Category: Journeys Two

Talking of Baking…

11.01.2025

2025, Journeys Two

Six months ago I moved into my little, old, cottage. It’s on a quarter acre of land and has a whole host of different fruit trees. Here in the Tropical Far North of Queensland, at this time of year, that means mangos. I’ve been told that the big mango tree, which covers almost the entire width of the plot is over 150 years old, but it is the younger tree that has been prolific this year. The cockatoos have chomped at least three times the amount of mangos that I have had and I’ve had a couple of hundred. They (the mangos – not the cockatoos!) are now either chutney or mango sauce or still waiting in the freezer to be made into something else!

It’s garden produce time in this very lush part of Queensland and this cottage garden shows much promise. It’s not been looked after for many years, but already I am finding a huge availability of foodstuff – providing I can get there before the wildlife. As an example, there are several mulberry trees. These trees are at least 40ft tall and at the start of the season they were laden with baby mulberries – I didn’t get a single mulberry, but the birds had a wonderful party, and I had a lot of fun watching them.

Then there are the lychees. Again the trees are beyond tall. My 30ft fruit picker didn’t stand a chance – all four lychee trees tower over the house. The flying foxes are even messier than the cockatoos and walking down the driveway was like walking on marbles! I did get to taste the lychees though: 6 fruits to me, 6,000 to the flying foxes!

I discovered a strange red berry a couple of months back. Off to Google to find out what they are – Brazilian cherries. They became jam and I have a big bag in the freezer waiting to be made into gin!

I discovered that the leaves of sweet potatoes are edible – and I just happen to have a big bed of sweet potatoes that are almost ready to harvest. Of course, I had to experiment and I discovered that they are really yummy when wilted with a little garlic and tomato. I suspect they will be awesome in a stir-fry with the mango sauce.

But just recently my sweet potato leaves have been feeding whole colonies of caterpillars and as I hadn’t realised that I could also eat the leaves, they, like the birds, have become well-fed. Most of the leaves show signs of being chomped, but I did manage to find a few hundred that didn’t look like lace! They were washed, soaked in vinegar (just in case there are any bugs still there that I can’t see), dried in the humidifier and crunched down to a fine powder for my morning smoothie!!! Next batch of sweet potato I grow will be apportioned a bit more in my favour through the use of protective netting, although I’ll still leave some for the caterpillars!

I am also bread making, but I am taking the easy option. I can no longer knead because neither of my shoulders work very well, so I bought a bread maker. I used to love kneading bread dough by hand. It’s one of those activities where you can really release any emotional upset.
The bread from the machine is divine!!!

Now it is time to get back to writing. The pantry shelves are filling with produce from the garden, and the oranges and guava are a long way off being ready to make into marmalade. Wonder when the ginger will be ready?

Thank you for reading

Please like and subscribe

Check out my new Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragonsandbooks

Auri’An Lay

Life through a neuro-divergent mind

No comments on Talking of Baking…
Distraction

04.01.2025

2024, Journeys Two

This is the first thing I have written in six days, and for me, who thinks by typing, that is just crazy.

I write every day. I write in my journal every day. With SDAM it’s the only way I have of keeping some kind of memory of what I have been doing. I write this blog, and I am deep into writing my fifth book, so how did it happen that I have written nothing other than the bare minimum in my journal for almost a week? Do I have writer’s block? Have I run out of things to write about? I don’t believe so, although on the first day or so of non-writing, my brain was a junky, gelatinous, mess of mush!

You know how, when you have a task that becomes the main focus in your life and you really have very little time or energy to focus on anything else? And then, when that job is complete and you can relax your brain and body, you just kind of melt into your favourite chair and shut down. Maybe you’ll pour yourself a celebratory glass of wine, or hit the chocolate – or both! That’s where I am. But it’s not writer’s block.

I’m in distraction mode. I am doing everything but write. In fact in these last few days it’s been very rare that I even think about writing – and for someone who thinks by writing, that’s kind of like shutting down all the systems in my head! I’ve been making bread; jars and jars of mango sauce and now I am focused on making a protein powder from the leaves of the sweet potatoes that are growing in my garden. I’ve been distracted by a huge monitor lizard that wandered through my garden and his friend the carpet python who has taken up residence in the big mango tree, and the little Willie Wagtail that joins me on my early morning walk around the garden.

But it is definitely not writers block.

