random asides – Page 2 – sea.ess.em.jay

Eight Minutes.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the art of writing letters today. Growing up, letters were a gift passed on in a day, that would live into the future. I need them just as much now, as I did then.

But I fear I’m not very good at writing letters. If anything, the digital age has provoked that. I still write them, but they’re not necessarily letters, in their usual form. In many ways, this is one of them. Who I’m writing it for is, of course, as much a mystery to me as it is to you.

Today, I woke up feeling like someone had run me over with one of those old-school garden rollers that used to flatten the grass and serve not much purpose, from what I understand. We used to have one, in the house I grew up in. I have never understood their purpose, but that suggests more about my lack of gardening skills than it does anything else. That aside, I had a list for today and, after attempting to tackle it, I neatly moved that list to tomorrow. There are some days where you just cannot.

Instead, I retreated to my bed, with a cup of tea and took to scrolling through my ‘must watch’ list on Netflix. And there I found a wonder: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

If you haven’t watched it, or read the book, do so. But – be warned – your heart will relocate to your throat and remain there throughout.

Essentially, it’s a story of a letter that was not sent. Instead, pieced together by things he finds, a young boy embarks upon an expedition (something his father had been in the habit of creating for him, before he was killed) to solve the mystery within. The young boy uses this expedition as a way to feel closer to his father, as he says:

“Oskar Schell: If the sun were to explode, you wouldn’t even know about it for 8 minutes because thats how long it takes for light to travel to us.
For eight minutes the world would still be bright and it would still feel warm.
It was a year since my dad died and I could feel my eight minutes with him… were running out.”

Many of the letters and posts I’ve listed here, are about those eight minutes too. In many ways, I am not sure if the eight minutes between my parents and I have elapsed. In some ways, as awful as it is to admit to myself and to type, I think they may have. Sometimes, in the moments imbued by them, and the scenes that play out before me where they’d fit, I feel like those eight minutes continue.

That’s why I write though. That’s why I write here, and there and everywhere. I want those eight minutes to last as long as they possibly can, even if I started them early, so they can continue long into the future beyond me.

Those letters I cling to, those ones that stretched those eight minutes for me, I keep them close. I place my hand upon them and cry. Sometimes, I smile at them. Occasionally, nowadays, I dive in and find an answer I had sought out, but had not seen before. They are my history book and navigational chart, just as the constellations above used to guide sailors to shore.

There was no real reason to write today, except to say that, in the future, I hope the words speak the things I could not say. Or the things I had to skip past. Or that they fill in the gaps we’ve forgotten, or encapsulate a moment we let go by.

Nature is like that.

The passing of Leonard Cohen struck me as unsurprising. Yes, he was 82. But in the year that 2016 is turning out to be, it is a wonder that anyone survives it. When I read the news of Cohen’s passing, I thought strangely of my fish we lost earlier this year. He was robust, stamina-driven and, ultimately, fallible like the rest of us.

Perhaps that’s melodramatic. I’m okay with that. I know people who have had incredible years, filled with flourishing dreams and great things. Yet, even they have felt deeply affected, on a human-base-level, by this year.

But to chalk it up to the year places far too much power into a human-crafted concept which, after all, is an illusion. Time is not a reality because we created the calendar. It was not given to us, nor is it something that Nature looks at, checks on and decides how it should behave. In fact, it is the opposite way round.

Just as time will pass, things transform and the seasonal moves of our world continue to turn. Perhaps we are entering a winter of humanity. Keeping my eyes on spring seemed difficult this week. To be fair though, it’s been difficult for a lot of reasons, and for far longer than these seven days.

Operating within a winter framework feels cold. Just as the season turns many of us to hermits, perhaps I’ve been one all along. Solace is, at least, the comfort of my dogs’ heads on my lap; the cadence of laughter at my dinner table and the texture of home.

I think, very much, that nothing will remain untouched by this year, but there are no guarantees that this will end, or soothe. It’s up to us to do that and, the only way to, is to think beyond the winter. I will think of spring while I try to shovel the snow and make sense of the mess. I will remember that, beyond the rain, grass will grow tall. I’ll think of warm bears in caves, hibernating their way towards sunshine. And sometimes, every now and then, I will look at the winter, determined to find the beauty in it. Occasionally, I will look at the winter and see only the chilled desolation of it, like the tree in my yard that’s – for no reason at all – dropped all its leaves. In the reality of seasons, right now, at my house, it’s spring. And that’s why, when I look at the world with its winter of humanity, I must turn my head back towards spring. Because, if anything, the winter will end and spring will come.

