A Simple Pick-Me-Up

Hi everyone! If you’re new this week, it’s Catherine writing to you (author of The 10 Minute Fix) with some weekend inspiration…

Yesterday, wow, I was tired. Tired. It was Saturday in Australia, we’re in what feels like Week Seven Thousand of lockdown, I’d been working frantically on a secret surprise—announced soon!—AND all the things needed doing. Laundry. Floors. The kitchen windows. Our bedroom.

There were dust bunnies, actual dirt, piles of shoes everywhere…gahhhh!

I’m a tidy person, but I hate cleaning. You??

Some people love cleaning and I made myself a coffee and thought about why. Then I remembered the famous Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn. He wrote about washing dishes as meditation (prayer).

How often have you been sucked away into the future? For me, that’s pretty much every second of every day. Ouch!

I needed to “wash the dishes to wash the dishes” and notice what I have.

I started on my bedroom dresser. See it sparkling above?

• I dusted my wedding photo and let my heart swell. My handsome naval officer husband! The sunny autumn day. The mother of pearl flowers in my hair from my own mother’s wedding bouquet, saved from 1952. Being so young and so happy.

• I wiped off the “puppy” my then 7 year old son, EJ, sculpted in art class. He came home and gave it to me, wrapped in tissue, and said, “It’s pretty good, but I forgot that dogs have noses.”

• I sorted and cleaned my pretty earrings. How lucky am I have to have all these “jewels”? If I could tell 7 year old Catherine that one day she’d have trays of pretty earrings, the little-girl me would have been SO excited.

I cleaned with love.

It made all the difference.

This morning I woke up to sunlight through the timber blinds, clean sheets, a beautifully organised dresser, scrubbed floors, a pristine bathroom.

In cleaning up, I gave myself a gift. I don’t know about you, but I think I learned the secret of why some people enjoy cleaning. It feels so good to love what we have, to notice it, to “wash the dishes” with intention and care.

Just a little something to think about as you enjoy your beautiful weekend. Let’s be here today, and not get “sucked away into the future.”

Love, Catherine x

PS.

• Working on my fitness a little, and these are the best biker shorts on Amazon…you guys! I love these (so many colours), and I love this workout bra, too. I always size up a lot because I find they run small. So good for the price.

• Oh, lockdown! As our worlds get a little smaller—we’re down to a 5KM radius of travel now—I’m thinking about all of you here. I hope you’re still able to work. Our family is okay (we can work from home), but many aren’t and I hope you’re able to find the resources you need during these tough times.

• A photo from the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday…I appreciated the beautiful photography and thought all the overseas readers might be interested in seeing it.

Hello, We're in Lockdown...

Last week, I saw this beautiful photo of a mountaintop. I can’t tell you the exact source, but it was posted by Earthfocus. I wanted you all to see it, too.

The world continues to surprise us, and there’s so much beauty to enjoy if we look for it. Australian winter has been full of sunny, crisp days with camellias blooming, and cold, starry nights. Sydneysiders have mostly been healthy, but now we’re heading into full lockdown so we’ll all be expected to stay at home for two weeks and wait for Covid to subside.

It’s a time to turn inward.

Work on our projects.

Be kind to the people we’ve been given to love, whether that’s cranky forced-to-be-home teens or family via zoom, co-workers on Teams meetings or the grocery and Amazon delivery guy.

I’m trying to summon up a mindset of appreciating this lockdown: we’re healthy here, we have a freezer that’s full, books and board games and work we can do remotely. But still—lockdown always makes me want to plan a dinner party, do a day trip, go shopping for a dress—the opposite of what we’ll have to do.

If you’re freewheeling into summer in the other hemisphere, enjoy your barbecues and gatherings. If you’re living in our lucky country Down Under, I hope you and yours are healthy and well.

And if you’re in my hometown of Sydney, I’m wishing you a peaceful time in the next two weeks. I hope you get a lot of little jobs accomplished: wipe out the fridge, clean up your desk, soak the school shirts in nappy san, crack open the Monopoly or Scrabble. I hope you and yours are okay.

We face what we have to face, and even lockdown can be useful.

Love Catherine x

PS.

• Something to learn: books I’ve been planning to buy are Flavour, a cookbook by Ottolenghi (love the cover) and Atomic Habits by James Clear. I borrowed Atomic Habits from my library but I need my own copy as a reminder.

• Something fun: new socks. When was the last time you went through your own sock drawer and made sure you had enough new socks? I regularly do this for everyone else I live with but my own socks were woeful. So I did a full ‘range of socks’ shop for me. Feels so good to replace them all at one time! Look how pretty.