Tuesday, 21 August 2018

Not a chance.

There are a lot of milestones in life.

There is the first day at school, the 16th birthday, then 18th birthday. And then 25th birthday. A quarter of a century.

I'm turning 25 in a few weeks' time (whoop! whoop!)

I had a lot of ideas as to what I would achieve by the time I turned 25. Many of my dreams came true. Some things exceeded my most extravagant. But many thins I thought I would have been or would have achieved by the time I was 25 simply never came about. 

Be married and mother my first child

I thought I would be married and have my first child by the age of 25 but neither of those is on the cards at the moment. Part of me is disappointed, but a much bigger part of me is very thankful that I haven't got married to any of the men I dated in the past. Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking. Marriage is a huge decision and you need to find a person who will love you unconditionally, who will stand beside you regardless of the ups and down of life. But once you find this special person, you will want to commit every minute of the rest of your life to serve him, to support him, to love him.

Have an MA

Getting a Masters degree was another thing I thought I would have done before I turned 25. I suppose this is a legacy of my Polish mentality. In Poland people seem to do an integrated degree programmes with an MA following directly after the completion of a BA. After starting studying here in the UK, I've actually completely abandoned the idea of doing an MA. I had enough of studying, spending our reading journals and writing essays. It didn't seem necessary for the work I wanted to do either. But I've changed my mind and I'm actually almost half way through doing my MA at the moment. I did it to pursue my interest, to become a better practitioner and to keep myself mentally challenged. I should finish the programme before I turn 26, so all is well.

Have an established exercise routine

and actually sticking to it. Do I exercise? Yes. Is it a routine that I follow without an issue? Nope. Definitely not. My flat is on the second floor now, so I get a good amount of exercise from just running up and down. This is made worse by my forgetfulness, but at least I don't really need a gym. The truth is that having an exercise schedule sucks all the fun out of doing those exercises. I much rather go as and when I actually feel like it, especially with a job that is really physically demanding (I must do at least 100 squats a day!).

Learn a third language.

I had a fair go at Dutch years ago, but I never managed to fully commit myself to learning another language. I tried Danish for a while and then thought that an Easter European language would be better, so I looked into Slovak. Learning a language takes time and I have less and less of it as I get older. It is also increasingly frustrating to experience that helplessness of early stages of language acquisition when I am already fluent in another language. I suppose it was natural as a child to be struggling with putting sentences together, but now it is simply infuriating. Maybe I'll have another go when I finish my Masters', there is only so much that you can do at once.

Be a great hostess

What I mean by being a great hostess is throwing dinner parties, hosting board game evenings, puppy meets ups and so on. I occasionally have a few people over, but I'm not a natural and it takes so much of my physical, mental and emotional energy to organise a small get together. I had a vision of myself as a sort of domestic goddess with piles of sandwiches, cakes and fresh flowers always on the table. I am definitely overflowing with cake most of the time, but parties are definitely not my thing. A cup of tea, a book or a good movie? Definitely. I am not going to be fabulous at entertaining people at home any time soon. But that's ok. I'm busy enough trying to entertain myself.

~~~

All the above things won't materialise by the time I turn 25. Not a chance. But I'm not bitter about it, because I came to realise that life needs to proceed at its own pace. I cannot speed things up, I cannot rewind to the past to make different choices. Instead, I tak each day as it comes. Life is good. Life is comfortable and most definitely interesting.

Now I'm off to enjoy the last couple of weeks of my summer holiday. It will be quiet here until September. But do not fear, I'm going to be back!

Sunday, 19 August 2018

Sunday Special: Jesus, I trust in You.

I went to adoration the other day and what really caught my eye was the Divine Mercy painting hung in a side chapel to the right of the altar. A painting just like this one, with an inscription at the feet of Jesus:

22712524_1477742758941943_978202221347441013_o

Jesus, I trust in You.

I've repeated these words in that hour of prayer over and over again. Do I trust? Do I trust fully that Jesus will hold my hand and walk me through the time of darkness? Do I trust His word that He came not to condemn but to save? Do I trust that He is the giver of life and that only by following the gentle whispers of His divine wisdom I can be truly happy and fulfilled?

I fervently prayed Jesus, I trust in You and with each repetition of these few words my soul got still. As if a storm have passed and a great silence ensued.

As it turned out, I completely misinterpreted the meaning of these words for my life at that moment in time. I thought trusting Him meant throwing life as I knew it behind me. In fact, it meant trusting despite the appearance of lack of movement and change. However, Jesus yet again surprising me with His generosity and mysterious ways of working through all the difficult and tangled situations. But what was important was that I took an enormous leap of faith, submitting totally to His will. Trusting Him completely to lift me up from the valley of death.

God acts without the constraints of time or space, so trust and patience is essential. He takes his times when working in my life. And the only way to respond to this is to trust. Always and entirely, sometimes against human advice, sometimes against all logic. Trust.
Then you will know that I am the Lord;

those who wait for me shall not be put to shame. (Isaiah 49:23)

Tuesday, 14 August 2018

The home improvement nightmare.

I used to think that home improvement was fun.

When I was little, I would go to diy stores with my parents and walk down the aisles with paint samples, tiles and curtains and think that it would be so much fun to decorate my own place.

Well, it isn't.

The actual process of painting, moving furniture and hanging curtain rails might not be that bad, but the process of choosing the items that will actually fit together and make the interior pleasing to the eye is really difficult.

I absolutely hate making decisions, especially those long-term ones. I'm not going to redecorate the flat for the next seven years probably, so in the past few week I went through hell trying to pick all those bits and pieces. What can I say, in order to have you dream home, you need to live through the nightmare of making important and expensive decisions.

Starting with paint, I wanted white walls and, guess what, there were about 20 different shades of white in the diy store. I'm not even joking. I've always thought that white was white, but apprently that isn't the case. Thankfully there is a colour called pure brilliant white that acts as a standard white colour, so that sorted the painting problem. Keeping it simple was an absolute priority.

All the lovely shades of white...
At that point I thought I was done with until I came up with the idea of having an accent wall in the kitchen. Luscious Lime or Kiwi Green? Or maybe I should go for blues, rather than greens? Do I want everything painted in that colour, or do I want some tiles on one of the walls? Decisions, decisions.

Didn't go with any of those in the end

That wasn't the end of kitchen-related decisions, because to revamp that space on a budget I've decided to paint the cupboard doors and change the handles. It was much cheaper than having a brand new fitted kitchen, but it required multiple decisions. And hours of inhaling probably toxic cupboard paint fumes.



Because all the flooring in the flat was absolutely hideous, I had to pick the carpets for the bedrooms as well. I highly dislike beige, brown and similar colours and it narrowed things down massively, but still there were tens of grey carpet samples in the store. Given that I finally decided that I wanted carpets with wool and had a restricted budget, we quickly went down to only couple of carpets, but the entire process took two trips to the store (have you ever been to one? They are sad places) and a good few hours.

The floor saga continued when I went to choose the wood flooring. Chevron or straight pattern? Which one of tens of wood colours? How thick should the planks be? And, more importantly, how wide?

My first reaction? Oh my...

And, after making all those decisions, I was down to my last one, which was the tiles for the bathroom and the kitchen. I know nothing about tiles, so porcelain, ceramic or stone, they are all the same to me. Mr Magic was helpful as ever: after I've narrowed it down to two types of tiles he said that they looked exactly the same. I've achieved a compromise by getting bigger tiles for the kitchen and smaller ones for the bathroom. I didn't have to make a choice as to which of the two I preferred.

Clearly two completely different tiles, Mr Magic.