Nature is like that. I should be ready.

Magic and Other Mumbles

My friend over the wires makes magical things in kaleidoscopic ways. This is one of them. You should listen to it. Go on, pop your headphones on, click, read, scroll down and listen. It’s magically magic.

But within the bars and beats, listen carefully and, you’ll find this line:

“We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

JK Rowling said that. She of Harry Potter fame and incredible tweet game. Now, as an aside, before I continue, I should tell you that I’ve never read a Harry Potter book, nor watched one of the movies. I have my reasons for it, but, as my daughter begins to climb into them soon, I know that will change. I’m happy with that change and, perhaps, I’ll dive into them with her. It’ll be an exploration we can undertake together.

/an aside, over/

I really love that quote by JK Rowling, because it speaks to something I’ve had to make a conscious effort over. I’ve been doing a lot more internal… well, I’ll show you. This is me, on a normal day:

Somehow though, recently, I’ve been feeling stuck on steps 1 through 4. And when you get there, and feel middlishly-muddly-and-muddy, well, it’s hard to get out.

Instead of sticking there and trying to wait it out though, I decided to go for one week, just one, and force myself to do things, to get unstuck, de-muddled, whatever you call it. Here’s what I did:

Forced myself to smile. This is hard, because I sometimes feel like I look like a murderous clown when doing this. My face is as easy to read as a newspaper, typed in size 72 Times New Roman.
I forced myself to smile while working, I forced myself to smile while out and shopping and I even forced myself to smile while sitting in a queue at the local tax office. Okay, on the last point, I pretty much rage-tweeted my time there, but I still smiled the whole time. Told you I am a bit murderous when I do this.
I also demanded of myself to take an alternative view when confronted by things. On one front, I determined that, when someone got weird/angry/strange with me, I’d try empathy first, instead of my usual response of “You bit my head off, now I’m going to chew your face off.” Here’s one instance of how I did it:

Now I’m not here to save the world (neither are you) or to write a self-help book, or do anything rather grandiose. I’m not about to hand over life advice, unless you asked me to, or start a hashtag. But I will tell you this, little blog of mine – just doing those two things meant I had a good week, despite the roll-around-hedgehog-wheel of life that happens. I’m going to try it again next week, and that includes another trip to the local tax office, among other things. I don’t know, smile sometime. Make yourself. It won’t fix anything, but it sure as heck won’t make anything worse. Change your perspective, just once, and adopt an alternative view when your brain instantly goes into MDK mode when confronted with an annoyance. Just, I don’t know, try it. I think I needed this more than anyone else.

The Chefs Table

Suspend your disbelief for a second, and imagine you’ve been invited out on a blind date. It seems promising, and you’re pretty sure you’ll – at the least – enjoy a good meal, even if it never gets any further. Now imagine arriving at that date, sitting down at the table and the restaurant doors open, to reveal your blind date. And that blind date just happens to Channing Tatum. Or Justin Timberlake. Or, you know, whoever goggles your eyeballs.

That’s what it felt like when I ate at The Chefs Table, and Durban, you now have your very own Channing Tatum of a restaurant. I’d suggest you get to it and make a booking. If you read nothing further, just follow that instruction and you’ll end up in that same heady-weird-food-coma I experienced the first, and the second, time I popped in.

First Up
Here’s something you should know about me: I hate phone calls. Like, if I could avoid talking to people over the telephone forever and ever, I would. But a call from Head Chef at The Chefs Table, Kayla-Ann Osborn, turned out to be the start of one beautiful experience I am so very glad I didn’t miss. Followed up with a personalised invitation (in the post, mos!), I started to get a little excited over my lunch date, where I was joined by some new and some regular faces from the Durban food, lifestyle and blogging scene. If you don’t bother to read any further from here, read Shirley’s review on Cuizine, and then pop over here and make a booking. Have I mentioned that you should make a booking? Good.

The Chefs Table doesn’t just serve up your restaurant standard fare – in fact, there’s nothing standard about it. Instead, taking inspiration from anywhere and everywhere, and utilising seasonal produce that’s sourced from local farmers, The Chefs Table serves you food that will make you cry. I don’t say that in a bad way, I mean it in that – after you’ve eaten here, anything you eat at any meal thereafter, will just be disappointing. The menu changes in accordance to available produce and focuses on bringing out the best flavours, aligned with an exceptional experience.