What it is, is that my book falls into three main sections and the first draft of the first section is complete. Now I need to re-focus in a slightly different way for section two, and if it is going to be half as ‘interesting’ as section one I really need all my marbles functioning at 100%!

The book is based on a past life regression and, of course, in that regression the focus was on the life I lived at that time. I, as Cole, was the main player and I knew what that life looked like from birth to death. Except that, each day before I start working on this book, I meditate and talk with the characters – and they have been filling out the story. They have been filling in the gaps and vague places. And oh boy! I discovered in chapter six that a character that had died in the original storyline is actually going to be the pivot point for a whole series of books! Other minor characters have stepped up to greater importance and me – as Cole – have become a bit-player!

In this current lifetime I have Alexithymia – a disconnection to emotion. It’s a diagnosis that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because I am actually over-emotional. I cry at the drop of a hat!

What I have absolutely no idea about – or ability to express – is anger. I have almost 70 years of anger bottled up inside me, and in section one of this book, three of the five main characters are filled with anger! And I, guided by those pre-writing, meditation chats with the characters, have been learning how to let rip.

And oh boy! For the first time in my life I have been able to let go of so much pent up frustration. I’ve been able to do it a way that is safe, where I am best able to express my thoughts, and where I am not running the risk of upsetting someone else by disagreeing with them. In arguments, from the earliest childhood, I have been the victim. I have been without the power to respond. Without the ability to stand up and say “You are wrong.” Now I am the author. I write the script, and that is a powerful step forward in my growth and understanding of the challenges brought forward in this lifetime.

And Cole? He too was the underdog. The mundane person who moves through life, sometimes in places where another personality type would tread on toes or step on shoulders to make their mark in the world. And his deeply-buried, well hidden, anger is why it became possible for Atlantis to sink beneath the waves.

Thank you for reading

Please like and subscribe

Check out my new Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragonsandbooks

Auri’An Lay

Life through a neuro-divergent mind

No comments on Distraction
Sorrowful Songs

28.12.2024

2025, Journeys Two

I am writing this on the early morning of Christmas Eve, 2024. Christmas has been a difficult time for me for the past 24 years and this year has been no different, but yesterday, it appeared that I had been able to resolve the annual retelling of painful memories and start the journey forward. Once again, a fresh start for the approaching new year.

I sat at my desk with a cup of black coffee, opened my journal and decided to see what had happened this time last year. This is what jumped out at me.

24^th December 2023. 2.24pm

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

I have two very meaningful songs in my life. This, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Gorecki, is one of them. I started listening at 1.12pm and I came back to myself at 2.11pm but then discovered that this recording had more tracks than I had heard before.

For all its title and its inherent sadness, it is not so heart breaking as Mozart’s Requiem. The symphony starts so very quietly that for several minutes you are unsure if you are actually hearing anything, then a single cello is heard as if far in the distance and very slowly moving forward. It’s strange. This music is without any doubt “sorrowful” but there is also a deep knowledge hidden within the notes – that of Life.

Unusually, as I listened, I had visuals. It began with the first aria and I found myself setting up an old-fashioned camera – the type where there is a large box on a stand and you go under a dark cover to expose the glass. One of the very early cameras. I was setting it up to take in picture in a library. Not a public library, but the private room of an affluent gentleman. There was an architects drawing board in front of the books and a large wood desk in front of that. I didn’t see who was to be photographed. The architects drawing board was, to me, the most prominent feature and as I type this, I realise that this is a connection to my husband Ian who passed from this life in 1998. He frequently used such a board in his work.

I discovered this piece of music around the time that Ian was experiencing his first symptoms of Glioblastoma Multiforme. I turned to this symphony during the end part of his illness, when I had to work, alone, through the dark night in order to maintain an income and not lose our home at a time when I was trying to hold everything together and also nurse Ian. I had promised him that he would not have to go back to hospital and that he could die in his own bed. That was very important to him.

Through the lonely hours of the night, under the light of a single lamp in a large, empty and otherwise dark and scary office, THIS music kept me company. After he had passed and I returned to working during the day; a time when I frequently fell to the floor, paralysed and in constant, unbelievable physical pain for which the doctors could find no reason, this music kept me company. I listened on headphones as I played it on a continuous loop. It helped me to cope with going back to working in a noisy and busy office where there were too many people encroaching on my space and my emotions.

