Contemplating life, death, milestones and expectations

 Hey

Its been 4 months since I was last here - do I have anything to share? I mentioned last time a HAED called Suteki by Aimee Stewart that I was starting...I began January doing the 100 days of HAED challenge and I stitched so much. Sadly I was only able to participate for the first 30 days as I had another project that I needed to finish for my mother. I will say that it was great to do, and I wouldnt have made the progress I did without the challenge to do it. I will definitely try  this again. As I want  to start a new HAED and actually completer it by 2026. 

Here is Suteki (although I have done a little more since this photo)

And here is the project I completed for my mum

This year of 2022 has not been kind to me so far, I had bursitis in my knee which they now think is a torn meniscus, I have plantar fasciitis in my right foot from coping with the knee - I have been struggling with standing and walking and was in so much pain at one point it was beyond and I had some very strong drugs. On top of that, we had COVID 19 in the house, that's what happens when your kid goes to preschool, and then my son was ill again with a bad cough which kept him up most of the night - he has only just recovered the poor mite. Oh, and amidst all of this my beloved grandmother passed away at 91 years of age. It was all very much a suffocating time full of pain BUT its spring and time to be positive and hope for a better second half of the year.  So, with this in mind, I was thinking about how I could challenge myself this year as I often feel like an eternal under achiever - I have a big birthday coming up, the big 5-0, and by coming up - I mean it is in 2026. So I was thinking what would I like to have done by then, have achieved or at least have worked towards. Now, I often have these ideas and I rarely complete the challenges but I DO accomplish things that I wouldn't have if I hadn't put the thought in my mind.

At first I thought I would write down 50 things that I could do before I was 50 - people do this a year before they turn 50 - but I thought maybe my success rate would be better if I started sooner. The chosen date...15/08/2022...don't ask me why but this is the start date - 42 months before I turn 50. I wrote down a handful of ideas, all quite life changing (I figured I had given myself long enough to retrain in a new career and lose that weight I've been losing the past 20 years!), and then I got to wondering what other things I could add to my (currently) short list so I decided to look up some inspirational ideas.

DO NOT WORRY!

I haven't found any yet, I looked on Pinterest and was distracted by the monthly challenges and started to ponder doing a monthly challenge each month for 42 months or each month of the year and then repeat - not the super fit exercises ones but the wellbeing, health, motivation, photography, writing type ones - I am heading to my fifties after all! Then I thought, typical me getting totally side tracked and continued to get side tracked again by languages. I am not sure if I mentioned it but I have been learning Korean (a level 5 language) for the past two years - by learning I mean on a very adhoc basis and putting aside 10 minutes a day - progress has been slow but I do feel like I am making some and I also feel like by the time I am 50 I would like to be able to have a conversation in Korean, watch my Korean TV shows without subtitles and generally enjoy having a second language. Now, I feel like I may be about to go off on another tangent here again - but I do love languages.

BUT

I am not great at them. I studied French in primary school and can remember a few phrases even now - which is a shock, I studied German up  to A' level until I got kicked off the course for not being as good as the other three students who all were marvellous and fairly so, but I did pick it up again at university where it saved me because it was an additional module and meant it didn't matter that I had failed one of my others! When I was a volunteer in Africa, I learnt very loosely the language of the village I lived in, its is from the family of Gurune languages and is called Frafra. I haven't lived there in 20 years, and my husband who was from there - I haven't been married to for 10 years - but when I bump into a friend who is from the area (but local to me) I realise that its still there - well enough to have a brief conversation and get my point across. So here I am wondering if I can challenge myself to learn a language from each of the difficulty levels for an English native. Madness I tell you, but a little part of me hopes that the language learning penny may drop a some point and it will all make sense. I had such a dilemma wondering about being too old to even try.

SO

Where was I?, oh yes, researching blogs and articles around turning 50 and what really stood out to me was the fact that I may be 50 but I have done everything later in life, so am currently doing what some of the 50 year olds did in their 20s in my 40s. If only I looked and felt 20 years younger - how great would that be? But seriously, they talk about midlife and when your kids all have their own lives, and you've almost finished paying off the mortgage and have the job/career you are comfortable in, you know who you are and what's important, and are about to slow down and enjoy the little things in life. 

BAH HUMBUG!

My kid just turned 4, and genuinely believes he is a red power ranger, he is about to start school in September and I am sure that will bring new joy and hurdles for us, I only bought my house 4 years ago - a panic buy to get a roof over my sons head! and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up! Slowing down isn't an option for me yet, and won't be in my 50s so these challenges I want to come up with will be to keep life interesting as I see out my forties in a blind panic. Scarily, I will still have about 20 years left of work when I turn 50 so I think I can learn now, or retrain or something to move me closer to a job I will love for those 20 years and more. But as I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up - some brainstorming is required.

LUCKILY

I have three months to lay out my plan of attack for my upwards ascent to the glory of 50 years young! Any suggestions you may have for challenges or advice or good blogs etc. send them my way but if you are going to  tell me not to bother then you will be wasting your time, because even if I do all this planning and then don't start, I will have added seeds of inspiration and growth into my mindset and that can only be a good thing. Anyway, as I said at the start, or implied, or did I? I am done giving up and failing at things and not feeling like I am making the most of these very short lives we have. I need to say it here, so its real, and documented.

RANT OVER!

So, one last thing to add is that when I was about 6, I bought a tea towel from a market stall that was pre printed with cross stitches and had a saying on 'A friend in need is a friend indeed'. You needed your own threads. I chose the colours and started stitching it, I must have put it down and picked it up a hundred times or more as I didn't give it to my grandma until I was 10 and the stitching is not great - not as good as the modern age 10 year olds stitching I have seen at least. Not all the crosses are going the same way, some of the legs are longer than the square but she had it hanging up in her house in pride of place where people could see it for the past 35 years and now it is back with me and I would like to share with you my first EVER cross stitch....drumroll please...

And the last item I stitched for her last year...

If you have made it this far, thank you, and I hope that maybe some of you are also inspired to challenge yourselves a little more over the next few years - if any of you want to join in then please do, and watch this space because its only three months for the big reveal of the challenges I will set.

Thanks Again!