Let me explain; The house of mama began this year with a two night stay in the high dependency unit of our local hospital for our four year old, beginning on New Years eve 2017 (which I spent alone, cleaning the oven). It was an incredibly worrying, upsetting and stressful time and I am unspeakably glad it's over.
It was most certainly not the start to the year I had in mind. My plans were for an evening of relaxing, drinking some rose with my husband, and watching Jools Holland. Followed by a weeks of sorting and tidying the house, clearing out junk, planning our home ed year and filling in my shining life workbook (which is actually just a notebook where I am answering the questions from last years workbook because #onabudget). The reality was quite different and something I'd sooner forget. Therefore New Year has officially started this week for me and was precursed by a wonderful "Word of The Year" Workshop run by my lovely friend Vicki from vickiclubleymoore.com.
I've been choosing a word of the year for about five years now, but it's only really properly informed my year since I began the Shining Life programme by Leonie Dawson, because with her workbook I was able to delve deeper into the hows and whys or word-of-the-year. This will be my third year. I have found it a really useful and inspiring tool to help me focus on how I want my year to unfold, how I want to feel and what I want my year to look like.
When I looked back over the past year I realised I felt like it had gone really really quickly and I had blinked one to many times and missed it. I feel like the past year has been filled with distraction. I have constantly distracted myself from real life by looking on social media, rading books or simply hiding away in the kitchen, at every possible moment. And I don't want to look back over my year, over my life; and think that I wasted it all on Facebook.
I really felt like I wanted next year to be a year of being present, living more in the moment and really immersing myself in life. Home ed life, home life, family life, spiritual life... I wanted to feel like I am fully experiencing everything the year has to bring; to touch, taste, smell, hear and feel absolutely everything, so I end the year full of wonderful memories.
For these reasons and more that I won't bore you with I have chosen the word IMMERSE for my word of the year.
(My rather crinkles word-of-the-year art that I did at Vicki's workshop!)
I want to be fully immersed in life in 2018 not distracted from it.
It will be interesting to see how the year goes because right now it feels a bit like wading through mud. I haven't shaken the feelings of sadness surrounding my little boy's awful hospital stay and I am struggling to find my rhythm. It's difficult as a full time, home educating mama to feel any sense of beginning and end, any sense of a task completed, of a job well done because everything is a constant cycle and I am almost always wanted and needed for the next task. From laundry to cooking meals to ferrying children to different places and trying to squeeze in house work, my life is not my own at the moment and nothing feels like it's going my way. Right now my immersion feels more like drowning than the involvement and engrossment I had in mind.
According the Thesaurus.com the antonym to Immersion is Surrender. This feels particularly poignant at the moment. Surrendering to life as I know it is all I can do right now. I have the choice to either surrender to the messy, chaotic majesty of this wonderful life or I can try to fight it and end up drowning, because no amount of fighting or running away is going to change things. I can only surrender and get on with it. But one thing is for sure, I won't be distracting myself from it any longer because I don't want to miss it. As hard as it is someday (everyday at the moment) this is my one glorious, cluttered, manic life and I'm diving right in.