Yes. It is sorrowful. But for me it also holds hope. It tells me that even in death there is life. Pain can be fought; it can be experienced, acknowledged, accepted, and life will continue. It’s a hard lesson and one that every person who has lost someone they love will experience. The person leaves, they continue.

The music swells in waves. It takes the listener on a roller coaster of emotion from the deepest sorrow to the gentle beauty that can be seen in a field of flowers. Life within death.

There is a pause where I understood the symphony to end, but then two more sections came. These were chaotic. Where every instrument was playing out of tune yet the whole was focused. Not pleasant, but listenable. I understood this as the emotional chaos that precedes death and continues until it is time to be released.

For me, having just emerged from my annual melt-down – my time of chaos – over the cause of my Christmas being spent alone, this writing from last year about a piece of music which fills my heart with the deepest, most profound emotion a human can experience – that of Life within Death and Death within Life, has shown me the way forward. It IS sorrowful to lose a loved one, and even when a loved one still walks the earth, but there is no contact between you, it is still a form of death. We grieve, yet life continues in all its wonderful discordant, chaos.

In just eight days from my writing this post, we will step into another year – a year which, for many, will be filled with discord, chaos, and pain. Listen to Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, allow yourself to float in the emotions that you hold so tightly bound in your heart. Release the tensions, pains and pressures of the past, and step into the future – however chaotic you believe it will be. Look beyond the chaos, to the still, calm centre, and know that we, humanity, will flourish beyond this time.

Thank you for reading

Please like and subscribe

Check out my new Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragonsandbooks

Auri’An Lay

Life through a neuro-divergent mind

No comments on Sorrowful Songs
Slippery Time

21.12.2024

2024, Journeys Two

I have often said that Time is slippery. Sometimes we can get up in the morning and suddenly realise that it’s late evening and we wonder where on earth the day went to. Other days Time seems to drag on forever. We feel as if we have put in a full day’s work, chasing our tails and never getting any time to rest, and then we realise that it’s not even lunch time.

This morning was one of those ‘slippery’ days. I have a dodgy memory and poor executive function so my journal is an important element of my life. It’s ALWAYS open on my laptop and just about everything is written in there – and time-stamped. In the mornings I make myself a cup of coffee and open the laptop and plan my day around the basic stuff I need to remind myself about such as showering, meditating, eating… Most things I’d do even if they were not written in my journal, but I like to tick them off as DONE! Then I get into noting the weather and my level of pain the previous night. I went to make another cup of coffee and came back to my laptop to discover that it was three hours later.

I sat down with my coffee and had a really good think – what had I done? I’d spoken on the phone for over an hour with a friend; I’d made breakfast and eaten it whilst reading a book; I’d picked up 23 half-chewed mangoes that the cockatoos had left and three mangos that were still human edible. I’d emptied all the rubbish bins and sorted out some accounting; I’d made my bed and tidied the living area… basically, I’d done a whole heap of stuff and just ‘lost’ that time!

The day continued like that. It’s now 8.30pm and I’ve still not eaten. I have no idea where the time went, nor could I tell you what I have been doing because there was not one thing that stands out above anything else other than I taught a meditation class and picked up even more half-chewed mangos, getting half-chewed by mosquitos in the process. I remember that because I am still itching and my back-scratcher is my favourite thing in the world right now!

These are the everyday time slips that we all experience from time to time, but what about the really weird time slips?

There are a few of those that stand out for me and they often happen when I am driving. For example: on a good day it takes about 30 minutes to drive to the next town from where I live, but on ‘slippery-time days’ I can get there in 16 minutes – without speeding. That doesn’t seem possible, it’s 64km of twisting forestry road. Maybe I’d read the time incorrectly when I started? That could have happened except that I’ve had this happen before so I take specific note of the time when I get in the car.

And then there was the time – over 40 years ago now – where I am convinced I saw a UFO that I describe as a huge metallic Toblerone, parked in a field around lunch time and the next thing I knew the sun was setting and I was about 50 miles away from that place!

In my home town, we hold the Southern Hemisphere’s only UFO Festival and I had an opportunity to chat with a Forensic Ufologist about that incidence. He reckoned I was abducted.

Maybe that is why I am frequently called ‘weird’ by my sister!

And that’s what these time-slips are… just weird. There’s probably all kinds of science about what is happening in the brain, but I’m not a scientific person. Actually, I rather enjoy the mystery!

