Lacking Inspiration? Maybe you're looking in the wrong place.

Friday 20 April 2012

I’m sure the seasoned Bloggers are far more organized than I am regarding the subject of their new Posts.

It’s my younger son’s fault…(oh yeah…the best thing about having kids is you can blame them for just about anything…just like my Dad always blamed our poor Cocker Spaniel for any stray burps or farts at the dinner table!)  Do I shock you?  I thought that happened in every normal household.

Anyway my younger son said if I were really going to start a Blog I had to be disciplined about it and write something every day.  And that’s precisely why I can blame him - I never really know what I’m going to write about until I sit at the laptop and reach for the jar labelled Inspiration.

‘Yikes!’ I said. ‘Things worth putting on a Blog only happen to me about once a month.’ ‘Well’ he replied in his laconic way ‘write about when things happened once a day – they DID, didn’t they?’

Had he not said that I doubt I’d have had the confidence to even THINK about starting a Blog…but I took his advice and the memories wheeled into consciousness like a flock of galahs at dawn…and a Blog was born.

And then an interesting phenomenon occurred - as so often happens after a momentous occasion like a Blog-birth (say that quickly 20 times!)

Through my new obsession with Social Media – particularly Twitter, I found I was Following men and women of all ages who were writing engaging, erudite Blog posts on the current scene – political, fiscal & societal et al.  And suddenly, there was a whole new area of inspiration in front of me.

You see, I’m not a scholar, academic, scientist, intellectual, archaeologist, lawyer or anthropologist…(although I’d love to have been any one of those things)…but one thing I AM is a ‘Picker-Upper of inspiration. Great Bloggers like Joan, Jane, Greg, Jack tra la have placed the facts of their expertise firmly under my nose so I can actually UNDERSTAND what is going on in the world.  And then I rely on inspiration to do the rest. See? Easy…I end up not actually doing ANYTHING.

So, back I go to my starting point of what to write about and my lack of organization.

 I must confess that because my elder son is getting married tomorrow down at Red Hill (which - for readers who’ve made the most unwise decision not to live in Melbourne Australia - is about an hour and a half away from the CBD) and because I’m the acting Celebrant and am picking up my elder daughter from the airport very late tonight and driving down there…I do not feel all that organized about this Post.

I was going to write about Love…but I really want that to be the Post for the day of the Wedding.

And then I thought again of all the wonderful friends I’ve made through social networking; I thought of all the support and encouragement I’ve received since starting the Blog… and those memory-galahs wheeled in again.

That’s it!

Gratitude. I’ll talk about Gratitude…because that’s one thing I DO know something about. It sparks inspiration! And how do I know this?  I know, because Aunty Ruby told me.

I bet you have an Aunty Ruby in your family.  She may not be called Ruby but you’ll know the one I mean.  She’s the one who seems to have been born in an era exclusive to herself. She has good advice for everybody except it’s about 20 years out of date…a little bit like Miss Havisham.

Our dear old Aunty Ruby had perfect reason to be like that. Born in the late 1800s she lost her fiancée in the First World War and never really recovered. For all her quaintness though, she was…well, as a child the only word I could think of was…mysterious.  She would pick up an injured bird or an animal that seemed to be beyond any hope of restoration and have them running or flying around in no time…sometimes instantly. She did the same for us. Not once did she let us believe for a minute that we could be sick or tired or panicked, have lost something, be feeling downhearted…or lacking inspiration!

And it worked! Up we’d get; fit, active, calm, uplifted and finding missing articles by simply find ourselves staring at them.

I was fascinated by her and intrigued to know how she did it.

Her answer on my questioning was always the same.

‘It’s Gratitude dear!

‘Express Gratitude for that which you have and you make room for what’s missing - be it health, money, keys or happiness. It’s not that it’s missing…you just can’t see it because you’re looking in the wrong places.’

I started practising that as much as I could even as a little tacker; and on the very first day, I made one of the most important discoveries of my life. 

She was right! 
















4 comments:

  1. I was lucky enough to have an Aunt Ruby too Nancy, only it was my grandmother Irene born 1898. On a 2000 acre farm in the Riverina she had six children, one of whom had polio that required regular treatment in Melbourne, and she taught them all at home by correspondence in between milking the cow, making butter, doing her washing in a copper, creating a wonderful flower and vegetable garden, establishing the first baby health clinic in the district, attending CWA meetings, and making all the meals for the family, including six or seven extra workers at shearing time. "Be grateful for what you have", she would tell us, "and you'll never feel hardly done by." A simple philosophy that turns what we have into enough - and more!

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  2. What a wonderful story Marion. No doubt about the women of that era - they were miracle workers. What an extraordinary daily effort...but she sure was right about gratitude!

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  3. A beautiful post - and so true. Needing a bit more gratitude in my day xx

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  4. Well Rachel, you're certainly not on your own...we all need a bit more. But the good thing is that it's the realisation of that fact that is important. Thank you for reading the post and your lovely words.

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