~~~

What making all those decisions in a very short period of time has taught me is that you should probably go with your gut feeling. Your first intuition as to what you like probably points you in the direction of what will bring you joy.

It has also taught me that I had no imagination. My wooden floors are beautiful, but I had no image in my head what the floor would look like in my lounge/diner. I can't really imagine the look of tiles in the kitchen (yet to be done). I'm taking a massive leap of faith with these things.

Anyway, that's the end of my home improvement rant. Look out for the post showing the finished apartment (probably in about 10 years at this rate). Take care and remember to avoid any home improvement at all cost if you value your sanity.

Sunday, 12 August 2018

Sunday Special: The Bible hack.

Do you ever think that you don't read the Bible nearly often enough?

I don't read the Bible daily and in my busy life it's so easy to get caught up in different activities and before I know it, it's already bedtime.

But I want to read the Bible every day, so I had to find a hack for this.

And I did. It's so simple, I can't believe I didn't come up with it months ago.

What is the first thing you grab after waking up? Probably your smartphone. Now, exchange the smartphone for the Bible and all of a sudden you read the Bible every morning. Use a physical book rather than an app to avoid distractions.

Read a verse, a passage, a chapter. It doesn't matter how much you read as long as you get those life-giving words into your day.

I'm currently working my way through the Letter to the Hebrews in this way. And I truly believe that it can transform my life, make me more attuned to the voice of God and more caring about people around me. Pretty good for five-ten minutes of reading each morning.


If you don't know where to start, I really love the Gospel according to St Mark. I love all of the Gospels, but Mark's one is special to me. I also really like the Letter of St Paul to the Ephesians. It really doesn't matter where you start, God will speak to you through any passage you pick as long as you are open to His voice.

It is by your holding fast to the word of life that I can boast on the day of Christ that I did not run in vain or labour in vain. (Philippians 2:16)

Wednesday, 8 August 2018

Dealing with (far too many) digital files.

Your Dropbox is full and no longer syncing.

Your OneDrive will be frozen on or after 31st July 2018. 

I was finally forced to sort out my digital clutter. Loads of digital clutter.It consists mostly of random downloaded files (250 items, not that many by some standards, but I'm pretty good at cleaning my downloads folder) and roughly a million pictures. Loads of pictures. Some dating 10 years back. Or more. You get the picture (pun not intended). I have 8,444 files and 119 folders stored in Dropbox alone, but there is more in different clouds and just on my laptop drive. And on the external hard drive. So you can see that there is loads of files to get through.

The problem with digital clutter is that you can't really see it. It's not in our way, you can't really trip over it and generally it doesn't cause much issues. Until you run out of space on your drive or in your cloud.

But clutter is clutter in whatever form, be it physical, digital or emotional. And I feel that it needs to be dealt with somehow. By deleting unnecessary files.

And oh boy, I have loads of those files. Mostly pictures. I've been organising my documents (bank statements, invoices etc) into a neat filing system on my laptop and I managed to clear off the downloads folder in about 30 minutes, but the pictures are a huge issue. I used to take a few hundred pictures each holidays and ever since we purchased a digital camera those pictures would just end p somewhere in the folder, often not even labelled properly. And so I have so many pictures that I never looked at. I have pictures of middle school classmates who I don't even keep in touch anymore. I have pictures of random food, random buildings and many totally blurred pictures.

This is my plan : if I haven't looked at a picture for years and if it doesn't spark any joy in me at all, the picture will go. Anything else will go to a KEEP folder arranged with various sub-folders. I'll start with cloud files and work my way through anything on the laptop, followed by the hard drive. It is likely to take weeks.

That's the theory, anyway.

I feel like being absolutely ruthless is the key to success here. Just hit delete. A moment of hesitation means that the picture needs to go. You either love it or not.

Let the fun begin. I will let you know when I emerge from beneath the pile of files.