100 Days of Wonder – #91
I forgot yesterday! After 90 days of really diligently remembering and wanting to blog – sometimes, but not that often, writing several posts at once and scheduling them, yesterday I just never thought about it. Maybe just a symptom of being in the post Christmas, pre New Year liminality. In my defence I didn’t feel great yesterday. Nothing specific, just a weird sort of meh (Kath said I was Eyore-ish). And, I was lost in my book in a way that happens rarely because I now so rarely read for pleasure. .
So here’s me and the Bear of Very Little Brain in 2019 to remind myself not to be cross with myself for breaking the run. Instead I am being kind, marvelling at the fact that I did 90 posts in a row without missing one and just giving you this post with another to follow this evening. I’m also acknowledging that the is joy and wonder to be had in days just lost to being and reading and that yesterday was not a wasted day but a proper rest day. I think the Bear would approve. I’m also quite excited now about seeing Winnie the Pooh again soon. He gives reassuring hugs and once tried to kidnap Kath’s Mum – but maybe that’s a whole other story.
Happy whatever day it is today!
100 Days of Wonder – #90
Now that Christmas and birthday are done, we enter that weird time between Christmas and New Year. The old not quite done, the new not quite here. You get glimpses of the possibilities and potential of what is to come but you’re also not quite ready to let go of what was. I love this liminality. I love being in liminal spaces, maybe because of the promise of endless possibilities and new adventures that they hold. There’s the possibility of new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things, of positive change and discovery but at this point there is no risk, no threat of chucking the baby out with the bathwater and abandon the good in the pursuit of the new. Liminal is uncertain, yes, but it’s exciting.
Disney World is incredibly good at creating spaces that, to me anyway, feel very liminal. There are no harsh endings and beginning just lots of transitions. You can see it everywhere. For example as you walk from the Contemporary Resort to the Magic Kingdom, you move along the path and it’s very resort like but you transition to Magic Kingdom park bit by bit as you walk along the path with commemorative bricks, through security, past themed bins, under the railways arches and into Main Street USA. As you walk under the arches there is a change and the opening up into Main Street is as close as you will come to a big reveal – but it doesn’t feel jarring or sudden. It feels like you have been building to it and when you get there you are ready. You see it in the parks with the transitions between worlds. You can linger with the magic of the castle right until you are carried away by the anticipation of Tomorrowland. Or, if you go the other way, you can feel the pixie dust right until the excitement of Adventureland hits. You never feel like you have to exit, or stop, instead you transition easily, comfortably and without ever breaking the spell from one story into the next. You also see it within rides. You transition through a liminal not quite park, not quite ride space as you make your way through the queue and somehow it keeps the magic alive. My brain really likes the lack of stopping and starting different things and the encouragement to just flow from one to the other through these spaces that are both nothing and the places you came from and the places you are going at the same time. It seems I like being in-between – where nothing has yet finished and anything is possible.
100 Days of Wonder – #89
Do you ever do the thing where you’re tired and should really go to bed but you don’t because you want to hang on to the feeling of something or because the day has been too people-y and you need you time. I don’t do it often, when I am tired, I go to bed and I sleep. But I do it sometimes and it is usually because there have been people around me all day, often but not necessarily staying at our house, and I need the quiet time when everyone has gone to bed. I also often do it on my birthday. It’s a balance on my birthday because I can’t stay up later than midnight because then it’s not my birthday anymore but I also like to linger with my own thoughts. You know by now that I need no invitation to reflect…
So today I am thinking about my last rotation round the sun (it’s been a pretty good one) and what the next might hold. I am thinking about creating my bubble in which I can just be, about who I am, who I was, who I want to be and all of those big questions. That reflection and sitting with those thoughts are restorative to me. They help me re-charge my batteries. I was thinking about this earlier and wondered why the solitude, quiet and reflection that I often crave in the late evening on my birthday has the same effect as being at Disney – re-charing me? Thinking about that I was drawn to the memory of a particular Disney experience – dinner at the California Grill at the top of the Contemporary Resort. And in particular watching the Magic Kingdom fireworks from the balcony. The picture is from the fireworks in January 2023 and even though the balcony was full of people, standing there, shivering slightly in the cool air, listening to the music through the restaurants speaker system and watching the night sky light up, it felt like it was just for us. And that feeling is replicated again and again with so many experiences at Disney. We are perhaps familiar with the saying that you can be surrounded by people and still be lonely and that’s definitely true but at Disney I can be surrounded by people, immersed in huge crowds in a way that would just be anxiety inducing anywhere else, and I can feel the same sense of just being me as I do in those rare moments of complete alone time at home. It seems its not about who else is there, it’s about a particular feeling and state of mind but one that I only experience in those late evenings when everyone else in the house is already asleep or at Disney World.
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