So I have recently been fortunate enough to spend a few days in Ibiza. As I only went for 4 days, I gave myself permission (in fact it turned out to be instruction!) to do nothing taxing.
I bought an easy-read novel at the airport (a bit more of that later) and made a pact with myself to swim in the sea every day (my favourite thing) and leave my computer and work brain at home.
So far so good….. and relax.
I discovered fairly quickly that my body couldn’t have been happier, slowly wandering to the beach, sea swim, delicious food, deep sleep. My body embraced the ‘nothing too taxing' directive with no resistance at all. But my mind, well, it couldn’t have been more uncomfortable with what was going on.
I spent the first 2 days regularly calling myself out as I recognised the constant need for planning, the twitchiness for a list of things to tick off (even nice things), a relentless call from my mind to ‘think’ about something useful/helpful/expansive or meaningful. Doing nothing was hard work.
WOW it was so eye-opening to recognise how much longer it took for my head to slow down. Then the morning of day 3 I woke up and knew something had changed. I felt it in my body, I felt it in my mood, I just knew.
In Ibiza there is a much thinner veil between the inside and outside worlds. Initially I meant this as an acknowledgement that the warm, dry air removes the need for doors and windows, but I now realise this is analogous to my own inner and outer worlds. For as I sat there within the sights and sounds of the living world, my edges blurred too.
The chorus of a million different birds (I wish my phone wasn’t so old as the merlin bird ID app would have been going crazy), the braying of the local donkey, the wild winds through the pine trees, the ants marching across the dewy balcony tiles, the horizon filled with ocean, the dark green tree-covered hill tops unchanged for centuries. The frenetic hustle and bustle as the sun began to rise and then a tangible settling as everything got to begin the day in earnest.
And here is the thing. Life is noisy and busy, it is overt and colourful, it is authentic and instinctive and it is very chatty. In amongst all that, it also needs to have chunks that are automatic, ritualistic and restful.
And I realised that stillness is not the same as quietness. Stillness is that beautiful sense of peace that descends when everything feels ‘as it should be’. 2 full days of fighting against my true interconnected natural human-ness but at last I got to abide for a brief time in my rightful place. And that place is where I am represented by both my significance and insignificance. The place where all the stuff I do seems both senseless and sensical. Instead of rushing towards something as life seems to prescribe right now, I just chose for a couple of days to live a little closer to wholeness.
And as is often the case when I read anything, the easy-read novel provided a quote that aligned with exactly what I was experiencing. “We think time travels forward, marches on in a straight line, and so we hurry alongside it to keep up. Hurry, hurry, mustn’t fall behind. But it doesn’t, time just swirls around us.”
I know these brief moments of stillness change me, delight me, comfort me, ground me. I also know that when I drink my daily cuppa with any level of awareness, that quality is what the teas are here to provide. They are the glimmers at this odd time in human history of what happens when we sit in a more balanced, peaceful space.