Recharging my batteries over the last week has been a marvellous boost. It’s not until you slow down that you realise how unthinking life has become.
In this dash about and have it all world we live in finding time to sit back, relax and think seems incredibly hard to do. Like magpies, we’ve become distracted by all the bright and shiny objects that surround us, including the attention of other people that feeds our insatiable appetite to connect with other human beings.
Admittedly people with fingertip access to the world through our electronic gizmos may suffer most from this condition. When you combine with busy professional and personal lives it’s hardly surprising that we often feel emotionally, physically and intellectually depleted.
Professionally I have deep interest in what brings focus, clarity, creativity and compassion into people’s working lives. With neuroscience and psychology catching up with what ancient traditions have believed for centuries, recent thinking on leadership emphasises mindfulness and personal spirituality, meditation and yoga are the new armoury of the modern world.
If you think this sounds a bit “new age†and “woo-wooâ€, you’d be right. Although having a yoga mat and developing elastic-like properties are the symbolic of bringing equanimity into your life I find a basset hound and wielding a Nejiri Gama hand hoe can have a similar effect. Also sitting in beautiful garden, or indeed any quiet, can be as soothing than a yoga studio full of steaming bodies.
Tomorrow I return to the big smoke of London where it will be trickier to find a quiet spot than it is in sleepy Hereford but my energy replenished I feel ready for anything, even a spot of retail battle on Oxford Street.