Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 30th June 2024
I’ve learned lots about mundane and heart sing over the past couple of weeks, from my own life and from the fabulous people who are part of Getting Curious about Gloriously Ordinary Lives. I’ve especially learned how it’s not as neat as I maybe first thought it was. Are things ever.
I moved house last weekend. Part one was the weekend before when I moved The Boy and half my stuff, then part two was last weekend when we moved the rest. Including dropping a piano off to my friend’s daughter who’s having it on long-term loan …oh and she lives right by the London Eye! Not sure what the photo test tells us.
What I’ve been learning is that mundane and heart sing, as well as being in the eye of the beholder (not many people share my satisfaction in a lovely pile of freshly ironed sheets apparently), are also context-specific – they change depending on our situation.
Heart sing moments from last weekend that might appear mundane:
• Looking at my wonderful posse of friends as they helped me clean my old house and maximise my chances of getting the deposit back
• Picking up the Luton van with my lovely big brother to start the process of moving The Boy and I into our respective new homes
• My new neighbour (who I’d not met) arriving home from work just as we arrived at the new house and offering to help empty the van
• Emptying the last box in the kitchen in the new house so I could finally get to my oven
• Charlie cat taking her first tentative walk around the garden after I traumatised her by putting her in the cat basket
I think the key here is that the essence of heart sing is in our deeper human connections, in our purpose, but they are only possible in the context of creating order and feeling safe in the rhythm of our day-to-day lives …and sometimes the relief and familiarity of those rhythms makes our heart sing.
I’ve watched The Boy create new rhythms in his new home and seen his team figure out their new rhythms with him. He’s decided that he’s coming for dinner on a Sunday evening and on our first Sunday, given that I’d spent the whole weekend cleaning the old house, we got a curry. This pleased him no end and as you can see from the chat clip, he clearly felt that had set a precedent for Sunday dinner being takeout. He was slightly miffed when I didn’t back down, but we’ve set our new routine.
The Girl has had some new rhythms imposed on her; I’ve moved house and I’m no longer 10 mins away but a 45-minute drive. The Boy has his own place, and she no longer sees him when she sees me. I’ve made a decision that she doesn’t see me every day anymore. Instead, we worked together to choose two days a week that she could come, and each visit is linked with a purpose. As I write this, I feel like the worst mum in the world – who imposes limits on when their kids can come and see them? But it feels like her rhythms are not working for her, that she doesn’t feel safe in her mundane and, as one of her team said to me this morning, we have to ‘hold her tight’. Too many things have changed in her life over the past few months, and she finds that incredibly stressful at the best of times. Part of holding her tight feels like we have to help her know and stick to her rhythms. When I was at my lowest, my Mum used to impose a daily walk on me. Every day I would tell her that I didn’t want to go, that I needed to stay in bed. Every day she quietly and gently insisted that I get up and we walk. Most days I did, and I always felt better. I didn’t have the strength to feel safe in my own rhythms and routines, she knew that and helped me by creating new ones with me.
I’m starting to feel that this might now be my new home as I develop some muscle memory about where everything is, and figure out my new rhythms, but it’s going to take a bit of time.
PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode five is here! I caught up with the brilliant Karen McCormick, from inCharge. Karen shares her really exciting plans to build an app designed to help people to get Gloriously Ordinary Lives!