Feel free to mention, in the comments, any weird things you have experienced with time.

Thank you for reading

Please like and subscribe

Check out my new Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dragonsandbooks

Auri’An Lay

Life through a neuro-divergent mind

No comments on Slippery Time
Life Intention

14.12.2024

2024, Journeys Two

The question was asked:

What is the intention of your life?

What do you ‘intend’ to accomplish in your lifetime?

This required some thought.

There have been many things that I have thought were my Life Path, but always at the base level has been the need to help others. At heart I am a teacher and I have thought for many years that teaching was my destiny. I am getting close to 70 years of age and I have recently discovered, on a Journey to find who I am without my wounds, that I have a host of neuro-divergent traits which coloured my life with fear and uncertainty. The last few years have been a journey of discovery, acceptance and eventual forgiveness, and that journey has resulted in some major changes in how I view the world I travel through.

It was interesting that this question came up when it did. Only the previous day, something occurred which set me to doing a deep dive into almost the same question, and it was triggered by a conversation with a meditation student who had read my book The New Storyteller. In that book, I show through a number of short stories that it is possible to take a life story and look at it from a different perspective. This was how I had changed my life, and my meditation student had taken that advice and was on the first steps towards changing her story from something dark into something potentially healing.

What was still lacking for me, on my Journey, was Inner Peace. Therapy had shown that the only emotion I understood was that of Fear. Over the past couple of years I have discovered how to be Happy; how Receive as well as Give. I have discovered Joy and Beauty and so much more, but being able to wrap all these emotions into one package that I could hold in my heart and call Peace was like trying to hold water in a paper bag. My Journey in this lifetime has been to find that deep Inner Peace, something that is so elusive for so many people that it can feel impossible to achieve.

In understanding what I, personally, needed to learn in this lifetime, I have been able to expand that into contemplation of what I want accomplish, and not just what I want to accomplish, but I am here to accomplish. I now know who I am, now I need to look at why. What is it I am here to achieve.

I needed, first, to recognise my lack of inner peace – and that has been my journey over the the last few months as have I come to accept that much of my fear has come about because of the confusion of not understanding, at a most basic and physical level, the workings of my mind and how I move through the world; and so I have worked towards unravelling of the mysteries of what makes me ‘tick’ and the result is, as I sit here writing this, I finally recognise this Peace within me.

Can I hold it, come what may? Not a chance, not yet – but those moments, like this one as I type this post, are like gemstones in a river – beautiful and precious.

What do I intend to accomplish in this life time?

It is my writing that brings me Peace, and it was my meditation student who showed me the path that I now see was always there, hidden in dense energy of fear. When I write, I feel that Peace. I also feel the emotion of the story that the words are portraying. I feel a connection through those words to the person who is reading them. I write for that one person. I write for you – you who are reading these words, and it is my hope that in these words you find something that inspires you to bring something that is beautiful and peaceful into your life.

My intention is to touch, through my writing, the soul of another human in a way that encourages them to seek their own healing journey.

No comments on Life Intention
The Soul of the Story

07.12.2024

2024, Journeys Two

I thought I had everything planned for my new book. It’s my first novel and I know that I have a beyond-rotten memory and keeping track of the story was going to be an issue. I have a number of neuro-divergent traits that affect memory and when I read a book, I can turn a page and forget the names of all the characters – even the main ones. The names of the places where the action is happening and pretty much any other details of the story become lost in the dark and silent stillness that is my mind. There is a bonus with this memory issue though, I can finish reading a book and go back to the beginning and enjoy it just as much the 27^th time through! I’m the same with movies.

I’ve already published four books but each chapter in those books is a stand-alone thing and rarely includes any dialogue, so I knew it would be a huge challenge to remember what character number 7 did in chapter three when I am writing chapter 24. I’d have to re-read the whole book to get to know the character again before I could move on – and that would slow me down a fair bit in this writing.

Having worked extensively with Excel in the dim and distant past, that is where I turned to. I spent a few weeks building a simple (yet complicated) spreadsheet where the entire storyline was laid out. Down the left hand side of the spreadsheet are all the characters complete with copious notes about what they look like, age, ranking in importance to the story, what they do in the storyline and how that turns out plus any interactions with other characters.

Along the top of the spreadsheet all the chapters are laid out in sections that depict specific parts of the story and when you cross-reference you may find that character number 3, when he appears in chapter four will be doing such-and-such a thing with character number 5 (who will also have notes from her point of view).

