100 Days of Wonder – #26
After the 2019 Dopey Challenge (if you googled that or clicked the link, yes you read that right, it is mad and 48.6 miles over 4 days is ridiculous), we took Dopey out to the parks to celebrate. You could say he went on a bit of a bender and there weren’t many sweet treats he didn’t try. For he, read we. It was an epic celebration of fun and silliness fuelled by good coffee, lots of food and some fancy drinks with lights and straws.
Completing a big impossible challenge like running races on 4 consecutive days with a marathon on Day 4 obviously warrants a big celebration but as I was looking through the pictures trying to pick just one (and failing, obviously), I was thinking about how celebrating the small stuff is even more important. Perhaps not always with a sweet treat or a light up drink but marking things completed, celebrating a job well done or giving yourself a pat on the back for holding your shit together are all worth consciously doing. So today I am celebrating 2 things: Senior colleagues having your back and students with brilliant ideas. And how? With a cup of tea and a small square of Ritter Sport chocolate, perfectly meshing together my German childhood chocolate with my oh so very English drink. It made for a lovely reflective moment and a smile in an otherwise busy day. Perfect. What are you celebrating today? And how?
100 Days of Wonder – #24
Yesterday I said I would write about the places in Disney I got to for quiet and calm (other than the Winnie the Pooh ride already mentioned). I haven’t got the headspace to find the photos this evening so instead let’s talk about sleep! Disney beds are comfy! The towl art we got from the mousekeepers last time was spectacular – we got something new daily and it adds a spark of magic. But sleep. It can be tempting at Disney to be on the go all the time. If you do rope drop to fireworks it’s a long day and the number of overtired children and adults is scary! For me part of the magic is being able to come back to the hotel for an afternoon nap. I rarely lie in at Disney and I like the fireworks but rarely have a really late night, but I do like an afternoon nap. But the fear of missing out and not making the most of the holiday can be real. It can feel wasteful to have a nap and sleep away the holiday. Bon Jovi’s Sleep when I’m Dead comes to mind… But that doesn’t make sense to me. I have always been exceptionally good at sleeping. Apparently I slept through early as a baby, I used to sleep 12 hours a night easily, I used to nap (completely sober) in nightclubs as a student. I can sleep. I watch all these people rushing round Disney, ticking things off the list, insisting everything is seen and done and everyone is tired and miserable and not really enjoying anything. Sleep could help with that! In fact sleep helps with most things. I have stopped trying to reduce sleep time to get stuff done. If anything I need to sleep more if work is piling up and I need to be efficient and productive. And I know this, I have always known this and yet every now and again I seem to forget. That’s a warning and one I am now much better at taking seriously. Lots of sleep for me is essential. 8 hours a night minimum and every so often a few days of hibernation are blissful. If there is one thing I really do know I am good at, it’s sleeping! And that makes me really lucky because EVERYTHING is better after a proper night’s sleep – particularly if you wake up at Disney!
100 Days of Wonder – #22
Ah Pluto! The first time I went to Disney World it took me a minute to suspend reality enough to do the whole character thing. Now I look forward to the silliness of the interaction. But silliness isn’t really what this post is about. The first time I went, characters like Pluto and even Mickey Mouse didn’t really mean anything to me. I didn’t watch cartoons as a kid, not that I remember anyway and I definitely couldn’t have told you the difference between Goofy and Pluto or Chip and Dale and Donald Duck has nephews? Anyway, over the last 20 years I have watched a lot of the old shorts as well as Disney Classics like Snow White (but not Bambi, I saw Bambi at the cinema when I was little and I’m still traumatised) and somehow that has set everything else Disney in context. I didn’t know I wanted or needed context but knowing the old stuff has made me enjoy the new(er) stuff more. It has also made me think about going back to the foundations or basics in so many things: Running, yoga, work. Knowing and understanding the foundations means we can build from them, we can critique and challenge them and we can learn from them. Sometimes we need to go back to the foundations or starting points to correct our course or to go on a new adventure. Maybe the Disney classics, the seminal works in any given discipline, the Couch to 5k programme or simple sun salutations are a different kind of base camp to the one made up of the familiar that I mentioned before, but one that is just as important. (And in case you are wondering, Chip has a black nose and Dale has a red nose)
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