Ruth's Real Life

A new year beckons. Before you know it we will be challenged by another 1st of January.  It's time to effect the change for which we yearn. Along come all the hopeful resolutions that briefly see the light of day before dying their usual death. Don't make resolutions - again I spoke to a group of people recently and asked them if they had made resolutions for 2020, many of them had. Most were horrified when I told them to ditch their grand plans as they would cause more stress than they were worth. The 1 st of January is like some magical line in the sand – there is a vague hope that we can step across the line and suddenly be all the things that we haven’t been for the last X number of years. The right inspirational moment Things that need to get done, get done. If you amputate a finger while cunningly carving a radish to decorate a salad, you don’t sit on the couch waiting for the right inspirational moment to go to the closest casualty room. You put your...

I've seen the world from upside-down Productivity is important. We need to work, most of us, in order to live. There is, however, a threshold where productivity must be curtailed, ironically, in order to survive. On the other side of too much work is stress, burnout, heart attacks and strokes. I have a handle on what it means to be productive and to work hard. A holiday or something to which we can look forward is a light at the end of the tunnel of work. We can draw a line and step away when a task is complete. I also know that there is no such line when it comes to personal development. We can leave work behind, but not ourselves. I facilitate workshops, for adults and teens, on creativity and the power of searching not for The Truth, but for a better truth. As a life coach, my role is to be radically present as I help my client to find a way forward. My poetry is an investigation into purpose and meaning. A single new thought, a moment of clarity, can change the ...

Under an enchanted tree When was the last time you climbed a tree? There’s something lovely about leaving the ground behind and ascending through the branches to an entirely different view of the world. I remember as a child loving the Enid Blyton tales of The Enchanted Forest . In our back garden was a huge willow tree and despite being told not to climb the tree, the quiet, green sea of the willow proved irresistible and I would climb skywards as often as I could. The tree didn’t survive - its roots were declared a threat to the foundations of the house and so it was felled. I was grounded. Up the tree, sky above Still, I have always looked for trees to climb. Perhaps, for context, you need to have a better idea of this climber of trees. You are probably imagining a lithe, athletic body, scaling the branches with ease. Hmm, that would be nice, but reality finds a 63-year-old, accident prone, fuller figure adventurer. It’s not surprising then, that last year w...

A single sentence can change the shape of the world. This one changed mine.  It was an ordinary day on an ordinary afternoon, and I was sitting on an ordinary couch. A late winter sun was lengthening the shadows in the garden. It felt like winter and there were certainly shadows, but it may well have been summer. When you’re at the bottom of the black pit of depression, most days seem wintery. Oprah was doing one of her usual TV interviews and her voice was a soothing antidote to the loneliness of the day. She was talking to a young woman who had been through years of abuse and fought the dragons of her darkness. I was mostly lost in my own space but there was one sentence spoken by her that pierced my heart: ‘You should never have to fight to be loved.’ That one sentence was a turning point for me. It was a moment of clarity that allowed me to take a step forward and that is often the most difficult thing – the one step forward – the step that will take us away f...

I goal set to die at 63. Dogs look like their owners - sorry, Pablo. That may seem like a ridiculous goal, but at the time I set it, life was bleak.   To fix a goal and then to see it vividly is a sure way to turn possibility into reality. Life changed, as it mostly does. I stopped working on this particular goal and when I turned 63 in November, I didn’t die. Well, not that day anyway and not in the traditional sort of way. I died on a Friday evening in February, sitting on the toilet and weeping. If this conjures an image of Elvis, it was nothing as epic as that. The tears ran down my cheeks and dripped into my underpants – no dignity in this death. I now have a new method by which to measure stress, it’s on a scale ranging from one to crying into my underpants. (Should you need to use this scale, it also goes up a level to crying acid tears.) I’ve had to muster a fair amount of resilience in my 63 years; I know the weight of stress. I’m not sure why this point ...

Have you ever been lost? It was a long time ago that a dear friend told me of her experience of losing her way while walking with her dog in the Drakensberg. Her story stayed with me: firstly, because she was so affected by the experience and secondly, because it speaks to the larger metaphor of life journey. I am directionally challenged. I have a strange penchant for turning left (never right) for no apparent reason at all. I hate reading maps. If I’m given verbal instructions they bounce off my eardrums and I don’t trust my GPS, hence, I often get lost. I’m sure most of us know that fine mix of fear and frustration as we search desperately for a familiar landmark. Billie, my mad rescue dog who always makes me laugh. There are many times too, that I have lost my heart path. There are times when my heart has turned left when it should have taken a different direction. There are times when I have felt lost in a wilderness of pain, where the only way out seemed to be t...

Go! Set sail! My image, Zanzibar 2014 Do you feel stuck? What happens when you wake up one morning and the voice that has been silenced for so long is shouting in your head? Life is journey but we often find ourselves on the wrong path. The choice to stay on the path that fate seems to have decided for us, or to take our destinies into our own hands, is one of the hardest tasks we will ever undertake. I wrote this poem thinking of my own life and the moments when the steps towards change were taken. Some came at a great cost to myself and others. In my heart, are so many of my friends who are caught in their own flux. Some are hesitating on the edge of that leap of faith, others have jumped and are striding ahead, dealing with the complexity that hard change brings with it. What does it take, to make that decision to go back to the paths not taken, to find the courage to live an authentic life? The price is different for each us. I don't know what the price would be...