As the afternoon meandered onwards, and we enjoyed tasting plates of a selection of menu items, paired with epic wines that brought forth the unique flavours of each dish, all I could think about was:

“Damn, I wish my family were here. They won’t believe me when I tell them about this.”

I’ll put it simply – when you read the menu, you’ll think one thing about a menu item. What ends up on your plate is not what you expected.

Coming In For Seconds
Lucky for me (and that beautiful family of mine!), I have been back a second time. I got so excited about it, that I could barely sleep the night before… I am not joking. And, of course, as I expected, The Chefs Table did not disappoint, as my kid and I giggled over her roast pumpkin tortelli and my fiance made what I call his “food noises” over his Moores-Pitt Rolled Chicken.

Saving The Best For Last
And while the menu changes as and when needed, I hope there is one item that stays stuck on it like that piece of double-sided tape you put on the wall to hang your precious Indecent Obsession poster back in the 90s and which is probably never going to come off, even if you charge a bulldozer through your house. It’s the Chocolate and Popcorn, which is the perfect example of “what you think you’re getting…but you’re wrong”. Just promise me you will add this to your Must Do Food List, and let’s be done with it.

Now, when are we going back again? Food is, aside from providing sustenance and nutrition, meant to be a positive emotional experience that engages and delights you. I’m pretty certain that, within the next few months, when you look up the term “positive emotional experience”, you’ll find a picture of The Chefs Table, right by its side. I’ll be back soon, Channing. Er, I mean, The Chefs Table.

Disclosure: I was invited to attend two dry runs at this restaurant in Durban before it opened to the public. I was not requested to create this post as payment for my attendance, but it’s just that damn good that it inspired me to crank open my blog again and get writing.

Born In A Storm… Eleven Years On.

When I think about the way you entered this world, I marvel, every time. The panic that set in when you made no noise as you arrived into this life… that three-second arched eyebrow your father and I shared, which shot right back down into reality as you mewed your first noise… that was our first taste of this love.

It’s now eleven years later, and I still panic when you don’t make a noise, but for entirely different reasons. You’re happily focused on a book, or plotting your next move in a game. You’re strategically setting out your books to study, or you’re meandering avenues of your mind I will probably never truly know.

There are an abundance of moments in our life where I am caught short of breath, as I realise the no-noise-child born into this world during a thunderstorm, is now the determined young lady before me at the dinner table. You have ideas, desires, dreams and rules for yourself. You have limits and boundaries, you have talents and skills. You have so many things I wished for you, and so many things I see you got straight from my book of life. I see your father in you, so very much, and I see myself, reflected back, sometimes painfully, but a lot of the time, hilariously.

You’re a wondermind of ideas, gently hewn by the notion of always putting other people before yourself. I’m trying to help you not to do that all the time, because this past year has shown us isolated (but luckily, not terribly harmful) situations where that’s not always the best plan of action. Figuring out when that’s a good move, and when it isn’t, is a life lesson I can only be part of, because the lesson is taught to you, by you, and through you.

The idea that children grow up has never scared me. The reality that children grow away from their parents terrifies me. But we are just the tree trunk and you, the child who must grow towards the sun, the branches and leaves that reach up towards the marvels of the sky.

Slowly, as you’ve grown taller, so too have your branches and, little by little, your leaves turn their faces towards the glowing sunshine of life.

Do not forget, however, my sweet child, that your family is the trunk. We are here, as you grow, when you want to recoil from the world and when you want to leap up towards it. We are here to keep you strong, help you reach higher and grow even more leaves. My job now is to be that trunk, and help you figure out which is the best way for your leaves to turn, to ensure maximum sunshine potential. I could ask for no better privilege in life.

When you turned five, we laughed over how you were now a “whole hand”. Last year, when you turned ten, I quietly mused into your sleeping head on the eve of your birthday that I’m running out of fingers and hands.

And now, as we begin the ascent towards your eleventh birthday, I realise I have run out of fingers to count the years of you, and need to use my toes too. As each year brings with it some great new skill to learn, or some giant lesson to tangle with, or an astounding discovery of the forests and worlds that live within you, I am reminded that you are on your own life journey. I was just the beginning, and my life – for you – must provide the navigational lessons to help you find your own way.

