how can we live our savasana off our mats – after all it’s not always appropriate to just lie down whenever the fancy takes us.

By being, not doing.

So much of modern life is about what we do, what labels we use to define ourselves, how we present ourselves to the outside world.

The list above is just a few of mine!

And there is nothing wrong with that.  We deserve respect for our achievements, praise for our good work, pleasure from our hobbies.

But there is so much more to us if we peel away the onion skin and look deeply.

Because ultimately all of these labels we attach to ourselves aren’t who we are, they aren’t what make us happy – they may contribute to our happiness, they may not but they are not the root cause.

Sometimes we need to allow ourselves to be.  Allow ourselves to wander without purpose, to sit quietly without the need to do anything, to skip the gym for a couple of days, to allow ourselves (as I did on Monday) to not take clients for just one day, to take a day off work (officially or not – I won’t tell anyone!).  To allow ourselves not to be always looking for the next thing and the next thing. And let this be the time we allow our bodies to assimilate the practices, the busyness of our days.

Be not do. Just for today.

And August, when everything is quiet and everyone’s on holiday, is the perfect time for that.