Ch-ch-ch-ch...

...changes...
I'm metamorphosing into a Nanna. Or a hippie. Or maybe I'm becoming a Hippie-Nanna? I've been hibernating over this relentless winter, hanging out in my house, sucking up lots of family time and just being me a bit more. And as is the nature of my head, I've spent lots of time pondering. Well, that and pinning stuff on Pinterest. In fact the pinning is bringing clarity. It's giving me a high resolution picture of who I am and what is important to me. I've pinned lots of wholesome recipes, lots of cakes, lots of activities for doing with kids, lots and lots of house pics and DIY's and oodles upon oodles of crafty ideas. I've gotten a taste for the simple life and it's making an awful lot of sense. Big picture sense. So, being a Hippie-Nanna, I'm entitled to sprout opinionated and controversial ideas. So here I go, just putting it out there...

1-Life is that thing you're doing now. Like right now. Not down the track when you've earned enough money to pay for the life you want, no. Now. So, ask yourself punk, are you happy?

2- Every minute of the day you spend working is a minute you've traded of your own life. So, if you hate your job, change your life so it doesn't own you and all those precious minutes, because you're not getting them back. Pare down your extravagant lifestyle because having less can be awesome, working more? Not so awesome. If you love your job and it's important? You rock.

3- Is ambition all it's cracked up to be? It's shoved down our throats that we should do more, be more and aspire to more. The happiest people aren't stressing about what
they should be achieving, they're hanging out in the now. That 'now' I mentioned earlier. You know, LIFE?

3a- Hold on dear, I'll just put my big picture spectacles on. Yes, that's better. Now I can see that it was ambitious humans aspiring to greatness who have caused all the pollution, destruction and poverty in our world. Thank you ambitious people for war and powerful weapons. Thank you for making your amazing products so appealing we'll happily support the slave labour that creates all this lovely, shiny stuff we so desperately need. Thank you for international travel so we can all have annual holidays where we can be unwelcome tourists in places just as nice as our own local spots, while polluting our way across the skies. Thank you for creating a food industry which allows access to immeasurable quantities of crap food that makes us sick and fresh food we waste through lack of motivation to cook it. Lastly and genuinely, thank you ambitious people running charities to clean up the mess and repair all the damage we've caused ourselves. If it weren't for ambition we wouldn't need you.

4- Family is the number one, absolute top of the list, most important thing. If we all took good care of our own families, we'd need to invest far less money, time and energy into fixing all the screw ups, screwing up our society. It's that looking after your own back yard thing. Good one Nanna.

5- And one more to ruffle some feathers. Equality in society today is bullshit. Men continue on more or less the same trajectory they've always followed. Work hard, bring home the most money, drink beer and mow the lawn (credit to those blokes and sheilas taking pride in being the exception that makes this rule). While women (according to several studies I've half read in quality news publications) still do most of the house work and most of the child rearing. The big bonus now is, we're also expected to do all this while being in paid employment. I thought equality was about having choice. Well I choose child raising and homemaking, with as much art making as I can wedge in the tiny gaps in between. Respect it.