#resound11: Appreciate

Posted on December 19, 2011 by nicdempsey

What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year?

How do you express gratitude for it?

How will you resound?

I’ve come to appreciate my family. I define family in this instance as more that the people who I’m related to but the friends I have that are close enough to me to count as family too.

They’ve encouraged, supported, trusted and had faith in me this year. Honestly, I’m not sure that I’d have survived this year without them.

How I express gratitude is to try and be that person for them and others. To remember how much a phone call matters and to make that call, to show love. That’s all I can do really.

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Bootcamp round up

Posted on December 19, 2011 by nicdempsey

I finished bootcamp!

It’s a simple idea. 6 weeks, 12 exercise sessions and following Jem’s ‘Better Body Plan‘.

I really needed to kick start working out again and can’t afford personal training so this seemed like a good idea. It was.

It was also cold, rainy, dark and muddy but I did it and lost 9lbs in the process.

The weight loss hasn’t been the best thing although getting back into my ‘take no prisoners’ work trousers!! The best thing has been how it’s made me feel, the combination of diet and exercise has helped with the SAD and stabilised my mood. This is the first winter in an age that hasn’t felt like a slog although it’s been the most challenging and I’ve done the last 4 weeks without my sunrise lamp which is usually a disaster.

I will be doing the next one in February but meanwhile, I’ve joined the gym around the corner from work (on the company scheme so £20 a month!) and on Friday did my first class and will be using it three times a week. I’ll also be sticking to most of the diet rules and am determined, as I enter Christmas to keep that weight off.

 

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#resound11: Extraordinary Ordinary

Posted on December 18, 2011 by nicdempsey

Have you ever heard the expression “God is in the details?” Or, perhaps, “the devil is in the details?”

In college, I had an instructor who would circle the most minuscule omissions in red pen and write that phrase: God is in the details. Accidentally double space after a period when the rest have single spaces? Red pen. God is in the details. Barely noticeable typography goof-up? Red pen. God is in the details.

Annoying, right? Right, but insightful. At the time I was annoyed because I had five classes of nothing but writing and creating and the last thing on my mind was a tiny, forgotten detail. When you think about it though, it is the details that make up our lives: little, seemingly insignificant details, choices, and moments that make up our life, make up our story.

Sometimes the most ordinary, mundane things can turn into extraordinary moments. What was one of your most extraordinary ordinary moments this year?

My entire year has been ordinary and extraordinary. I have been trying over the last few years to appreciate the beautiful, ordinary things in my life. It’s been a difficult couple of years. Stand outs this year have been how some of my friends, Tina, Max, Kathy and Bex have, as if by magic, called me and suggested a coffee or a walk just at the point I was feeling really blue.

On one of those walks, with Tina, we came upon mushrooms growing in the park…that seemed like magic

Watching these kids grow this year and learn to walk and talk, that’s been extraordinary ordinary:

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#resound11: Discovery

Posted on December 18, 2011 by nicdempsey

Today’s prompt is brought to you by Krissie from Questions for Dessert and @krissieb.

We learn new things every day. Processes change at work. We meet new people. We cook new recipes. We are constantly learning and growing.

But sometimes we learn something that qualifies as a discovery. A piece of new information – a feeling, a song, a place, an event, a book, a random fact – can sometimes change our view on the world and our place in it. Discovery can bring on positive change, but sometimes discovery is hard. Sometimes it causes conflict. But after a discovery, something about you just isn’t quite the same.

What discovery did you make in 2011? What kind of impact did it have on how you view the world today?

How will you resound?

The discovery I made this year is that I can do impossible things. Not really impossible things, I’m not going to be leaping over tall buildings or anything, but things that I thought I couldn’t do actually I can. I can find contentment when things are horrible, I can find the time to exercise, I can do things that at the beginning of the year I thought I couldn’t do.

This has led to some changes, I find myself giving up some things to achieve the things I really want to do. I want to exercise and I have to work, so sometimes I’m going to turn down a night out in the middle of week so I can do the things I need and want to do.

It’s not easy, but I can do it!

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Sunday Music

Posted on December 18, 2011 by nicdempsey

For Unto Us a Child is Born..

From Handel’s Messiah, I know some people go and listen to the Messiah at Christmas, for us it’s an Easter thing, the whole scope of the thing, fits Easter, when I’m thinking about the miracle of resurrection. This though is for Christmas and sums up all of it. The smallness of a baby, just an ordinary thing and the largeness of what He will become, what He will do. At the same time the hugeness of just a tiny baby, of every tiny baby and the overwhelming joy they bring (it says nothing of the sleepless nights and endless nappy changes but you can’t have everything!)

