Learning the hard way.

Standing in the middle of Zara's flagship store, on Via del Corso, attempting not to cry, after my & Other Stories sandal decided to publicly fall apart, for the second time, despite a recent trip to the repair shop & becoming wearier still, as the sound of heavy rain began to fall outside, it dawned on me the concept of 'living your truths.'  Namely, don't invest in 'false economies' & 'buy quality, last a lifetime'.

Only a few months prior, when I was living comfortably in the Dordogne, had I started to search for the perfect pair of sandals, to replace the now extinct tan pair I had from Kurt Geiger, which were much loved & had seen me through several summers, until their demise in Sicily, just before Christmas.

Having gone through the lesson of owning less & loving more, I took the matter of restocking my wardrobe perhaps a little too seriously.  I admit I suffer from OCD when it comes to, well, everything really & being able to start from scratch on the wardrobe front, meant I wanted to get it right first time, not waste any money.  Plus, without a secure income, I'm even more conscious of how I spend what I do have.

Shopping has a tendency to bring me both elevation & chronic stress.  I have a magpie outlook, anything shiny, gold, overly patterned & colourful & I'm rubbing it gleefully against my cheeks.  However, I hate staring into my closet, bogeyed & overwhelmed by choices, because everything is so mismatched & nothing seems to actually pair together.  The classic tale of a wardrobe full of clothes & nothing to wear.

Hence, I find it far easier to keep to a more compact, capsule wardrobe, which sticks to a strict colour code, namely white, black, grey, nude & of course, my favourite, gold.  Okay, it sounds clinical & maybe even a little drab, but honestly, nothing brings me more joy than a bit of uniform & when everything can be put together, in seemingly endless combinations, it saves both time & tears.

So, back to my search.  There I am in France, spending far too much time perusing the options online & I find myself pinning all my hopes on the tan Ikaria winged leather sandals from Ancient Greek Sandals.  I've wanted a pair for a few years now & yet, have never quite found myself committing to the purchase.

At €150, they're an investment in something handmade & of good quality.  Something I would wear for many years & that would go with everything in my new stripped back capsule wardrobe.  Yet, with the money nestled in my bank account & my finger hovering over the purchase button, I somehow convinced myself that the delivery time was too long & that I would possibly be in Germany by the time they arrived in France.

I left it.  Eventually arriving in Berlin with solely my beaten up black DMs to see me through.  Then the weather got hot & there was no escaping the need to purchase a pair of sandals.  Feeling a little forced & stressed, I searched through all of my favourite stores in Mitte & eventually, after a week or two, decided on the black leather pair in & Other Stories.  At €55, they were less than half the price of the Ancient Greek pair.

I loved them & wore them every day, until of course, they unceremoniously fell apart one evening, when I was alone at Markthalle Nuen, having just bought myself a glass of wine.  Walking around with a floppy sandal, on your lonesome, in a packed out food market is not fun, let me tell you.  I drowned my sorrows, ate a vegan burger, scoffed a scoop of chocolate sorbet & cycled home in the dark, a little wobbly & very annoyed.

I took them back to & Other Stories, only to be told they'd sold out & therefore couldn't replace them.  I'd have refunded them if it weren't for the love I'd by this time invested in them.  So I got a €20 part-refund instead.  Cue one trip to the repair store in Prenzlauer Berg, €7 & several days sweating it out back in my DMs, waiting on them to be ready, followed by a few weeks of wear before the Zara incident occurred.  Lesson learnt: Don't be fooled into false economies.  Buy the shoes!

In the end, I left Zara with a sassy pair of gold block heeled sandals, which I'd been secretly coveting for a little while.  Having been wearing a combination of flat sandals & DMs for over a year, I felt a little wonky at first, but then, getting into the stride of things, I waltzed out of the store, into the rain, feeling pretty damn good & mentally flipping the bird to the world.

Some things don't need a lot of money spent on them of course, but I think, if you're going to choose to have less possessions, it's probably worth spending a little more & really investing in things that are going to last the test of time & not leave you barefoot & teary eyed.  This is a rule that I think applies to everything, whether it be sartorial, dietary or in the home.

Better to spend a little more on organic & fair-trade, than to ingest the rampant pesticides & chemicals of the cheaper non-organic, have your money contribute to the destruction of our environment or indeed to the hardship of people in other parts of the world.  Equally so, better to 'spend out' on a decent set of top quality knives once, that last you your adult life, than to keep shelling out on cheaper ones that fall apart cutting up your potatoes.

