Miss Mandie

If this is true, how can success and happiness co-exist?

Is there a difference between doing something we don’t want to do because it makes us feel anxious or it’s boring or it requires energy and effort, to doing something that doesn’t resonate with our core essence/truth/soul?

How do we know the difference?

This has been an interesting conversation in my head lately.

Particularly as I watch myself procrastinate the shit out of completing my studies.

It’s as though I have to drag myself kicking and screaming through the last remaining modules of this course.

A course I have been doing for twelve months.

A course where most of the work has already been done.

A course I could have finished months ago.

A course I wished I had finished months ago.

So what’s my problem?

Albert Gray wrote a speech about his search for the common denominator of successful people. His discovery?

“Successful people formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do”.

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I recently had one of those days.

You know the ones.

The kind of day when everything seems to go wrong.

When nothing seems to flow smoothly or easily.

You are tripped up, tripped over and tripped out…

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I came across an email from a few years ago.

I was searching for my mum’s pumpkin soup recipe and somehow found an old email from a school friend. Says a lot for the apparent “organised” filing of my inbox.

It was an email thread that transported me back to my life in 2006.

At the time I was selling my house, tackling a Masters course, on the verge of exiting the full-time working caper, entangled in an on-again-off-again-aint-no-hope-of-really-going-anywhere relationship, drinking myself silly with friends, financially strapped waiting impatiently for said house sale, and dreaming of future possibilities with that expectant feeling that something big was about to happen.

What struck me the most was the hyperactive tone of my email reply.

“Could Mandie be abusing amphetamines?” would have been a completely acceptable response to reading such an overuse of the humble exclamation mark and repeated reassurance of just how full and amazing life was at the time.

I wasn’t taking many drugs back then, but I was busy.

Busy worrying, busy working, busy studying, busy socialising, busy creating “house sale dramas and nightmares”, busy drinking, busy pining, busy trying to work out the answers, busy gossiping, busy reassuring, busy dieting, busy story telling, busy arguing, busy complaining, busy planning, busy getting ahead.

Our society is great at helping people who want to be busy.

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I had the most delicious dream last night.

I was indulging in a box of Chocolatier chocolates. Revelling in the creamy softness of Milk Encore, a milk chocolate shell that melts away to a smooth creamy milk centre, and sucking in the goodness of the Lemon Macadamia, a decadent macadamia praline enriched with the zesty taste of of lemon.

After finishing the box, I moved on to those puffy marshmallow things covered in chocolate.Yes, in the real world I would have made a more sophisticated selection, but c’mon, I was dreaming.

I was gorging. I was happy. I was in sugar-fuelled ecstasy.

Then suddenly the realisation: Oh my god! I broke my diet! Shit. Shit. Shit.

But then morning rolled around, and I breathed a sigh of relief. All was well in the world. I hadn’t consumed 100 grams of sugar in one sitting.

I am not on a diet to lose weight.

I am trying to break my sugar addiction.

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