Excalicauldron: Recalibration - Issue #8
Tl;dr I'm back to publishing here, armed with a healthier approach to the concept of time (and how there's never enough of it, so adrenalise or die), and a super-simple, ADD-friendly, mindfulness productivity system that supports the sanity and peace of myself as a human being, all while feeding my busy brain's insatiable lust for all things human doing. Comes with an invitation to continue joining me on this ride :)
Woman in a Ticking Time Box
Winnie the Pooh gives me all the feels when he says, "I'm a bear of very little brain." I happen to be a brain of very little time. Not objectively speaking, of course. We all have the same 24 hours, yada yada... Now try telling that to my neurodivergent brain that's identified the enemy and built up all sorts of stranger danger lines and retaliation stations against it. Time scarcity is real and it's the super saiyan source of my daily anxieties.
It's rather fitting that it's been 6 months to the day since I last wrote anything here. I put this newsletter on pause in favour of pop-up newsletters, starting with Gamarjoba and Chill, to coincide with my three-month trip to Georgia in Eurasia’s Caucasus region.
I'd reached a plateau with Excalicauldron in terms of what it got started as (getting off Facebook) and, post-COVID, I wanted the freedom of a new writing platform, undemanding for introspection, hungry for travel stories. As I mused in Issue 7 - And on the 7th Day, She Took Pause and Bid a Momentary Farewell, I anticipated returning to Excalicauldron only if and when it made sense to do so.
Spoiler alert: I never published more than a single issue of Gamarjoba and Chill (Issue 2’s been in Drafts on my Opera browser for the past six months, which tells you something about staying power...or refusing to kill your darlings). Instead, the Georgia trip became the Turkey trip became the most (internally) intense six months I've had in a time. But what happens inside has to be processed publicly, which is the way my inner mechanism ticks ✍️
Un Soupir Eternel
Since my roles as a startup founder, parent, partner, and friend demand much of my time, and it's in my ADD's nature to bite off more than I can chew, there's little space left on the calendar for naval-gazing. However important or necessary it may be. It doesn't have my Calendly link - everyone else seems to - and doesn't it know I live and die by the hours I spend on calls each day?
I'm at my best when I live with mindful intention, but it ain't easy to convince yourself - when there are 10,000 things happening all at once - that the best thing to do right here, right now is to be the eye in the storm. Tornadoes are, by nature, a force that sweeps up everything in their wake. Since I'm at a place in my life where I'm learning to let go of an overidentification with (being) the storm, I remain committed to finding ways to integrate this spirit of mindful intention with the demands of everyday life.
As such, this newsletter - which has never had much of a particular focus other than keeping in touch with friends outside of Facebook's algorithmic claws and sharing the occasional Deep Thinking Thought - is probably going to take a slightly different turn from now on. Less abstract, more personal.
A daunting idea, being as private as I am, sharing details of my life only in the privacy-settings cocoon of my Facebook profile. But the time is nigh to take another step away from the slowly-decaying social network, which recently announced a revamping of Facebook algorithms to offer a Tik Tok experience (i.e. content from random strangers on the internet), making content from friends and family second-tier 😏
Seeding Across the Stars
Today marking the Day Out of Time in the Mayan astrological calendar, it's the perfect moment to reflect on the mid-year outcomes of my 2021 theme, Listen. That, and the fact that right this second, newly arrived in a mysterious city in a strange country, I'm perched on my balcony overlooking the city park where many murders of crows are flocking home to the nest in the treetops for the night. What else is there to be done than to ponder your own flight paths and hone in even stronger on whatever beacon's guiding ya?
Now, you might not know this about me (because, like with any addiction you can't shake, I hide this compulsion oh so well), but I'm a productivity systems junkie. Now, I'm the first one to stomp my feet and rebel against all this toxic productivity we're so caught up in, but at the same time, my life is definitely going to change as soon as I discover the "perfect" system, so I gotta keep on trying 😅
However, with mindfulness and intentionality comes a re-evaluation of how certain things serve you (or not, as the case may be). The reality is that no amount of goal-setting or taskbox-checking - however smooth the planning and execution - is going to fix or run my life for me. This is done, moment to moment, by being present to what is, befriending angels and demons alike, and wu wei'ing my way through life.
As such, here's my super simplified system for being in my life without overly identifying with its many demands🧘♀️
Three Big Ladybirds
(As symbols of luck, love, and transformation)
I hate restrictions, but I need them to stay sane. The thought of having only three goals feels (very uncomfortably) counter to my nature of wanting and pursuing All the Things. My mind has the unfortunate habit of thinking up six impossible things before breakfast and becoming convinced just as quickly that every single one of them's worth pursuing that very day.
