Carpe Diem ... Definitely :)

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times.

~Thomas Merton

My inspirational blog bud Jennifer has made herself a paper link chain of the things she has to do that she wants to accomplish. I think I might take up her lead, actually. It can be something I can hang from the roof of the playroom, along with the couple of masks I saw at The Warehouse the other day, blank theatrical masks waiting to be painted I have no idea what. I don't even know why they are attracting me, but they've stuck in my head ever since I saw them, and I can see them hanging from the roof, so why not?

I love what Jennifer talks about on her post, the chiselling away of the things that we don't really want or need to do to make way for the things that we really do. If we don't get down to the things that we really need to do (and they can be hidden, and we can automatically say no to them when we uncover them), then we will be wasting our lives and the world will be poorer for it, and we will always feel like there is something off kilter and we are sitting somewhere outside of our own bodies. We are. I have had a fair bit of experience of smallifying my life in the desert of CFS Land, when I basically had to pare back my life to almost nothing. Turns out there was a vast amount of stuff I learnt in there, about what I want to do with my life, about how a few well-selected items in a life can be more beautiful than a life that is chaotically overflowing in all directions (although oh, for chaotically overflowing days, full of riot and colour, too. They are also needed). But having your life pared back makes you realise how little you can live with, how noisy and squalid the world in the West has become with our oodles and oodles of stuff and diversions. We don't need three quarters of them.

I am baking myself a potato in the oven for breakfast. To be smothered with sour cream and coleslaw. It smells good. Today, if all goes to plan, I am going to make vegetable soup (yum yum) and go and catch a movie with Jane at The Sun, a cool little art deco movie house in Yarraville that has correspondingly lumpy art deco seats, but which is somehow more charming than the local Sunshine Village Megaplex (although put me in the Gold Class section and we might be onto something). But really, give me music, friends, creativity and nature. That'll do me, Jack.

Having my life stripped away has made me appreciate the smallest of things, the less is more ethos. Yet looking around me, to say that I have little is laughable. I am blessed beyond belief. Absolutely totally blessed.

One thing I do want to add to my own paper link chain is to join an organisation to help people who are ill. I know what it's like to suffer through your days. I'd like to give something back, take the focus off me me me me me and help someone else out in the process :)