Sometimes you have to just quieten down the noise

Constant chatter, groups of people standing on the path trying to decide between this coffee shop and the one across the road, a high pitched natter of a teenage girl trying to impress her Nanna, parents oblivious to their baby playing with its food in a highchair, waiters and waitresses bustling back and forth, a long black coffee, my pad and pen, a gentle breeze and the realisation that this is where I feel most at home. Alone with my thoughts but surrounded by strangers. Perhaps I am a little odd after all.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy the company of others and chatting about all and sundry but when the mind feels like it is in overload and needs to escape itself; well, there is nothing quite like a walk around the river, taking photographs, followed by being anonymous in a crowd of people and lost in thought.

As I made my way through the gum trees, passing couples walking their dogs, canoeists rowing on the lake, a man reading the paper with his worldly possessions in a shopping trolley, I found myself wondering why I get so “wound up” over things I cannot change. I decided to ask myself the seemingly easy, but honestly quite difficult, question “What do I want?”

 Applying the KISS principle, I came up with some rather simple answers:

  ·        I want to be healthy

·        I want to appreciate daily

·        I want to write for a living

·        I want to laugh every day

·        I want to contribute to making someone’s day a little brighter

Blow me down with a feather when it hit me that I had not thought to write “I want to be out of debt” for this seems to be a constant source of angst for me. Why was that?

The next realisation as I looked over my list was no mention of a partner – my eyebrows raised in curiosity!

The biggest realisation of all! My life meets most of these wants now! Surely the rest are possible.

Is it all up to me and the choices I make? Is it as simple as to stop listening to the inner voices of self criticism and doubt? Or is more about the ability to stop caring so much about how others see us or would think of us? When did others become the judge and jury of my life? Oh headspin!

So just as I had to push myself to go that extra kilometre this morning, I have decided to push my inner self to discard the noise and open myself up to who I am and who I want to be; I like her!

“It’s a New Dawn – It’s a New Day – It’s a New Life – for me” Muse

FOOTNOTE: As I ambled the last kilometre or so home, I heard “plop” as a bird crapped on me from a great height … I have decided to take this a sign of Good Luck (Isn’t that what they say?)

A Universal Seal of Approval if you like; albeit a rather embarrassing one as I seemed to pass an unusually high number of people in the shortest distance! Ssshhheessshh! 

My Badge of Honour... Bird Shit... well, there you do go! Ha ha ha

(c) Dianne Traynor 8 December 2020