Dear Diary; Coming of Age

A text from my landlady popped into my inbox… 

‘I’m sorry for the noise, it’s my daughters 21st, I’ll make sure the music isn’t on too late…”I don’t mind at all’, I replied, ‘she can be as loud and as late as she wants, it’s her 21st’! 

If we are to live easeful lives, it’s important to know that many many things will happen on the apparent outside that could easily threaten our equilibrium…

Other humans for example!… Living their lives, sometimes directly directing things at us, sometimes vicariously…

As in having a party above us, or making merry in the hotel room beside us before an important race or big meeting the next day… Or being allocated a training room to work in with clients for four days, with an exceptionally noisy building site making an exceptional amount of noice right outside…

I have experienced all of the above…

I’ve run races – really well too – on only a couple of hours sleep, due to travel trouble…

Once upon a time, we (the team) turned up in Norway at midnight (because of plane delays) for an international race due to start at 9am the next morning… We were served dinner on arriving – which didn’t finish until 2am – eating something and being polite to our hosts had seemed more important than sleeping…!

Another time, we flew to an international in Barbados sitting for seven hours in the smoking section of the plane – I am dating myself! This was in the 80’s.

Our agent had been held up en route, which meant the whole British team were checked in too late to be allocated the non smoking part of the plane… But we were all up ‘bright eyed and busy tailed’ the very next morning competing in 28 degrees heat – it was December too – with humidity through the roof, and our lungs full of smoke…

Another time, I had been working in a company in Philadelphia with my colleague; we were due to land at Gatwick at 8am… This would give us a day to prepare the training day, for the day after that with the London part of the company…

I was in a half sleep and ‘came to’ at 10am to find we were still in the air…

There was too much fog to land!

We circled Gatwick all morning, and then flew to Paris to re fuel the plane and us… At 6pm three jumbos all trying to land at Gatwick were re directed to Manchester, where they fed and housed us all for the night!

We got to our beds at midnight and at 4am we were on the platform to catch a train to London, where we did as much preparation as we could for the day ahead….

Some months later I was working individually with one of the people who had been on the training day and I told her the ‘behind the scenes’ story…‘Wow’, she said ‘I would never ever have known that the two of you were jet lagged and had hardly slept…’

We had pulled it off…!

Relaxation and acceptance of ‘what is’ – not fighting or railing about the external circumstances, and knowing that the only way to shape the future is to be present and relaxed in the now.

I learned very young to relax, to be fully present with what is going on…I had read that it was helpful to give whatever the cause of disturbance was, permission to be there and to stay at ease within…

To stay present.

To not give anything outside us permission to wobble our inner state of ease and calm.

As we become more and more able to stay present and to be still within, we witness within ourselves a ‘coming of age’, a spiritual maturity…

Silence within, amidst the ‘noise and haste’…

The party above me was still in full swing at 3am this morning…

I mostly slept through it …

But every so every so often I was aware of music, conversation, fun and laughter….

The celebration of a coming of age…!