But the key to what can be is acceptance of what is, so in light of that, I've gone and crammed it all in, making my wants and needs pledge alliance to a choice of three clans. If something arrives at my doorstep demanding an audience, it's got to pass the Test of Three or it's sent to the seams of the world like a village crazy, to be sought out only in extraordinary times. Bridling my horses in aid of harmony in the town, letting the wild ones run free in the mountains.
In short (so much for sidestepping the abstract), anything that doesn't directly contribute to my:
Wellness
Family
Career
gets a pass from me. However sad it might be (it always is), no matter how I grieve stillborn ideas (I always do), this brain of very little time now answers to only three knocks at the door.
As befits any hero/ine's quest, the gift from the goddess was hard-won. This particular victory of the mind comes after a long and bloody boxing match, not only with myself but involved my newly beloved. Since the start of the year, I've been in a relationship that's challenged everything I believed about work and life.
There was no honeymoon phase in this new romance because his - let's call him M. - approach to things pushed my buttons right from the start. He wanted me to reorder the list and uncrown my career as the benevolent dictator that held the rest of my life under its thumb. I hated the thought (and him for requesting it), resisted as much as I could, and when that didn't help, I scratched and screamed so I could run back into that oh-so-familiar prison of my own making. Miraculously, we weathered the waves (he's one heck of a sailor, cos I'm one heck of a storm :)), we've come out intact on the other side, and our story is just beginning. More on that another time 💞
Wellness
Wellness has become the category I prioritise most. This is a marked difference from the start of the year when averaging 4-5 hours a night was "normal". (As mentioned in Issue 4 - There is actually a lot of room.) Didn't help that M. and I were on different continents at the time and my out-of-whack sleeping schedule tied in with his awake hours.
But this saw a radical shift in February when we met up in Georgia and I embarked on a radical overall work-less-quest. This also happened to be the cause of a LOT of conflict in our relationship, because it took eons for me to not only accept, but embrace that time spent sleeping, relaxing, and having fun isn't time wasted.
Spot the growth, cos I've since come to see it as time invested into my future, however much time's allocated to me in this life. The thing about wellness is that the future's now: The choices I make today that harm or heal me physically, emotionally, or mentally, show up as early as tomorrow ⌛
Family
Despite having spent most of my adult life in a few key relationships, I've never thought of myself as anything other than a single mother. Raising a 16-year-old has been fraught with one challenge after another, and my predominant feeling isn't one of relief but rather, shock and disbelief that we've made it this far. If you think life's hard, parenting's even harder.
It's an entirely new experience to find myself in a partnership where, for the first time in my life, I no longer feel like a single mother. Whereas before it's always, in the end, been A. and I against the world, suddenly it's a triangle. If you're anything like me, the word "triangle" conjures up thoughts of two against one, and it's been an interesting (short for painful) journey of welcoming a third into what's always been a two-person space.
But a recent lesson learned is that a triangle is the strongest shape in a family as much as it is in architecture, offering unparalleled support and a foundational base that holds the shape of what is being built.
So while this is a new - and much underdeveloped - focus area in my life, for one the cliché runs true: Watch this space - there seems to be a whole lot more on the horizon 🤯
Career
Dethroned but not forgotten, my career is no longer the be-all it once was. 2020 saw me embarking on a quest to work less, live more, and what an adventure this has been. I continue to grow in my understanding of the role work and busy-ness have played in my life, and I continue to make alternative choices that involve working smarter, not harder, honouring the axiom that less is more.
Taking this approach to running a startup has been the scariest thing I've ever done, because it takes every piece of restraint I have (and a whole lot more I've needed to develop on the fly) not to consume myself with every minute detail of the business.
As my roles have changed from professional to executive to company leader, I've needed to embrace saying yes to what's next for me, rather than bind myself to what's familiar yet outdated. This has not happened without a very big share of pain, because more work has always equaled an increased sense of safety and ok-ness.
In fact, it was decoupling work from my identity that enabled me to supplant my career from my raison d'etre, a theme I'll definitely be diving into over the weeks and months to come 🔮
The Unbearable Beauty of Immersion
If you've made it this far (as you know from being subscribed to my meanderings, brevity's never been my strong suit), I bid you adieu on this fine Mōnandæg (Anglo-Saxon for "the moon's day"). Till next we meet ❤️
For now, and in light of this ever-so-challenging time we live in with inequalities and the revoking of basic human freedoms running rife, please accept my magpie of words that hug, copied here for your feasting pleasure:
"So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance."
The Weighing by poet Jane Hirshfield
Nadja x