As is the case when I’ve been gone for so long, I feel like I need to explain myself to you all.  I feel I need to fill you all in on my life and my podcast.  Yes, I do have a podcast now.  I have a new website now, with my name on it.  Yes.  My actual name.  As my husband asked me when I pondered the concept of eventually moving Theythrowrocks there, “But you won’t be anonymous anymore!”  Hmmm.  Anonymity.  I thought it would give me the strength to be true.  To speak my mind.  To just say it as I see it, with judgement and all.  To bear myself.  To bear my true self.  While I “decided” that I was going to give it all up, then again, in true TTR fashion, I think about it.  Should I?  But don’t most of my readers know who I am already?
OK, so that’s something that I shuttle back and forth in my mind, but lately, my mind and even my life has felt like a mess.  Imagine a set of long tiny wires all tangled together and as you remove one knot, you create several others and after trying for as long as one does, you just give it all up.  You realize those wires will not ever be untangled and there’s nothing you can do about it.  No amount of patience was going to help you.  Funny thing with mid-life crisis or just life crisis is that it jams your brain and like the tangles of wires, you try and try and nothing works.  Except with your brain you don’t have a choice of trashing it and picking a new piece of neuronal networks.  I worked with the tangles and it became my new reality.  Simple questions became difficult to understand or respond to.  What are you doing with your life?  What do you want?  The answer was always, I have no flipping clue.  Seriously.  I wanted to give it all up and start over.  Then there’s the finances to consider.  I couldn’t think straight to try to salvage my reality and my job.  I looked for something new.  Maybe I want that.  No.  I want that.  In this mayhem, I cannot imagine how I started and kept consistent with a podcast.  Something that doesn’t pay me at all.  It can’t be a profession or a job.  I know you have to be famous to make it that way, but I’m a nobody right now.  I’m just TTR who’s still struggling to understand the reasons for my own anonymity.
I just returned from a fabulous vacation to Sandals Grande Antigua.  Sandals, a chain that my husband and I have chosen, has been fun.  Has been a week of beach and sand and great food.  This time around, I decided it better be more.  I didn’t know what I wanted from the beach but I looked up “beach meditation” online just in case.  So, first day out, we do our breakfast and I make it to the water.  I tell my husband that I am going to meditate and be one with the Universe and he laughs rolling his eyes because he knows his wife is crazy.  I don’t care.  I feel the sand under my feet.  I look at the water, the small waves, the tiny ripples.  I look at the light greenish blue color of the water, as it turns bluer towards the horizon.  I look out at the shore line of white sand and the waves crashing.  I kept doing this.  Day 1.  Day 2.  Day 3.  And sometime around Day 2, some things started making sense in my life.  The twisted network that refused to work started sending signals.  I felt a change within me.  A clarity, if you will.  Suddenly I was able to see my work and what I wanted from it and also from my podcast and my blogs.  Yes, blogs.  I plan to have 3.  This one which is going to continue to be a lifestyles blog.  A wandering spirit blog about my travels and the third one, the script of my Living A Life Through Books podcast.
And I think about my office and what will make it work.  Everything that felt like a crushing feeling within me, was slowly releasing away and I could see clearer.  There was still a question I had in my mind that I was not finding the answer to.  I couldn’t connect completely.  Day 4.  Better clarity.  I need to get a dot journal or whatever those things are called.  Or just a TTR style journal.  Day 5.  As I lay down to bed, the one question about my office hits me.  The why I do what I do.  It may seem crazy but you know how parents tell you not to touch a hot pot or just stuff like that and you learn it instinctively and it becomes a part of you.  What if someone asked you why you don’t touch the pot anymore and you just didn’t know why?  What if you didn’t remember that pot was hot, but you just didn’t touch it because of habit.  And when someone asks you, you say, that’s just how it is, but you stumble with the why of something as simple as that.  Well, similarly with my job there was something I did and there was a reason.  Except, I did not remember what that reason was.  I think I starred at the blue ocean and felt the waves for a long time looking for that one last answer and it was the night of day 5 that it came to me.  More than just the answer.  A conviction about why I did what I did.  I spent Day 6 floating in the ocean and thanking the Universe for giving me answers that I couldn’t find anywhere else.
Now, here I am, in a lounge at Miami International Airport, feeling a renewed sense of clarity.  OK.  I would be lying if I said I sorted every answer out.  As I sorted answers out, more questions came up and most of them have been sorted out.  The most important thing is the clog in my brain that has cleared up.  I can answer questions now.  My brain actually feels like it got a jump start.
Is is all mid-life crisis?  Is it all a mental block?  Who knows?  I know one thing for sure.  Everyone says they need the beach, that they need a vacation.  I feel my definition of a vacation has been to get away from it all for a while.  A panacea for a week and then back to the grind.  A bandaid that doesn’t cure that which is your reality.  That used to be vacation for me.  This one was a first.  I can look at the beach with a renewed focus and a new set of eyes.  The eyes that allow me to return.  The eyes that want me to return and live the life I set out to live.
Before I go, I will say that I am not clueless to the stresses that are going to hit me as I get home.  I know the brain will unfortunately get clogged again.  I also know that, for me, a week of beach meditation and gratitude for being able to experience it has gone a long, long, long way.
I wish you all the best in this coming New Year.
TTR