Live

What do you wish you could do more every day?

The outfit’s all wrong in that image but the attitude isn’t. Apparently I came into this world to be boring, but that’s unsurprising when you’re surrounded by concrete and housing rather than scenery and nature. It takes a number of hours to fully escape suburbia in a car. We didn’t have a car.

Suburbia is also a state of mind, of complacency in some ways. Mainly because once you leave the poorer areas and move to the middle class ones, life becomes about paying even higher bills and the struggle can be similar.

It’s odd, live in a poor area and there’s often more awareness of community, more willingness to offer your last penny or carrot. Or it was when I was young.

Yes they struggle a lot more, for real reasons. Yet in suburbia it seemed to me that the struggle lay in reaching higher than you needed to.

If I could advise young people today I would say, think carefully about the decisions you make, get a nice house, and stay put unless you have to move. That way you’ll pay off your mortgage sooner rather than getting higher and higher mortgages. In owning your house you can start saving. Let the house increase in value, and when the time is right get the house you really want. You may even own it outright.

In the West we’re taught to strive and reach. There is no need. It affects you making you worry about money, perhaps status, that means you’re in a state of stress not happiness. That is ridiculous. Happiness is a thing but you must seek to create it.

Two steps are less expensive.

Not living

Our lives have been spent paying off bills. We had to move so that Tony could get work, had we stayed in our lovely little house in Wiltshire where the cats could go out safely, we would have owned it 15 years ago.

That would have meant more holidays. Friends of mine have a tiny house that they’ve made really lovely, and they’re content with what they have. They’re incredibly wise.

However, the real crux of me drifting was what I call that suburban mindset. No dreaming. No reaching for the stars. No getting above yourself. Don’t even think “what if…?”

It took me a long time to realise the subtlety of what my background instilled in me. It was no one’s fault. My ancestors were only doing what they’d been taught. Yet my dad went to sea at 16, but he was a boy. Girls were held close in my day.

Now I’m reaching. Writing my play. Getting it ready for a competition, and why not? It’s just fun. I think maybe I’ve finally conquered the suburban mindset, or the family one, or both.

You always have to respect your own experience, whilst acknowledging that other people escaped both mindsets, and ask why you didn’t.

In my case the people around me drained my energy, I struggled just to want to get up in the morning, but I did. I got up, I worked, I rarely had a day off. In 30 years of severe acute anxiety one GP insisted that I have two months off, and I went back to work. It didn’t leave me time to dream, or the energy to be fully alive.

I respect my past. I respect me. But it’s never too late to be fully alive.

Give it a try – sooner rather than later.

Love, light, and laughter.

Deb xx

P.S. Don’t have bucket list have a wish list and keep adding to it. Don’t live because you’re going to die one day, live because you want to be fully, beautifully, thrillingly, alive. Right now! 💖