Happy New Year!
+ Time Management and Poetry
I hope that you and your loved ones had a wonderful holiday break and that you are looking forward to an exciting 2024! I was busy working on the editing for my new novel The Masterpiece, a mystery set in post-war France, which will be out in September 2024, and also I’ve started writing my next book which is set in Italy and will be out in September 2025. So, an exciting year of writing for me already!
Regarding writing, in my last couple of newsletters, I’ve shared my thoughts about online courses I’ve enjoyed on the BBC Maestro platform. In this newsletter, I will focus on Oliver Burkeman’s Time Management and Carol Anne Duffy’s Writing Poetry.
My introduction to the positive psychology movement was in the 1990s. I was a student at the University of California and living in the US state that could, at that time, have been considered the epicentre of new-age spiritual energy, enhanced by its sunshine, beaches, mountains and population of descendants of the Flower Power generation.
My roommates and I often watched The Oprah Winfrey Show together, and we read books such as The Seat of the Soul, The Road Less Travelled, and Women Who Run with the Wolves. I credit my American friends with the fact that I became a writer, a story I tell in my book Emboldened: On Finding the Fire to Keep Going When All Seems Lost but to summarise, they were the ones who insisted that I had to ‘go for my dream’. It was that exposure to America’s ‘can do’ culture that has guided most of my life since then, along with the belief that I can achieve anything I want to, if I’m willing to work for it.
Part of this philosophy has involved paying attention to all the areas considered to be necessary to a ‘well-balanced life’ – career, spirituality, health and fitness, love and family, hobbies, and contribution to society. In order to fit such varied interests into a 24-hour day, I’ve had to be highly motivated, focused and organised.
That approach worked quite well for me until just over a year ago when I became the main carer for my 92-year-old father. Fortunately, my father is in remarkably good health for his age, but that well-being is maintained by a multitude of medical specialists, everything from cardiologists, nephrologists, urologists and more. He must have regular GP visits, blood tests and a list of medications that fills an entire Excel sheet. On top of that, my father does have a good social life and attends Probus, church, cardio exercise groups and various other social activities.
But my father can no longer drive or live on his own. His hearing is pretty well shot and if he gets too tired, he becomes overwhelmed and forgetful. So, I have become the person who organises everything for him, including his finances and meals. Some days, there is so much to coordinate that I feel like an air traffic controller trying to do it all while at the same time attending to my own life and work responsibilities. But there is an emotional element as well. My beloved father is growing frailer before my eyes. I accept it’s part of life, and I try to live in the present as much as I can, but a lot of the time I feel as if as if my heart has relocated itself to somewhere in my stomach. It’s like a daily punch of grief. This situation often leaves me time-poor, exhausted and overwhelmed.
Which is why I found myself drifting towards Oliver Burkeman’s Time Management course. I was hoping I could discover some perfect system that would enable me to manage this new normal of caring for my father while maintaining my own life, and still somehow stay on top of everything. A lot of us are living with this magical type of thinking, and it’s turning us into hamsters on wheels.
Oliver Burkeman is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He also has a twice-monthly blog: The Imperfectionist, where he muses on productivity, mortality, the power of limits and on building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment. He is a warm, compassionate teacher but his message was quite sobering for an A-type personality like me: You can’t do it all. It’s impossible. So, you need to choose the few things you really want to do with your life and let everything else slide.
We’ve heard this message before, but Oliver teaches his students how to let go, not just why we should.
At first, I thought his message was a bit depressing because I have a lot of hobbies in my life that I really enjoy, and I thought he meant that they would have to go. But as I continued with the course, I realised that a lot of the things that were sucking up time were mental rather than physical. One of them was worrying about things over which I had no control. The other one was how guilty I felt about sometimes having to say ‘no’ to my father. (I don’t have trouble setting boundaries with others, just those I love!)
Sometimes, I can’t stop what I’m doing and drive him to Bunnings no matter how inspired he is suddenly feeling about a gardening project. He’ll get upset with me and I’ll start feeling guilty because I know I’m not going to have my father for much longer, and that refusal to take him to Bunnings on that particular day may haunt me for years to come. It’s such a simple thing, right? But my father gets around so slowly these days it would mean a loss of a productive day of writing. Through Oliver’s course, I’ve learned to be okay with being a ‘good enough’ daughter rather than a perfect one, and that means sometimes I’m going to have to be okay with disappointing people, even my beloved father. While that might sound ridiculously obvious to many people, it certainly has been a revelation for me.
Sober, considered and elegant in that very British way, Oliver’s course is great for women who are carrying the mental load of working while caring for others. But it’s also a great course for anybody who feels overwhelmed by competing demands. It’s a voice of reason and kindness in a world that has become overly busy. Highly recommended.
The BBC Maestro course that I’m currently doing is Carol Anne Duffy’s course on ‘Writing Poetry’. In my blog One Step Away from Rage 👇 see link below:
I wrote about one of the reasons many of us feel so stressed these days is the way we wake up. According to studies, upon awakening 80-90% of us immediately check our mobile phones – searching our emails or scrolling our social media. We do this while our subconscious minds are in their most receptive state and when our nervous systems are particularly sensitive to stressful content.
I suggested that instead of doing this, to read a poem instead. There are a number of surprising health benefits to reading poetry and I’ll be writing more about these in my autumn newsletter. The comment about reading a poem first thing in the morning started an interesting conversation between myself and fellow authors, Natasha Lester who co-hosts an online book club with me, and Vanessa McCausland about the benefits of poetry in improving our powers of observation and use of language. These are important attributes for everyone, but especially for writers. Sadly, a lot of us were put off poetry because of the way it was taught to us in school. I’m hoping that Carol Anne Duffy’s course will open me up to a new world.
Belinda Alexandra’s Books in Chronological Order
*Please note this image is not in chronological order*
Meanwhile, I wish you a wonderful start to the year!
Love Belinda XX
I was part of the sandwich generation - adolescent children and aging parents. It was very much a struggle to service everyone’s needs little own my own. One definitely needs to ensure there is time devoted to those things that fill one’s own bucket back up if we are to be serviceable to anyone. Best wishes Belinda.
A big yes to starting the morning with poetry! Every time I don't do it and look at my phone first instead, I invariably spend the day feeling more stressed and waste so much more mental energy that could be much better used!