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Mindfulness - a perspective after ten years of practice

As I approach ten years of doing my best to live mindfully, I thought it might be useful for people thinking of dipping a toe in the 'mindfulness' water to hear a perspective from someone who's been doing it for a while. I'm no paragon of mindfulness - but I have at least plugged away for long enough to have had sufficient successes to know that it's worth persisting. Why I began At the time (about 10 years ago), I'd managed to get an assignment remotely working exclusively with a remote team. It was a great job, and a wonderful team to work with. However, this meant I got zero personal contact other than a very occasional trip to visit them. After a while I began to realise that this wasn't doing anything good for my state of mind: I found myself getting more and more stressed, for no obvious reason. I guess that, during the last couple of years of the Covid Pandemic, self-isolation and working at home, problems like this have become rather normal - so perh...

A grand day out: tandem ride to Beaulieu and Eling

This was a tour of many parts: a circuit around the beautiful South-Eastern quadrant of the New Forest, a brief and ill-advised visit to the hellhole that even Beaulieu can become when busy, and ending with the bizarre and possibly self-contradictory nature of Eling.

 

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Mindfulness - a perspective after ten years of practice

As I approach ten years of doing my best to live mindfully, I thought it might be useful for people thinking of dipping a toe in the 'mindfulness' water to hear a perspective from someone who's been doing it for a while. I'm no paragon of mindfulness - but I have at least plugged away for long enough to have had sufficient successes to know that it's worth persisting. Why I began At the time (about 10 years ago), I'd managed to get an assignment remotely working exclusively with a remote team. It was a great job, and a wonderful team to work with. However, this meant I got zero personal contact other than a very occasional trip to visit them. After a while I began to realise that this wasn't doing anything good for my state of mind: I found myself getting more and more stressed, for no obvious reason. I guess that, during the last couple of years of the Covid Pandemic, self-isolation and working at home, problems like this have become rather normal - so perh...

Alliums: a watercolour experiment with sea salt

It's allium time in the garden I rather love alliums: the way the flower head seems to 'explode' from the top of the long, elegant stem. Here's a beauty, growing in our back garden Sea salt to the rescue When it comes to painting them, at my rather rudimentary stage of learning with watercolour, they present a bit of a puzzle: a dark spherical 'starburst', dotted with brightly coloured seed-heads and flowers. So I thought I'd try out using some sea salt, to get the pattern of light and dark on the individual flowers. I found some Cornish sea salt in our store cupboard... Sea salt The painting