A new week, fully into the new month and a new rhythm is giving me a new sense of “normalcy”. 

Strangely, this week, I even cancelled going on a trip to the UK next month because I feel so happy to just be in a flow. M was shocked, but we also decided to take advantage of this feeling, especially as we also have guests coming throughout next month, making it busier than initially expected. So, not traveling will lessen the load of thought and logistics.

In fact, that is the real matter at hand. Not having to consider the logistics involved in traveling for a couple of months feels like a weight has been lifted. It sounds “dramatic” when I say it, yet energetically, it feels quite real–and nice. 

Even though I say we are in a rhythm, we are not yet in a routine, which is more my wont than realistic.

Usually, I don’t go anywhere on a Monday and set the pace for the upcoming week. Since my week is usually scheduled by Saturday night, I’ve also started keeping off my phone and social media as much as I can on a Sunday. The stats for this past Sunday show only 57m on social media apps compared to today’s total at only midday as 1hr41m. To be fair, most of my time is spent on WhatsApp over the other platforms, but still, I am really trying to create the habit of once a week being as phone-free as possible. WHY? 

Well, it’s just for myself, really. I have felt myself pulled more and more away from embracing the mind-numbing scrolling or even mindless game-playing. I still try to do my DuoLingo or I do use Gemini a lot to ask random questions like, What should I wear to an evening out in town today? Yep, that’s the level of my interest sometimes!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not a luddite by any means. I love new gadgets, like the Mirumi, or new phones, or even new programs. It’s just that I don’t feel like I need to be bombarded by advertising so much. It’s really hard to escape, if you think about it. My inbox is filled daily by 20+ messages of advertising; that’s just on email. Much of my feeds are interspersed with adverts for this or that. I understand why it’s there and that it must be effective, but these days I am very aware that I already have enough. I have more than enough. So, I really truly don’t need to consider more or to be sold for more.

As a clothes-horse, fashion-lover, and outfit-collector, this is particularly hard to overcome. I think it was the last bastion of temptation to address. However, when a fight almost a year ago now resulted in a challenge to not buy any clothes for three months, I also took a step back to consider my desire to buy more clothes. Part of it was truly for the love of new clothes, being up on the trends. I mean, I get lots of compliments on my fashion sense and outfits, so maintaining that status and standard is important to me. I famously was known for not having to repeat an outfit in a 16-week term so that my students never saw me in the same outfit twice. I would repeat them the following term or even rejig them as new outfits, but that was how much I considered my closet. I’m sure Nancy Reagan would have been proud.

Yet, these days, I don’t go out that much. I have plenty of outfits that can be rotated that most would not remember seeing me in it before, or would not particularly care even if they had. Our lives are just more subdued. So, I don’t need as much as I have in my closets.

Admittedly, this is hard to accept. 

Still, it is true. There is indeed a calming and refreshing quality to cleansing a space, to resetting a schedule, to moving to a repeated rhythm for a period of time. So, that is what we are doing. 

Now, my closets are calling to be cleaned… 😅🤪

~T 🔥🐉♋️