Down the right hand side there are columns for places, major events, and background info such as religious beliefs, how the transport system works, and when they last had a haircut. And there is a final column which lists all the million and one things I need to research so that there are no glaring technical errors.

With all that done, I started writing the actual book. It was working perfectly. I knew exactly where the story was going and then, in meditation, the main character told me that I needed to include XYZ into the story.

What? But XYZ is actually a really good idea so I went back to the beginning and started turning the storyline around so that the XYZ event could happen. And then it happened again with another major character. And with a third.

I had a choice: I could tell all the characters to shut up and stop interrupting my meditations; I could stop meditating, or I could listen.

I chose to listen.

The story line is based on a past-life regression I had a few years ago. It’s a great story, but when you allow the characters to tell what really happened, that great story becomes a potential best-seller!!! I’m beginning to wonder if I should change the genre to a Thriller instead of Fantasy!

I’m 16,000 words in, I’ve just finished chapter six, and the original main character hasn’t even been born yet. This character is me. It’s who I was in that past-life regression and it appears that I am not as important as I like to think! He’s now been moved from the number one position on my spreadsheet to number five. The character that wasn’t supposed to survive beyond the first chapter has suddenly become the central pivot point for this book – and the series that I now know will follow.

In a lecture from Collette Baron Reid, she said to listen to the soul of the story; to let the soul tell the story. Oh boy – it’s not just the soul of the story, it’s the souls of every character in the story!!! And they are all clamouring for attention and everyone of them has a wonderful thought about what to include!

No comments on The Soul of the Story
Writing

30.11.2024

2024, Journeys Two

I normally write these articles a few weeks in advance, that way, if I get caught up with other stuff, this is one thing I don’t need to worry about, but right now I am eyebrow deep into writing (and re-writing) my next book and today I suddenly realised I needed to pull back from my book and write next week’s post.

It’s my first attempt at a fantasy novel and I am discovering how easy it is to get so totally lost in the the growing story that I sometimes I can lose an entire day!

Writing a novel is very different to writing a blog or a short story. For one thing, you don’t have to worry too much about dialogue, but a novel where the characters never talk, would probably go down like a lead balloon – and I have discovered that writing dialogue is not my best point. I am, therefore, following a rapid learning curve and finding that there are some rules that just seem really silly to me.

I am told, for example, that when a character talks it is always in the present tense; but descriptive text is in the past tense because you, the author, is telling of something that has happened!!! And then, just to complicate things, my personal punctuation rules are not really acceptable because, well, they have uniquely developed from about 60 years of writing how I speak, and ignoring every rule in the book other than a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop! Everything else is a result of where I stop to take a breath when I read out loud!

I also start sentences with But and And and So because that is my syntax and, to my mind, it makes text seem less stilted and more personal: from me, the writer, to you the reader as if we are conversing.

But this storyline is demanding that I write it, and don’t stop for anything so arcane as punctuation. For now that, and grammar, can take a holiday because, whilst I write the story there are no rules, and dialogue will happen as is needed. Yes, there will be some major editing work once the story is finished, but that’s to be expected of any book being written.

Right now though, I am writing the soul of this book and it is amazing. Characters are developing and growing and are becoming so real it’s almost as if they are sharing my headspace with me. With aphantasia, I can’t visualise the characters or the landscape, but I am feeling them in every cell of my body.

This is fantasy, but it is also so very real. A world to lose yourself into. And it is my story.

No comments on Writing
The Fisherman’s Shoes

23.11.2024

2024, Journeys Two

Each morning I go for a walk to the edge of the sea. There are some massive sandbags on the beach about a kilometre from my house, and that is where I stop and meditate. The bags are meant to stop erosion but really, they are an ugly blemish on the pristine North Queensland beach. They do have some benefits though – they are the perfect height to climb up and know that you might just be far enough away from the crocs to think you could get out of the way if one was feeling a bit hungry.

Today, instead of meditating in solitude, there was a man fishing. I almost left to find somewhere else, but decided that there was enough space for both of us, so after checking to see if he was OK with someone intruding on his quiet space, I sat down and took a few deep breaths to settle into meditation.

Except we got to talking.

We pretty much put the world to rights, and had a good laugh about many things, but there were two points in the conversation that were worth digging a little bit deeper into. One thing was about an ambition he’d had for many years, and had decided that he was not going to eventually die without at least giving it a go. That ambition was to run a marathon.