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#resound11: Home is…

Posted on December 17, 2011 by nicdempsey

So behind on these, it’s been a mad week.

How will you resound?When did you feel most at home this year: in your life, in your space, in your career, in your skin? What factors make that situation feel like home? Do certain comforts make your space feel like home? Does being with certain people make you feel complete? Is there an activity in which you excel that makes you feel like you’re doing what you were meant to do?

This is your life. Where do you live? Where is home?

Home is here

I can honestly say that my flat is where I’m comfortable, where I’m home. I’m lucky to have it.

There are other places that I feel at home too. At my Mum’s, increasingly with at Ben and Lu’s (where I’m writing this, having put the boy to bed!). They’re places I always feel like me, with my family, where I am truly known, good and bad, and loved. Which is the definition of home.

I feel at home in places I’m somehow meant to be in, that can be uncomfortable places, where I’m called to stretch myself, this year that was in currating my first Grace service ‘God’s Not Fair‘. I’m not sure I’ll ever do another one, but it was something I was really called to do.

This year in Middleham, where I have wanted to go since I was a young impressionable teenager.

In July, when I spent a night looking after my nephew because it was the only thing I could do for Ben and Laura besides pray. In September, when I went to Belfast because I just wanted to check on Ryan with my own eyes!

So I guess for me home is a place and a feeling of doing what God put me on earth to do, for the times when I’m sure and certain of it

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Another morning without a lie in

Posted on December 17, 2011 by nicdempsey

I’m up early to go and see this little man

while his parents go and have a day (and a night) off.

So I won’t get a lie in tomorrow either! Somehow I don’t think I’ll mind too much!

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Christmas Tree decorations

Posted on December 16, 2011 by nicdempsey

I love my tree!

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Early mornings

Posted on December 15, 2011 by nicdempsey

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I leave the house at 7.30am in the morning. At the moment it’s in the dark and all the street lights are still on, it’s pretty. Not pretty enough to stop me wishing for the summer but pretty enough I stop cursing the world for thinking that it’s acceptable to be up at such an unnatural hour*

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*I am completely aware that in the great scheme of things leaving the house in time to get to work at 8.30am is not that much of a hardship, especially when you consider how early train & bus drivers and doctors & nurses need to be up. I still maintain it’s unnatural though!

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#resound11: Best Gift

Posted on December 14, 2011 by nicdempsey

Today’s prompt is brought to you by Krissie from Questions for Dessert and @krissieb.

The holiday season is typically a time we focus on others, sometimes at the expense of ourselves. I can get so caught up in the expectations of the season that I have a hard time remembering to enjoy the peace and wonder of the season. I can forget to take time to care for myself. So lets look back on how we cared for ourselves. Maybe we’ll inspire each other to take a few minutes for ourselves today.

What was the best gift you gave yourself this year? Did you buy big, fluffy towels? Did you have a massage on a day when you really needed it? Did you forgive someone and give yourself the freedom from that grudge?

How will you resound?

When I saw this prompt this morning, I immediately thought of things. Was my best gift to myself my properly fitted running shoes, the lemon squeezer, the whiskey?

The best thing I gave myself this year was that I learned to take responsibility only for the things I was responsible for. This is hard for me, I’m one of those people who thinks that everything is down to me and this feeling, that when something goes wrong it’s because I didn’t do enough or didn’t do it right, means that often end doing things that are bad for me ’cause I’m trying to make everything right.

I know exactly when it happened. It was when I was helping T & C move. It was an emotional time all around, I was sad because the house at St Leonards Road was somewhere I had loved living in and for all it represented and I wanted to talk to one person and I couldn’t because he had stopped talking to me and while I could guess why, I don’t know because he didn’t tell me, he just stopped calling and wouldn’t take my calls. There wasn’t anything I could do about it but that didn’t stop me feeling responsible.

During that week, I was sad for that lost friendship but I finally understood that it wasn’t my fault. I had done all I could, I was allowed to feel sad but I had no control over the decision Craig had made. I didn’t kill a 10 year relationship, he did. I wasn’t responsible.

After that something just clicked. I wasn’t responsible for not having a job, but I could take some action to get a new one, I wasn’t responsible for having bad knees but I could take responsibility for not making them any worse, I’m not responsibility for having SAD but I am responsible for managing the symptoms, I’m not responsible for trains and buses breaking down, but I am responsible for leaving the house in good time so I’m not already running late when the bus does break down . Once I stopped worrying about the things that were happening that I wasn’t responsible for, I could deal with the things I was responsible for. I’ve done that, it makes me happy and I’m leaving this year in a good state of mind.

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