Pockets of smiles and flies!

Oh it's been a day!  I could sit here and type out all the shitty things about it but I don't want to write that anymore than you want to read about it so I was thinking to myself while staring at this blank page; what's been good about it.  And I was pleasantly surprised with what I came up with...

When I got up, before I'd even had my breakfast rather than do my thing of idly browse my emails and FB messages (9 times out of 10 all spam anyway) I made a cuppa and chop-chop-chopped away at veggies to pop in the slow cooker.  Actually, I tell a little lie, I did briefly go online to google how you cook a fennel (I didn't have a clue what one went with!) but once I saw they make good additions tomato based dishes I took my foggy little sleepy head (everyone has that in the first hour of consciousness, right?) down to the kitchen and didn't need to think as I choppidy-chopped.  It was so therapeutic!

My slow cooker is the most recent addition to my weight-busting tools of success and this was the first time I got to properly use it.  Here's a list of what I (literally) threw into it and it made a fantastic, healthy, low fat sweet potato filling:

• Quorn mince
• Chopped fennel
• Chopped celery stick
• One red and one normal onion
• 2 big tomatoes chopped
• 1 tin of tomatoes
• Dash of balsamic vinegar
• Dash of soy sauce
• Mixed herbs
• A cup of vgetable stock
• Celery salt and pepper

It cooked a dream and the smell was HEAVENLY as it was bubbling faithfully away.  I literally looked forward to it all day.  And the taste?  Immense!!  I enjoyed every mouthful and I was so impressed with myself for cooking something new and healthy.

Also, amidst the chaos of today I found 20 minute of 'me' time while I was running errands in town.  I slipped into the local Buddhist Centre and sat quietly in the meditation room and for those precious minutes I was in an impenetrable bubble and the stresses and strains out the outside world, which I could still hear bustling away in the background like a mindless fly that almost amused me, just melted away...

We all have rubbish days.  But I'm becoming ever more mindful to the little windows within them that aren't quite so bad, those pockets of smiles that make the rest bearable.  I'm making a conscious effort to give the good stuff more of my attention and to not give the crap stuff any more of my precious energy than it absolutely requires.

We can't check out of life, we can't stop the stresses of it bothering our consciousness but we can occasionally achieve some respite by swatting it away like a pesky fly.  Of course, as is the nature of flies though, they do eventually come back!!