First, he did his research and worked out which route in all of Australia was the flattest. That happened to be the Gold Coast Marathon, so he committed himself to taking part – and committed himself to running it. He bought shoes. Then he started running and discovered that he really doesn’t have the right body-shape for running. He’s a blend of mesomorphic and endomorphic somatotypes. In other words, he’s not very tall, has broad shoulders and short legs. His body is built for strength, not endurance, and to run a marathon, endurance is what is needed.

Very determined, he went running most days – and discovered that he HATED it. Running was definitely not his thing! But he’d made a commitment to himself – and he’d bought the shoes, so over the next six months he continued his training. He finally ran the race and came in with a very respectable time of just over four hours. He told me that he’d have cracked the four hours if he hadn’t stopped for a cigarette in the middle!!!

What did he do when he got to the finish line? He took those shoes off and put them in the rubbish bin.

It’s a wonderful story, and for me it tells of the power of determination – and of knowing when is the right time to quit. This fisherman had an ambition that was so far out of his comfort zone it was laughable (just ask his mates at the pub – they laughed their socks off when he first mentioned it), but he was aware that the years were passing and that if he didn’t try now, he’d have to acknowledge that this would be one ambition that would never be realised and – most importantly – he would forever be disappointed in himself.

Everything was stacked up against him. His age, his fitness level, the fact that he smoked and that his friends thought it was a huge joke. But he bought those shoes. They became the symbol of his determination and each day as he put them on, they became the driving factor in achieving his dream.

But he also discovered that the dream and the reality are not necessarily on the same page. I suspect that the dream hadn’t included how very hard it is to persevere in rolling out of bed and going running, especially when it is something almost alien to everyday life. The dream would not include recovery from tired and aching muscles and joints; and it would definitely not have included how tempting it would be to simply give up. And to be honest, that’s what I would have done even though I am not a stranger to heavy fitness training regimes.

I suspect that this fisherman came to hate those shoes and all the represented: the sweat, the aches and pains, the injuries, the tears. And that, I also suspect, is why the shoes went in the bin!

There is no doubt that he had set himself an almost impossible task, and many of us aim to metaphorically climb mountains, but how many of us actually hold the determination and commitment to see it through to completion. At one time, when I was much younger, I thought I did; and I pushed many boundaries as an elite athlete, but ultimately my determination was not one tenth of what it took this middle-aged man of average fitness to live his dream. It was hard for sure, but how many of us can stand tall and know that you took a dream and made it real – and carried it through even when you discovered that the dream and the reality were on opposite sides of a coin.

Now the fisherman can stand tall and tell a stranger – not in words, as most of this story was in the undercurrents – that he took an ambition, a lifetime dream, and made it real.

PS – the other story was of the idiots who come to our beaches and disregard the warning signs about crocodiles. There are a few tales to be told there too!

No comments on The Fisherman’s Shoes
Metaphor

16.11.2024

2024, Journeys Two
I recently read a post on Substack where the writer talked of how a particular metaphor had helped her to overcome difficulties. She had seen a photo which epitomised all the strengths she was seeking in life and this got me to thinking about the metaphors in my life.

I could never appreciate what a metaphor is until I discovered that I have multisensory aphantasia. Our language is filled with such things:
- “I see what you mean,”
- “Yes, I understand, it’s as clear as day,”
- “Picture yourself at the beach,”
- “If you can’t sleep, count sheep jumping over a fence.”
Until you discover that up to 98% of people can – literally – see these things in their mind, and you can’t, you have no idea what you have been missing out on. Because until that happens, we are all just talking metaphors – aren’t we?

When you do start to understand that people can, literally, create images in their head, it’s a huge shock and you realise that these things are not just metaphors and speech patterns but actual experiences that you are missing out on.

For some people, it hits them really hard. They feel different and incomplete as if something is wrong with them because their brain doesn’t work in the same way as everyone else. Many people go through a full-on grief process as they work out that they are not living in a world of metaphors but a world of technicolour mind pictures – and they don’t have access. They sometimes start to look deeply at themselves and explore what else could be affected. Maybe they are hopeless at playing the piano because the have aphantasia? Maybe aphantasia is the reason they get lost when they are driving somewhere new? The funniest one I’ve come across (and I’d love to know more about the thought process behind this one) is that maybe aphantasia is why they can’t do cartwheels!!!

