"Your current safe boundaries now were once unknown frontiers" (anon)

Expanding our horizons

This quote reminds me that there are always new experiences out there.

This year I celebrated my birthday by going for an early morning swim at the outdoor pool near my house before going to work. In September I will be going on a dance holiday for a whole week in Ibiza. Two years ago I couldn't have visualised doing either of those things - I told myself I couldn't swim, and I had only just signed up for my first dance weekender. 

Then I visited my friend Nadean in Turkey and discovered that for someone who couldn't swim, I'm quite the waterbaby, and discovered that dancing til dawn on a weekend away is utter bliss, so what could be better than a week of dancing in Ibiza? (there's a pool at the hotel, too, so I'll need to practise my swimming for September!)

I have recently finished knitting a hood with cables, something else I would never have envisaged myself doing a few years ago. The first few times I came across cables, I couldn't get my head around them, and the first time I attempted them, I wasn't successful. 

But then I found a pattern for a hood with cables, and I loved the pattern so much I was inspired and motivated to knit the hood, which meant I had to conquer my fear of cables. 

And now that I have become comfortable knitting cables, I want to learn to do lace patterns next. 

In 2010, I signed up to my first 5k Race for Life in Bristol, and this year is the 3rd year in a row I have done it. The first year we did it in 44 minutes, last year I did it in 42, and this year my friend Kathryn and I did it in under 40 minutes. And now that I know I can do the 5k, I want to try the 10k next year! 

We take it for granted that children will learn to walk, even though it can take babies up to 2 years to learn, but those baby steps are just the beginning, and what starts out as crawling, eventually turns into walking and skipping and running. 

We may feel comfortable where we are now, but really, in some aspects of our lives, we are just learning to walk. We may even still just be beginning to crawl, but if we remember that we learned to walk and talk, we can have faith that we will get better as long as we persist. 

We may not always be able to see the improvement with every attempt, but if we stick with it, we will find that moment when it all comes together. 

That's when we lift up our eyes to the horizon to seek the next unknown frontier to explore and conquer. 

Purlgirl xx

“Today is the future I created yesterday” (Louise Hay)

Visualising who we want to be

Recently I celebrated my 10 year anniversary of moving to the UK. Growing up, I always knew that I was going to live in the UK. I didn’t know how, I just did.

Had you asked me at 17 where I saw my future self, I would have told you I would be living in the UK - I know, because a friend recently told me that's all I talked about when I was in High School. I even checked what I wrote in my year book when I was home with my parents over Christmas, and there it was in black and white, "In ten years I see myself living in the English countryside, with my English husband and our three children".

Well, one of out three isn't bad! (I guess Oxford could qualify for the English countryside)

4 years ago, I knew I wanted to work in Publishing. I had no particular proof, I just knew it.

So I talked about it, imagined it, visualised it, asked myself what steps I needed to take to get there. I even had a back-up plan; if I didn't get the job I really wanted - the one I am in now - I would go back to Bristol and approach it from a different angle, to get the experience I needed to get into Publishing.

And suddenly, I found myself where I had wanted to be.

I think the best way to illustrate how we can live up to our vision, though, is through my friend Sarah, who has slimmed down, and dropped 3 dress sizes this year. One day we looked at her and saw a new person - she had to get used to being that new sporty, active, healthy person.

We need to live ourselves into the new person we are becoming, and bear in mind what we are aiming for, and just like a knitted pattern, we start to take shape, and suddenly we can visualise what it is going to look like.

The transformation itself happens gradually.

Realising how much we have changed strikes us like a flash of lightning.

Purlgirl xx