Day 15 of Project 2015

Since changing our outlook on life, we have noticed a considerable change on how people interact with us, particularly strangers. We have had people smile, have a chat to us, be kind and generous to us. It is like we have opened the door to a different world.

Or maybe it is just that we are not letting those negative people get to us anymore. We just let those experiences go – who needs to remember them? And why waste our brain space on such encounters?

We find that living in the now is making us forget quite a lot of the “not-important” details of each day. This for us is such a plus because we sometimes get bogged down in the details that don’t count!

Summary of January 15

Newbie

We’ve set ourselves a challenge as to how many books we’ll read in 2015. We want to have another “goal” to try and achieve – 

We are aiming for 25 books each. Let’s see how we go!

Brighter/Different Perspective? 

Last night, being outdoors for a quarter of an hour or so after dark – and Le has been MAULED by the mosquitoes! We have just counted the number of bites and welts on her legs, 11 on one and 9 on the other. How crazy is that?! 

But is it bothering her? Nah, it’s always good to have a nice good itch every now and then 🙂 

Day 5 of Project 2015

We bought a board game “Googly Eyes” for our 8-year-old nephew for Christmas. The game involves drawing and guessing what people are drawing while they are wearing vision-altering googles.

And from this game alone, we had some take-home messages.

(1) We got to see life in a whole different perspective LITERALLY. The vision that we have to see things “clearly” without assistance – the game took our appreciation of our eyesight to a whole new level.

This is what it looked like through the glasses at the game board.

 

(2) It is okay to relax and let loose. Laugh at ourselves sometimes and just have fun!

(3) We are terrible at drawing (or are we?), We did much better than we expected and when we have our nephews saying, “That’s actually pretty good!” – It really does boost up our confidence and does show how important perspective really is.

Summary of January 5

Newbies

Today we experienced what it would be like to be parents to 4 children. We took our 3 nephews and niece to the movies – it was lots of fun but lots of hard work too. We really do admire those who are parents to be able to manage the land of little people. 

Brighter/Different Perspective?

Not to take ourselves so seriously – being light-hearted and having a laugh is so refreshing. Yep, we looked pretty goofy! 

As Charlie Chaplin once said:

“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”  

Day 3 of Project 2015

An interesting morning for both of us as we both awoke to rather vivid dreams. Le dreaming about crowds and queues and buses heading in wrong directions. David dreaming about villains chasing him into water and then him fighting back.

We are by no means experts in dream interpretation but could our dreams be a sign that we need to start shaking any negativity away from us?

For Le – is there an element of moving on and feeling confused about where she is going? There is a lot of chaos and people around that are hindering what she needs to do?!

For David – is he trying to run away from something toxic in his life? He needs to face and fight rather than run?

How it would be wonderful to be able to know what our dreams mean? One of our goals also for this year is to try and practice lucid dreaming – all as part of our spiritual discovery.

Summary of January 3

Newbies

We woke up earlier than usual and went for a 7km walk this morning. We felt so refreshed and energised the entire day.

Brighter/Different Perspective

As the sun started to shine it’s fiery rays down, we began to get weary but came across this Indigenous Sculpture: “The Serpent”. The way we also see this, is an arrow up. That there is always an “up” to every down 🙂 No matter what we dream, as long as our conscious stays happy and uplifted, we can continue achieving anything.

Day 2 of Project 2015

Le finished reading this book today and it had a few themes throughout that resonated with us. Yes, this is just a book, a fictional book at that. Le chose to read it because of the medical condition that was mentioned in it yet somehow we are able to take away some life lessons from it as well. This book reinforced and reconfirmed our thinking.

Without spoiling too much of the book, in case you plan to read it yourself one day, the character is forced (in an unpleasant way) to slow down her life and reevaluate what is important to her. A powerful and determined woman who put a lot of emphasis on her career that has to come to terms with not returning to the life she once knew.

Money, career and success is not everything! It does not make us happy, it does not define us and it certainly should not be at the sacrifice of everything else that we value and hold dear.

The book reminded us that it is essential to slow down and focus on what is meaningful in our lives. We have too often read books or watched movies, where an event (usually disastrous) is the catalyst for re-prioritising. These movies or books are wake-up calls to society yet how often do people just pass these off as entertainment? It is more than that, read between the lines and stop and reevaluate. It could be the sign you were waiting for.

Summary of January 2

Newbies

Today, we decided to walk to do our grocery shop. It isn’t how we normally do it but we figured that we had enough “walking” training on the Camino and that we would also save the environment by reducing our carbon footprint. We called it our “healthy” shop – not only because we squeezed in some exercise but we also bought less because we had to carry it home; no junk food or snacks or unnecessary items. 

Brighter/Different Perspective?

Would you believe after completing the original version of this post, we somehow managed to lose it all?! And instead of obscenities ($%^&$) being thrown around, we calmly opened a new post to re-write it best we could. We figured what we had written in the other post was not meant to see the light of day 🙂 So hope you enjoy the revised version instead! It also teaches us to hit “SAVE”. 

Day 1 of Project 2015

Happy New Year!!

Cannot believe we are at the start of another year – that means we are at the start of our “project”/”experiment” at looking at life from a brighter perspective.

This morning, as we sat at breakfast reflecting on 2014 and what lies ahead for us, we thought, there is so much more than just thinking about things from a brighter perspective – sometimes it’s looking at things from a different perspective.

So what is in store for us in the coming days, months and year ahead?

A lot of reflecting on our every day, on the little things, on the things that don’t look profound or memorable, on the things we may prefer to forget or on the things that let us down.

Our challenge for the year ahead to turn things around and see it all in a positive light or simply from a different angle. This fresh outlook can’t do any harm but if it can do some good – well, then that’s just darn brilliant.

Along with seeing things differently, we are setting ourselves some goals to try and “slow down” time. We want to see if it’s possible because we recently read that if we did different things all the time, our perception of time changes. So let’s see if that is also true. As part of this challenge, every day of the year, we are also going to try something new or do something differently. Out with routine and in with variety.

And this blog endeavours to capture how this year-long challenge/project/experiment/mindset goes. This time next year, we want to be writing how we had a year that lasted longer than 365 days (luckily it’s not a leap year) and that we really had more highs than lows. We want 2015 to be a year where nothing is going to get us down…. NOTHING!

Wish us luck and join us for the ride.

Here we are at Day 1! And what can we share….

Today to mark the beginning of something fantastic this year, we chose to sit down and write down some goals for 2015. Then we decided to spend it doing things that we wanted our year to be filled with… we played games, we ate good food, we laughed, we read, we exercised.

Summary for January 1

What new thing did we try? (We’ll call them “newbies” for future posts)

We made and tasted Strawberries and Cream Iced Tea. This was a Christmas gift from some very dear friends of ours. What a refreshing and delicious drink for a hot day like today. 

And for the brighter perspective?

On our evening walk today, we came across this: 

We felt this was so very symbolic of how we are going to change the way we see things. Instead of being down, we are going to pick ourselves right up again. 

And that is exactly what we did, we walked on over and fixed it as best we could. Making those bins stand upright again…. 

Off to a good start, may the positivity surround us for the next 364 days 🙂