How to feel a little calmer while life has some challenges.

I am having two different conversations while out on my walks by the sea with locals.  The first involves the pandemic situation here in my little seaside town.  Up until recently, it has felt like a safe haven with relatively low case numbers.  But things change quickly in a pandemic and at the weekend more than one neighbour cheerfully commented that "we have gone purple" now.  Fortunately I have stared at the colourful coronavirus map of the UK enough times to know that purple means a lot of cases.  As I wonder how on earth that happened so quickly, it is also a stark reminder that there is actually a pandemic still rumbling away which is now more prevalent here. Fortunately the second conversation is about swimming and how I am managing to swim in the sea without freezing.  And that is a very good question that I am exploring.  The most commonly asked question is "what do you wear?"  There seems to be a divide in the world of open-water swimming about whether t

As I inched my way into the chilly sea this morning, I was taken aback once again by how incredibly different the sea looks each day.  Today, the water is churned up with some swirling winds causing uneven waves.  The water is murky and feels cooler than only a day ago.  With every stroke, I feel a stream of cold water on my back and it takes all my concentration to ride the swell of the waves.  Yet the clear blue sky above me and warm rays of sunshine feel amazing.  Once again, I feel more like the weather, with some emotional choppiness but a renewed sense of hope has found its way back into my heart.  It feels as if some of the emotional and political turbulent "weather system" of last week has slightly receded with seeds of positivity already emerging.   Lockdown 2.0 feels completely different this time to those tense months back in the spring.  Now I'm so used to living in a more restricted way, I have barely noticed a change other than the high street is once again

I asked my partner on this epic US election results morning, how he was feeling using the weather as a metaphor?  It's a question we used on my yoga course to check in with each other in just a few words.  I thought he would laugh at such a question, but calmly said "like the blue sky".  When it came to my weather for this morning, I replied that I am feeling more like a raging storm with lashing rain, wild winds and crashing waves.  So much tumultuous energy is circulating within my calm exterior, rather like the actual weather system that battered our coast once again at the weekend.  Every now and then, a lull would come, blue sky would appear and I could feel some positivity return for a while.  What an incredible time we are in.  It feels as if the world is paused, holding its breath to find out the results of the US election, which in these intense and turbulent times carries huge significance.  Something much larger must be at work right now in our planet, whether