This is not to say that I am not with you. You know all too well that I’d helicopter my way into everything you’d let me, with rotating blades flapping wildly or quietly, whichever you prefer. But it’s up to me to respect the way you welcome my helicopter motions, and to respect the times where you tell me they are not required.

We talk, often, about wonders of the world we live in, or the fascinating ideas beyond our front door. In the oceans of life, as they ebb and flow, I am the deep sea, but you are swimming towards the sun.

The deep sea is a fortress of life, where things that cannot live in the bright and shiny world find safety and solace. They are the secrets of the world, mostly unseen by humans. Many assumed that not much lives in the deep sea, some 1800 metres below. But science has proved them wrong, for the deep sea is teeming with life and has a constant temperature, unaffected by the planet’s seasons or weather patterns.

That is my love for you – the sweet child born of me. I am your deep sea, unaffected by the life and events beyond ourselves, and a constant and infinite place where you never need to be unsure of me. I am the deep sea, the trunk of the tree, and I will always be.

Whatever it is you need to be, however you need to take on the world and see, as you swim towards the light of life or reach up and unfurl your leaves towards the sun, know that you can always return to me. No backsies-swapsies-or-deals required. I promise to keep every secret, love you past every pain and forge ahead into life committed to understanding first, and questioning second.

I am the deep sea.
The trunk of the tree.
And now you are eleven,
An incredibly big number to be.

Happy Birthday.

Badum Belaxing. Adam for nightum. X

Hey Mom, I’m Getting Married | Six Years

It’s six years since we had to say goodbye. You’ve missed all of the parts I wish you could’ve seen. All those things you wished for me are coming true, and all the things I said I’d do, I did.

I like to think you haven’t missed them, but I miss you in them. We’re planning a wedding, and I keep looking for the part where I can stop and ask you what you think about menu choices, or where you think we can be socially correct with seating arrangements. Who are the people you’d insist were on the guest list, and who can I skip right past? Look, I know my own answers to those questions, but sometimes I want your view. I want to tussle with you over these things, and have you pull the pursed-lip, arm flung-over-head move on me. I miss fighting with you over the most stupid of things, and isn’t that just the most ridiculous thing to miss someone over?

So yes, Mom, I’m getting married. And it still feels weird that I am typing that, because it remains entirely surreal to me. Excitingly surreal, like I won a life lottery that I forgot I bought a ticket for.

So, instead of a list of things I have to discuss with you, all I have is a calendar reminder that on then 5^th of June, you shuffled off. Not just shuffling off down the passage at 10pm, like you did for almost all the evenings I can remember, but you really, really shuffled off. It is a symbol of my lineage that I find that funny to contemplate. The thing is though, you never really shuffled, whether in life or in endings. No, you were always triumphant and bold with what you did, which served as your way to overcome everything internal or from life that sometimes expected you to feel small. You were a warrior, even in the quietest of fights, and my word, what a warrior you were. You are, still, it’s just that it’s the bodies and minds of the people beyond you that act it out. The courage and wisdom within the little-people-now-growing-bigger that live beyond you – that’s where your fire burns brightest still.

Six years seems so very long, but I swear it was just yesterday that I noticed your hair was turning blonde in the sunlight. Perhaps it was the magnitude of you that meant you were gone for just a moment – that you’re just in the next room – yet an entire six years can live in that moment. Time has still not faded you, and it never, ever could. That’s because you are indelible and undeniably here, somehow, in the little things. Whenever I say the word “indelible” I think of you, because you referenced the word so often in my memory. I guess that’s a significant word for me to remember when thinking of you.

As I wind back the time and look across the expanse of these years, I remember the things you said, the incredible things you did, beyond anything I can ever imagine (and some of the things I will probably never know about). I meander through the words of you, in my head and on paper, and as I look towards the future, I remember the possibilities of beginnings, and how they sometimes look like endings, at first. The ones you’d hoped for me, the ones you’d wished into life and the ones you grabbed with both hands at glee. All the ones you wished for me.

Mom, I’m not afraid to speak anymore, and when my voice shakes, I know it just means it’s even more important that I say it.

Hey mom, I’m getting married. I wish you were here for it.

I miss you forever. Adam For Nightum.

Cassie.

Wedding Dreams

No, not like that. I’ve never been the girl who obsessively daydreamed about the perfect white dress, or the exact flowers she wants to see as she prances down the aisle. I’m far more keen on the marriage part of this deal, so let’s put this all aside for now.

