If you’re like us, perhaps you are returning to work feeling more weary than when you left for Christmas and New Year. Weary of worry and of helplessness. Emotionally exhausted from what feels like endless bad news — and that’s just if you’re seeing it happen on your screens and not experiencing the events in person, which is even worse. Late 2019 and the first weeks of 2020 have drawn Australians into an unprecedented bushfire crisis, against the worrying backdrop of climate change.
We’ve started to write this post several times. Each time we do, something else happens and we find ourselves staring at a blank page yet again, trying to wrap our minds around where this is all heading.
We are optimistic people. We’ve brought ourselves and our families through deep personal tragedy and grief and other professional and personal pressures and challenges. We’ve always tried to move forward with strength and self-compassion and a ‘glass half full’ focus, knowing we can get through this.
That optimism is being tested at the moment. Is it just us?
We look for the helpers, and there are plenty of those. Media is filled with beautiful examples of people digging deep, working hard and opening their homes and hearts to those who’ve lost everything. There certainly isn’t a lack of heartening human interest stories to further entrench our faith in humanity. That is not under threat.
In our book, I Don’t Have Time, the first of the 15-minute tasks we set our readers is to drop everything and sit with your feet in a bucket of bubbly water for 15 minutes. We’ve always been adamant that the idea is to do it now, regardless of your mountain of other priorities.
And so we’re taking our own advice. Starting with socks.
There’s an Australian business called Manrags, that offers a service where you purchase a bag for $5 and mail them up to twenty clean, old socks. They sort through the pile, pull out any that they can up-cycle and send those to an industrial laundromat to be cleaned, repaired and donated to people in need. They recycle the rest, turning them into new textiles and saving them from landfill.
Simple.
So, even though we’re back at work and juggling school holidays and family responsibilities and helping those suffering from the bushfire crisis in practical and financial ways, this is what else we’re doing: Socks. Feet in a bucket. Cup of tea.
In a crisis, we can easily feel powerless and overwhelmed, and that’s when to go back to basics:
|
