The Art Of Relaxation

It's not something that I have thought about much before, but I have suddenly realized that I haven't been relaxed for a long time. This seemed a strange realization because there have been so many times recently when I have done nothing but sleep for hours on end. But this is not relaxation; it is more a case of exhaustion and the body saying that it can take no more and needs to close down in order to recuperate.

At the moment I am not studying anything with the OU. I wasn't enjoying the course that I was doing and I felt that constantly having to force myself to find the time and the enthusiasm to study was part of the reason that I was feeling so depressed. I may have been right because once I had made the decision to stop for a while I started to feel better. I wasn't completely out of the darkness, but I started to feel better than I had for a long time.

I still had things that I had to do. I had to write the notes and script for last week's lecture and that meant a deadline to work to, and it was a deadline that could not be changed or negotiated over. This was probably rather good for me. I didn't put the finishing touches to it until the day before it was going to be presented, partly because I had a significant change of mind about how the experience of my current psychotherapy should be described. I think that the change was successful and added to the impact of what I had to say.

Now that this event is over I have nothing major in my diary for a couple of months. This means that I can spend time on myself doing whatever I want and this weekend has been wonderful. I have done what I wanted, when I wanted to and thoroughly enjoyed it. Yesterday morning I finished knitting a scarf that I had started earlier in the week, then immediately started another one, this time a lacy pattern that is being knitted in a lovely mohair yarn in shades of blue and purple. It is progressing well and will be finished this afternoon.

I read a little this morning, and only put the book down and picked up the knitting because I could feel my eyes getting heavy and sleep calling to me. I am enjoying my reading again, and reading a little each night before going to sleep; this is again something that I have not done for a long time. And the reason for all this is that I have suddenly discovered the art of relaxation again.

I am doing things that I enjoy and doing them when I want to and not seeing them as a means to help to focus my mind on something other than how I am feeling. I'm not worrying about how I am feeling because I think that I am feeling happy. It's been a long time coming so I think that I am going to make the most of it while it is here. I shall relax, do whatever I want to, and not worry too much about the chores. Yes, I will do them, but I won't worry if I decide to put something off until tomorrow because I want to do something different. And that is going to include me taking the opportunity to visit a couple of museums that I haven't visited for more years than I care to think about, and one that I have never visited at all.

I'm rather enjoying relaxation.

Happiness Is ......

Happiness is, as the saying goes, different things to different people. I feel that it is a very long time since I could honestly say that I felt happy, but I am sure that as I come out of this period of depression that happiness is something that I will feel again. I suppose that is what keeps me going.

Since I have been writing this blog, a number of other bloggers have left me comments. Some have said that they liked a particular post, some of them have read all my posts and have added me to their blog list, and all of them have given me encouragement. One of them is Lemon whose blog can be found here. Lemon has left comments for me on several posts and has told me that she has added me to the list of those that she reads regularly, and that warms my heart a little. Actually, it warms my heart a lot, because after she had left what was, I think, her third comment, I sat down and read the whole of her blog. When I read her comments I knew very little about her, but having read her blog I realized that Lemon is a young lady for whom the compilation of her blog is a way of releasing some real frustrations that she feels because she is unwell, and nobody is absolutely sure what is wrong with her.

I'm sure that Lemon is happy sometimes, she does her best, but her illness makes her feel tired and she has lost much time at school and yesterday she made a post saying that she was sad and that her life seemed to be moving on without her. Having read her blog I felt that I had to leave her a comment; so I did. Lemon has been blogging for a little longer than me, and she is a very articulate young lady for her age, but no-one had ever commented on her blog before. When she read what I had written, I think it made her happy that someone had bothered to read her blog and taken the time to comment on it.

Some write their blogs as a form of diary of what they have been doing; some as a means of venting their frustration. Some hide behind a curtain of anonymity (for very good reasons). while others are quite open about who they are. But we all write our blogs in the hope that someone will read what we have written and find that they have something in common with us.

We are a strange group of people. We sit at our computers writing about all sorts of things, very often saying things that we would never dream of speaking out loud because we are too shy, or frightened to let others know what we are thinking. But the fact that we can remain relatively anonymous behind our blog names means that we can stand up and be counted over things that matter to us. The list of blogs that I read regularly grows daily as I find new ones that I may find interesting, and I am starting to make more comments on them as the days go by.

In this post I said how nice it is to be read. It is nice, but it can also start to bring happiness to one who is usually so down through no fault of their own.