But, one thing that has been happening as we talk about and begin to plan the very thing I never thought was for me, is that I am dreaming about it a lot. Here’s what has invaded my slumbering thoughts:

A long, intense dream about having let Reddit users vote for our first dance song. They chose “wiggle wiggle“.
Noticing, as I am signing the register with my now-husband, that he has changed his name, and will from thereon be known as “Master Good Time” and that my surname will become “Good Time”.
Annie Lennox busts out of her chair during the ceremony to sing Thorn in My Side, and ends it off by telling everyone how Dave Stewart is, and always has been, actually a hologram.
I’m getting dressed, all the right people are in the room, we’re chatting, things are great and then I look into the mirror and realise that I’ve shaved my eyebrows off.
I get stuck in traffic on the way back from the wedding, except I am on my own, on a bicycle with one wheel (not a unicycle, an actual wheel is missing), wearing an insane dress, that is NOT the dress I will be wearing, and I’m using my hand to steer, not handlebars.
I turn around during the most important part of the ceremony and everyone is staring at a TV screen, watching a rugby game.
The man I’m marrying takes up calling me “boet” while we’re saying our vows.
I develop chronic ezcema the day before, and all of our photos include me scratching my face.
We post our wedding album to Facebook, as you’re supposed to do in these times, I guess, and Facebook automatically tags our exes in the photos. We are unable to remove the tags, and our pictures are used in a case study in a conference I am attending, three months later.
Instead of wedding programmes, the printing house delivers copies of my teenage diaries to the ceremony, and these are handed out to the gathered friends and family. I don’t know this, until afterwards, when it’s mentioned during speeches.

This is normal anxiety, hey? Hey, at least some of it is funny.

You Have A Nice Face

As a teenager, I used to catch the bus home from university every day. If I was lucky, I could catch an early bus, then a second one and be dropped almost neatly at my front door. If class ran late, I’d have to wait around for the last bus that went into my neighbourhood and then hope that my dad would realise I wasn’t home, and be waiting for me when I stepped off the bus.

If I tell you that I’m highly neurotic about time, you can predict that, pretty often, I was keen to get home on the early bus, so I was regularly at that dirty little bus stop a little more than I should’ve been (with apologies to my lecturers. I’m sure your classes were great).

It was during this time that I started to notice what my mom would call “nice face disease”. Random people would walk up to me and start talking to me. I never once had a bad incident with this, as I could generally sniff out someone who wished to do me harm from five paces away, and it led to interesting conversations while I waited for either the early or the late bus(if it was the late bus I was waiting for, you can bet your bottom Yen that the number of crazy people around increased exponentially. It’s science. I actively calculated this to highlight how important it was for me to get on the early bus once). My mother and father had the Nice Face too, and I know both my siblings have it too. They’ll have a barrel of these stories to share too, if I asked them. I remember my mom saying it’s because “we have open faces, that invite the world in” once.

The bus stop wasn’t the safest place in the city, but it was what I had to work with, if I wanted to get home. I tried to apply the don’t talk to strangers rule, but it didn’t always work out that way.

There were quite a few of these Nice Face situations, but two people who will forever stick in my mind are Flower Man and Bag Woman. I have no idea what their names were, and I hope they can forgive me for calling them this. I spotted Flower Man walking towards me, dressed in his dark suit, and green tie. He walked as though he’d not been off his feet since last year, and yet had a smile that made me think of the colour yellow as he ambled along. Flower Man walked up to me, smiled, sat down next to me and gave me a purple flower. While my mind raced thinking that it might be laced with something, he said:

“So many people walk up to young girls and tell them to smile. I’m telling you that you don’t have to, but that this flower is for you. You look like you could use one.”

Then he got up, walked away and I never saw him again.

Bag Woman sat down next to me a few weeks later, opened her bag, tapped me on the shoulder and said:

“I have everything in here that I will ever need. Except for my husband. He’s dead. I haven’t emptied my bag since he died because I can still smell our house a little bit when I open it. The house is gone, he’s gone and I have nothing to do except go to work and catch this bus.”

I hugged her, held her hand and together we picked through the contents of her bag, and she showed me bits of paper (the last time they ordered KFC)and the lipstick she was wearing on the day she got the phone call. He’d died three years ago, but she clung on to those things like they were gold. They were her gold and all she needed was someone to acknowledge her treasures. I missed the early bus that day, and waited with her for hers to come. I looked out for her every single day thereafter, and never saw her again.

