100 Days of Wonder – #3
In spite of the smile in the photo, I hated most (all?) of my first Disney race. It was a half marathon. Training had been awful, I hated running and I did it only because we were doing it for charity. Our friend Rachel had died the previous year and nothing much made any sense. The run was for her. I look back at that run with wonder and awe. At this point the only thing running had taught me was that I hated running. I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know how I got round. I had no clue what I was doing. That woman in that picture there – she had so much mental strength, she was so determined to finish and she crossed the finish line purely because doing anything else would have been unthinkable. On this occasion doing the impossible wasn’t fun, not at all. But I look back at this picture and smile. It’s the perfect reminder that we are always stronger than we think we are. I suspect that this run also set the scene for what is now a more than 10 year love/hate relationship with running and with RunDisney in particular. I look at 2013 me with so much admiration that I sometimes forget that’s me. But it is and I find both joy and wonder in that.
100 Days of Wonder – #2
The picture is of me in January 2006 in the lobby of the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World in Florida. It was my first trip. I didn’t care about Disney, I tagged along for the Florida winter sun. That trip changed EVERYTHING. It taught me to suspend reality. It taught me to throw myself into my imagination with reckless abandon and to trust it. Trusting my imagination was something I had lost studying law, imagination had felt mostly irrelevant to my degree and in many ways to the PhD I was working on at the time. But re-discovering my ability to imagine different ways of being and thinking have been key to my development as a law teacher and academic. The trip also reminded me of the power of good story telling and that drew me into Disney. Not that I knew it then, but that being drawn into Disney set the safety net that I would need, years later, when academia so nearly broke the joy and wonder in that twenty-something year old little kid in the picture. Sometimes I miss her and I often wish I could whisper in her ear: ‘It’s fine, you’re doing it right!’
100 Days of Wonder – #1
I have Covid so I have been both bored and incapable of actually doing anything useful for the last few days. Yesterday, to cheer ourselves up, we booked tickets for Disney on Ice: 100 Years of Wonder for next spring and as it happens, today it is 100 days until we go on our next Disney Adventure. As a result I have been daydreaming, reflecting, thinking… whatever, about the idea of wonder and of escapism. In my induction talks to our new students I also talked about finding the joy in what we do, particularly when we are having a hard time. So as I have been drifting in and out of conscious thought staring at random stuff on TV and coughing my lungs out, I was trying to look for wonder and joy. Here’s number 1 of what may or may not be a 100 day series of finding them and using my Disney or Disney related photos to do so. Of course it is Disney based, that’s where my brain goes when it needs to either escape or is bored or needs cheering up. But in scrolling through photos and closing my eyes and mentally flicking through memories I have thought about so much more than Disney. So bear with me over these post, some will be about work, some will be about running, some will be about life. I hope some will make you laugh and some will make you think but most of all I hope they inspire us all to pause and find joy in the wonder of our lives. I remember the first time I saw Disney World fireworks. I had never seen anything like it. I had never seen anything like Disney World and I was already pretty overwhelmed after a day of having my mind blown repeatedly. I remember standing at the edge of a very busy Main Street USA. I remember that it should have been noisy but that it felt like I was in my own bubble and everything else faded into the background as I was completely in the moment. When I am trying to write or really focus on something, that’s the feeling I try and re-create. It’s both happy and joyful and completely focused. The Disney Fireworks can still do it for me. Here they are from our last trip.
My Conversations 