Focus on the positive. See things the sunny way up. Turn that frown upside down. We’ve heard it all before, I’ve preached it before too. But how can you really anchor yourself to something resembling happiness when your best friend, your closest confidante and most trusted companion is put down a few months after gorging through the trash and eating left over birthday cake? The act was fine, funny even. Now I am impatient with loud barks, reluctant to becoming too attached in case something happens. They’re not Cindy, they won’t come close. But is happiness acceptance? Or moving on? Reading and absorbing and being smacked in the face with social guidelines telling you “how to be happy by 3pm” isn’t exactly conducive to developing your own relationship with this idea. Focusing on balancing all areas of your life, on the “in betweens” if you will, leads me in any case to a furious Googling session with key terms including “cheap but legit supplements”, “how long does it take to learn the splits” and “top 10 transformational books”. Does balance include getting up at 5am for a sunrise yoga class only to fall asleep during Savasana and go back to bed when you get back home? If it does, I’m nailing this thing.
The internet can’t answer all my questions unfortunately. Sometimes experiencing something terrible is enough to give you a wonderfully new lens through which to see your life. One of my favourite part time jobs was a flamenco dancer in a Spanish restaurant from the age of sixteen. The restaurant was (and perhaps still is) owned by a Turkish family who quite simply had no idea about Spanish culture. After a particularly difficult night, where our final dance included encouraging customers to dance with us failed miserably and resulted in us almost begging couples to leave their tables, he asked us to step outside for a chat. I think now is the time when I should mention his habit of drinking from lunch time until he offended enough customers and closed up shop for the night. He informed us that the show had to change in some way and suggested that we wear shorter dresses. Flamenco. Shorter dresses. It just wouldn’t work. I was on the cusp of seventeen and was realising that there are some people in the world just waiting to take advantage of you.
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Balance
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