I’m long past the days of catching buses and avoiding boring lectures now(oops, sorry, I mean, you were great! I learnt so much!) but “You Have A Nice Face” has stuck with me. Just yesterday, I had an inspiring conversation with my cashier around her ideas on how to change the world. I told her to write them down, so we could write a business case for them, because they sounded really cool. I never expected she’d email me this evening, but there it is, sitting in my inbox.

I often wonder what happened to Bag Woman and Flower Man. Sometimes, if I doubt myself too loudly, I start to think they were figments of my imagination, dreamed up to save my mind from wasting away while I waited for the bus home. But if I look into my scrapbooks from 1999 and see the pressed flower, I’m reminded that these people were not imagined. They were as real as the ideas contained in the email just sent to me, and the young woman who is determined to be far more than a cashier in her life.

If you’re reading, Flower Man and Bag Woman, and the host of characters who once peppered my days at that smelly and dreary bus stop, I want you to know that I remember you; that your treasures are real and your life is worth more than those grey afternoons that couldn’t go fast enough.

Morning Rituals

Ask anyone who has ever lived with me, and they’ll tell you – I talk when I’m in the shower. It’s here that I get my best ideas, find that hook for a story or finalise an idea.

When we arrived to view this house, I walked in and loved it, immediately, without walking upstairs. When I did eventually go upstairs, I peeked into the bathroom and laughed at how big the shower was – we could probably host a dinner party in there. But there’s another thing about that shower you need to know – it has something in it that struck me when I first saw it.

Perhaps it’s a flaw in the tiles, or whatever, but if you squint your eyes a little, you’ll see it too – there are two things on this tile that I stare at every morning and most evenings (I grew up in a house with four other people, with only a bath. Trust me, I like showering. We have an eco-friendly shower head, calm down).

At the centre of this image, you’ll note a weird shape. Squint a little and it’ll become a heart. To the right of that – yes, that’s a question mark. No, it’s not pen or anything – it’s in the tile.

Every morning, I stare at those and they help me focus – think about what needs to be done today, and throw some ideas around for a cool story or the like.

If there were ever to be two symbols chosen for my life – they would be the heart and the question mark. I question everything, all the time (mostly myself) and try so very hard to do everything I do with love. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember, and it really used to lead me feeling hurt when I was a kid. A lot, actually – more than I am willing to admit – some stuff that happened to me at 5, still stings more than it should. The question-everything-aspect is something I see with my kid (and I see the heart thing with her too, more again, than I think anyone else knows) and I endorse it, over and over again. It’s that quality that will help her find the answers to things that plague her, and it is by heart that she will be guided through life.

Anyway, when I spied this little funny flaw in the tiles, I knew all over again that this is where I wanted to live. And every morning, as I step in to think and clean, I look at those two things and am so weirdly reminded of why I woke up this morning.

21 Days Of… Breakfast

Life is currently kicking me into shape a bit, and that shape is – well, as I type, I’m pretending I don’t have a cold and am attempting to engineer my way towards smacking a few deadlines on their heads. But something caught my eye this morning, so I’ve signed up to do it (and it has to do with the first sentence of this post).

I’m not a very “let’s do a challenge!” or “sign me up for that diet” person. In fact, group hype about something is not the best way to pique my interest in something (which is why I’ve never yet, and probably won’t ever, read or watch anything of the Harry Potter franchise – friends, feel free to flee me now). But this one is a little different, and it’s something that can be done, quickly and integrated easily. It’s 21 days of awesomeness, overseen by my adventure compadre, GI Jane.

It’s completely up to you, what you choose to change or commit to and, over the 21 days, people who have signed up for the challenge share their commitments, perspectives and ideas on what they’d like to do for these three weeks. I’ve chosen to commit to eating breakfast.

Yeah, I know – I sound ridiculous. But here’s why: Since the beginning of this work year, I have failed to eat breakfast every morning, instead ending up wanting to gnaw my desk by 10am, because I “had to attend to that urgent email”. I end up feeling flat, emotional (in a bad way), grumpy as all heck and my ability to work starts to wobble. The stupidity is, I sit with my daughter every morning as she eats breakfast and I attempt to regain my personality with a cup of coffee. By skipping breakfast, for the sake of my inbox, I’m effectively ruining my own day before it’s begun. So, here goes – starting 15 February 2016, I will start eating breakfast with her again.

What would you commit to doing for 21 days, to make your life a little better, or to feel a little healthier? You can sign up here. (By the way, it’s free).