Good weather for The Boss

The weather at the Isle of Wight festival has been making the news - endless mud - but Springsteen will have had good weather for his trip over on the 4pm ferry from Lymington to Yarmouth, and for his set this evening.  It is a really lovely evening with sun and blue skies.  My brother works on the aforementioned ferry and they evidently had a really busy morning with people coming back to the mainland because they had just had enough.  Last night it poured and the wind howled again, and I think that might have been just too much for some of the festival goers, Boss or no Boss.  However they might just have missed out on the best part of the festival, and it brings to mind Hendrix's set at Woodstock where he played to an almost empty field, though everyone claims that they were there.

We all do it sometimes...give up on things when we should see it through to the end.  Sometimes when you are in the midst of something it is difficult to see that there can be a happy ending to what is happening.  I know I do this on occasion; I can only focus on what is going wrong right now but then I usually just put my head down and trudge onwards, though not necessarily without a growl and a loss of temper.  I am getting better at this though and I think that is because of Mindfulness Meditation.  I don't practice it anywhere near as much as I should, but I do use it a lot to centre myself and bring my attention back to my breathing and reminding myself that right now everything is really ok, I am safe and it is ok.  I can take myself to certain places and marvel at the beauty of a place I have been when it was warm and sunny, and yes, everything was ok.

I was thinking about natural beauty as I was driving home across the New Forest from my acupuncture appointment in Wimborne on Friday.  I actually live in a really beautiful part of the world, but it is something that I really take for granted because I have always lived in this area.  We take for granted what is around us all the time, be that the natural world, the people, the way we think.  So sometimes I need to remind myself what is good about my life when things just seem to be going wrong all the time.  Too often we just look at the big events and highlights rather than the normal and everyday.  Those moments which stay in the memory tend to be those Big Moments, a view, an experience; but life is mainly made up of things that are far more mundane and these are the things we should also value.  The main reason I went for the new post as Attendance Advisor was because of the routine that working gives my life.  It certainly isn't for the money as it will be a third less hours, and therefore a third less income, but the routine and the social contact is more important than that.  The little things in life really can make it worth living.