Today I have been exactly the type of person Ruby Wax in her book ‘Frazzled’ would like to shoot (I can’t remember if she said the word shoot… but it was something like that… )

 

I only started her book this morning but I am hooked already… her dry sense of whit and humour has made me laugh out loud but at the same time given me plenty of food for thought.

 

Apparently ‘frazzled’ is a technical and neurological term to explain focussing on what is worrying you rather than the job in hand.  Frazzledom she talks about is something we are all trying to escape…. And yet all I can see is people being proud of ‘multi-tasking’… getting a lot done all at the same time.

 

I have loved learning about mindfulness and living in the present.  That is where you find the happiness.  As RW says – you can’t search for happiness… you just have to find it in the moment that you are in.  Books ‘the power of now’ and ‘the one thing’ all share the same theme…  and I have shifted from the multi-tasking maniac, now to the person that Ruby wants to shoot!

 

The person who gets up and goes from one thing to the next, from a run, to work, to coffee with a friend, to picking up the kids…. And then dashing out to have cocktails in the evening!  They were her words … and they described my day today to the letter!

 

Her solution… is to rest.  To stop.  And reboot.  I suppose I do that through my 5 minutes of meditation… my moments to find clarity in my frantic day.  And in this.  My brain download of blogging and journalling.

 

Stress she says comes from a couple of things (from what I have heard/read so far)… Being brainy and having too much choice.

 

Being brainy has taken homo sapiens from being an ape happy to simply eat a banana to innovating, creating, maintaining and fixing… and that creating and innovating has made us want more, do more…

 

And having too much choice!  In earlier times, we just ate what we could grow or kill, we had limited choices of careers… and now our time is taken up from choosing from 100 delicacies on a menu or from 30 aisles of a supermarket.  No longer are the choices vanilla, strawberry or chocolate ice-cream… but honey comb, cookie dough dynamo, blueberry pie etc etc etc…

 

I also love her thoughts on connection.  Today she refers to connection being through key boards, our fingers and the internet or iphones, to our i-wife or i-husband talking about our i-home… love that.

 

I think I am going to have fun listening to her 6 week programme  and course of mindfulness.  She is now qualified to write about such things having completed her studies of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford Uni.

 

But until I start… tonight, since I can’t de-connect from my iphone as my i-son has just been dispatched to cub ‘packmania’ for 3 nights/4days and the i-big-man is cycling in Italy,  I am going to stress myself silly by choosing from a tapas menu as long as your arm rather than eat a banana..  and possibly drink enough cocktails to make me far less brainy… and that can also be my way to pass out and reboot!