Some people thrive on routine – they love knowing what came before and what is to follow. They work best when all is calm, when all is ordered, when all is predictable.
They do their best work writing in their sacred studies where no-one dare enter without express permission and where spontaneity is a word that evokes terror – not excitement.
I have decided this week that I am another kind of creature. That I operate best amongst the bustle and hap-hazardness that being surrounded by a busy city evokes.
I have always accepted that my best “work” has come out of being in rather unorthodox surroundings. My “best selling” seminar – where I weave the skills of Memory, Mind Mapping, Study Skills and Speed Reading in a six hour onstage blab-fest was conceived, created, refined and partly rehearsed during a 13 hour layover in the blizzard conditions of Bangor, Maine.
Trust me- there is nothing much to do at that airport …………. but those hours enabled me to create on the back of a road map (the only paper I could buy) a seminar that has earned me tens of thousands of pounds in the past.
I think I had half convinced myself that I was channeling Stephen King (Bangor is his home town BTW) as the words, the concepts, the intricate weaving of humour and teaching points unspooled from me in a an effortless stream.
And today I felt that same frisson ……………………….
Today -as we hopped on and off the open top bus in the sun – constantly moving, constantly being exposed to the new, the novel, the unusual ……….. moving through a city I thought I knew, but realised at the same time I was meeting it with fresh eyes as I introduced my boys to “No Mean City”.
Newness – novelty – surprise are things that my little life back home has gradually worn away …………. so that today my senses have almost been burned out with the constant succession of the new.
Now I could blame the sunshine – and for sure most of my memories of Glasgow are of the rain, or the fog or the snow. The sun dresses it up in its Sunday finest and it flirts with its visitors like the grand old lady that she is.
But in walking through this “new City” I met myself again – the younger, braver, bolder lass of years gone by ……….. and she has walked beside me, shadowing my footsteps all day. She drifts like a wraith,drawing my attention to young lovers in the street, young families at play, old couples walking carefully arm-in-arm. She makes me look – she makes me really see.
My notebook is brimming with ideas – with frantic pen sketches and half-formed questions and I am aware that I feel that I am shedding layers of skin, layers of protection and am digging ever deeper to find ………….. I am not sure what I will find ………… but I have a feeling that by the time I return home the “Single Mum” label will no longer be one that serves me, that the bubble of that little life is well and truly burst.
I have a feeling that the person who returns home will be a bigger, braver, bolder and more connected person that the one who packed her case on Monday.
For the boys this has been a Glasgow Adventure – but amongst the busyness and hustle of a city I found a braver, more ambitious person inside me than I have seen in many years.
Turns out – travel really does change you!!!
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