About a month ago while I was on my way home from work, it occurred to me that I did not feel the usual relief as I got into the car to head home, instead I felt very unsettled. It had been a very busy day, but the ride home is often a calming experience for me as usually I’d read a book, listen to music or just stare out of the window playing “Guess their story” with the faces of strangers in the cars next to me. That day however, none of that gave me the calm I was hoping to feel. I felt very scattered, my thoughts were all over the place, and my mind refused to settle on any 1 thing.
After a while, I realized there were so many different thoughts struggling for my attention at the same time, and I was trying to attend to them all, at the same time!
First was work – what had happened in my day, what could I have done differently and what may have yielded better results?
Next was the kids – was there something I was supposed to have gotten them that I had forgotten?
What was even for dinner that day, would hubby like it or would he prefer something else?
It had been a while since I heard from one of my friends, what was up with her? Was she okay?
I had not bought any new books in a while, blog post nko?
My head started to ache, not because the thoughts were too much for me to deal with, but because something at the back of my head was screaming at me saying, “You have this same thoughts almost every day, WHAT IS NEW???
What Is New???!!!
It hit me then, nothing was new 😮.
I had been going round in the same thought cycles for a while and my mind was craving something different, a new experience, a new knowledge, a new action, a new feeling. But what could this new feeling be? My thoughts were still running after each other at this point, but something was at least becoming clearer.
I needed a new experience, one that would help me regain my calm and feel less frantic, one that would connect me back to ME, and not focus only on all that was happening around me. An experience that would have me come out from it, feeling refreshed and eager again.
Tall order, but the answer came almost immediately, I needed silence, complete silence!
My first interpretation of this was that I needed to get home quickly, lock myself inside my room for a while and just calm down, as I often do after a really tough day, but when I got home and into my room I knew this wasn’t the new experience I was looking for. Between the girls running into my room and the thought of hubby getting home soon, I could only get like 15 minutes of silence if I was lucky.
The more I thought about Silence, the more I pictured myself sitting quietly somewhere out in nature, just watching all the inartificial life happen around me, lost inside all of that realness but feeling very alive. I wanted silence but not stillness, I wanted beauty but not decor, I wanted sound but not speech, I wanted cool breeze but not cold air.
Now where to find all this without having to travel and still be all by myself. I picked up my phone to call my friend, a concierge who knew a lot about everything in Lagos, and she gave me the perfect venue.
Fast forward to about a week later, I found myself somewhere in the heart of Lagos with everything I had hoped for, plus a chapel in the case that I wanted to pray, in addition to the experience of being out in nature. Unbelievable!
I started by walking around the beautiful grounds just to calm my mind a bit, then I sat down for a really long while, literally looking at the trees, flowers, birds and listening to the wind blow. It was so…so quiet, I could not imagine I was still in Lagos. It felt surreal.
But something was happening to me as I sat there, I started to reminisce on times in my life when I had felt or come close to the feeling I was currently having. It was like my mind opened up, and I could see pictures in detail from my child hood and even my youth. I could hear my own voice as a child, the things that made me so happy and the things that made me cry. As I pictured these distant memories, I started to cry, I stood up again at that point and walked around the grounds some more.
In between breaths, I gave thanks, over and over again, for everything, everything single thing, the good, the not so good, the crazy, the scary and the embarrassing, even the miracles, yes miracles…all the experiences that took me to that very point, it was like I re-lived them in fast forward just walking those grounds till the pictures were done and I was back at the spot where I had been sitting, but now barefoot.
I looked at the time, I had spent 6 hours already in this place without speaking to a single individual. I rushed to the chapel to wrap up my thoughts and say a few prayers before it got dark. I found there was really not much left to say in there. Then the thought came to me…”Create the future”
Fortunately my phone is a notebook which meant I could make notes, because I had carried nothing with me to the venue except myself and my phone which had been on silent mode all through my time there.
I wrote one line – Go inside & Create!
Upon further reflection I came to understand the words better.
Go = Move, Take action
Inside = Your mind, Your thoughts
& = Pause, Think
Create = Do something new!
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