Aphantasia isn’t just limited to an inability to voluntarily make images in the mind. All the other senses can be involved too.
- Do you like to remember the smell of the flowers in your mother’s garden?
- How about what it feels like to cuddle your grandchild?
- What about recalling how a certain type of ice cream feels in your mouth,
- And that favourite song on the radio?
I have total multisensory aphantasia which is a total ‘mind blindness’ of all the senses. I cannot voluntarily see/imagine images in my mind. Neither can I imagine the smell of a rose, hear a song playing in my mind, recall the taste of ice-cream or remember how it felt to hold my daughter when she was born. I do not even hear my own voice in my head.

But it’s not all bad, Aphantasics are super good at conceptual thinking. We know, for example what information is needed to ‘know’ an elephant:

Aphantasia was first named in 2015 and it was 2017 when a lecturer told me to be careful when scripting meditations because not everyone could see in their mind’s eye. I still recall the shock I felt when I realised that not everyone’s inner world worked through metaphor. Now, I am comfortable with what I know about aphantasia and the many neuro-diverse traits I have since discovered I hold.

To be honest, I’m pretty sure that I would hate to have my dark and peaceful mind over-run with voices, songs, and pictures.
No comments on Metaphor
Greatest Achievement

09.11.2024

2024, Journeys Two

I was asked a question:

What is your greatest achievement?

Daley Thompson won the Decathlon Gold Medals at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games. He broke the world record for the event four times. I ran track with him.

That sounds really good except that I only did it once and that was because I wasn’t quick enough to find an excuse not to.

We were testing the new Polar Heart Rate monitor and Frank Dick, Daley’s coach, hauled me in to run with him. At that time I was an aerobics instructor and at my peak in fitness, and I was the very first registered athletics coach in the UK with aerobics as my discipline. Aerobics was being considered as a future Olympic sport and I wanted to be involved.

I’m an endomorphic body type – that is, even when I am at my peak fitness, I still look short and round – so I am pretty sure that I was thought of as the ‘balance check’ in this track event. The short, fat, obviously unfit (because I am short and round) woman!

We ran just 8 x 220m laps. My body shape dictates that I am not a runner and I often joked that by the time I’d finished my laps, Daley had run his, gone home and had a shower, played a round of golf and was just finishing dinner as I crossed the finishing line.

But it was a totally different picture when the results finally came in and I had that small moment of unexpected fame. Apparently my recovery time was faster than Daley’s, and that caused a bit of a furore because at that time, your recovery time was a major indicator to your fitness level, and on the surface it appeared I was fitter than a gold-level Olympic athlete!

Moral… Your body shape (or anything else that you consider a limiting factor to achieving your dream) can be totally wrong for what you love to do. Do it anyway.

BUT: Even better was when an elderly lady came to me to say thank you. Two years previously she had been living in an aged care home and totally bed-bound. I had been asked if I would run an exercise class for about 12 people who were living a dreadful life. Every morning they would be lifted out of bed and into a chair, and in the evening they would be returned to bed. They hardly had visitors, and were all despondently sitting ‘in God’s waiting room’. Exercise and Aging was my ‘speciality subject’ and I agreed to hold a weekly class.

I researched what the popular music would have been for these folk and when I listened, some of it totally shocked me! Today’s blatant word usage and references in music is nothing to the level of shock that clever subtlety can bring. George Formby was a master! And I invite you to check out a song from 1941 by Florence Desmond The Deepest Shelter in Town.

We started with finger exercises. Touching the thumb with each finger in time to the music and we incorporated wrist movements and shoulder shrugs, and suddenly these lovely older people were wrist dancing!

Week after week we built on this. The elders moved into sitting in chairs and we started toe tapping.

Two years later one lady thanked me. She told me that she had just made a cup of tea for herself. The first time in ten years. She hadn’t been able to reach for the cup or lift the kettle. Now she had both the flexibility and the strength to do this simple task that we all take for granted. Even more than the exciting story with Daley Thompson, THIS epitomises my goals in life; but both events, for me, tell the same message. If you have a goal – strive for it and don’t give up. Whether the results are Olympic medals or making a cup of tea – the sense of achievement is exactly the same.

And those beautiful, funny elders? They told me as they walked into class one day that they had played hooky from the Home. They had hired a bus to take them on a pub crawl!

1 comment on Greatest Achievement