Sometimes it's a painful separation between cash & wallet, but you'll thank yourself in a few years time, when you're sitting comfortably on your beaten up Chesterfield, wondering why you ever even contemplated looking in Ikea.  'Buy quality, last a lifetime.'

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Milk & Honey

Since starting my Happiness Project & implementing my first resolution - Own less, love more, I'd come to realise I'd only been applying it to the big stuff, i.e. possessions.  I realised that I still wasn't being mindful of what I was spending money on in general.

Having been in Rome for the past two weeks, I've managed to avoid spending much money & the little I have spent, I've thought more carefully about.  This change has made me realise how unnatural it feels to go days without spending money, it's almost like an unusual concept to me.  I find it almost a compulsive habit to spend some amount of money each day, yet I don't know why.

Supermarkets, especially, are like my nemesis.  Even if I know I don't need anything, just being in them makes me feel the need to buy something.  Coming across one the other day, in the city's centre, I had to mentally check myself, 'I don't need anything,' before forcing myself to walk past.  Is this part of the subliminal message of consumerism?  Have I been under the influence the whole time without realising!?  I'm starting to think this might be the case.

It's no longer just a case of walking into Cos & asking myself if I need that fourth white T-shirt, now it's really about, do I need that daily gelato, or that overpriced juice, when I have a bottle of water in my bag.  Okay, this sounds slightly anal, but honestly, how many times do we needlessly spend money on little things that we don't really need, just to satisfy the compulsion to spend money?

Admittedly, I have a whole host of issues around food.  Having always been bean pole thin growing up, I gained a lot of weight when I left school.  Mostly due to the cessation of playing sports daily & my somewhat large appetite, that never decreased in accordance.  When my parents separated & mère & I went to stay with family, a combination of my new state of depression & a few, somewhat misplaced, jovial comments on my weight from family members, left me with a complex.

Cue excessive exercising & an acute bout of anorexia, which took over a year of my life & left my relationship with both my body & food in tatters, still to this day.  Now when I 'treat' myself to something like a pastry, I get caught in the confusion as to whether it's a treat because I'm spending money on something I don't realistically need, or because it's something I don't feel I should be eating.  Needless to say, regardless of an answer, I always suffer from post-indulgence guilt.

Having spent the past two weeks reframing from this mindless spending around food, I've managed to save a fair amount of money to take back to Berlin with me & I've saved myself a lot of guilt.  Although, after one tremendously hot day in the city, whereby temperatures reached forty degrees, I couldn't resist the impulse to procure a dollop of, vegan friendly, gelato from Fatamorgana, an organic gelatoria I'd stumbled upon.

It was a two scoop as standard affair & so, after choosing a chocolate, coffee & hazelnut flavour, I asked the guy serving to recommend a complimentary flavour.  He suggested ginger & pineapple.  Not something I would usually go for, but I gave it a go.  I walked out into the street, cone in hand, feeling gleeful.  The chocolate flavour was amazing, but when it came to the ginger & pineapple, it was bitterly disappointing & ended up in the bin.  I tried not to feel guilty about spending money on something that felt wasted.  Note to self, listen to your gut & always ask to try an unusual flavour before committing.  Lesson learnt.

I think when I get back to Berlin, I shall be even more inclined to keep to this resolution.  So often do I find myself strolling the streets after yoga, a little bored & in search of entertainment & end up at the chocolate cafe across the road, buying a chocolate muffin, for the third time in as many days, despite knowing I have fruit in my bag.  Or when I end up in a vegan cafe, with a thick milkshake & a huge slice of cake, both of which end up giving me cramps for the following three hours, due to my soy intolerance.

Spending money on things you end up regretting, is as bad as spending money on things you end up forgetting.  It's not just about cutting down on the things you can see, like those new shoes in your closet, it's equally about all the things you don't see.  All the cups of tea, or coffee, or the cakes & the snacks.  Of course it's nice to go have lunch occasionally with friends, but it's the daily 'indulgences' that end up being both the wallet & weight offenders.

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

Time to start being that change.

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{Insightful Sunday} Intuition

Recently, a very good friend of mine got engaged, to someone she's been in love with for over a decade.  Sounds ideal, right, except, their love story is one riddled in complication & only really came to fruition just over a year ago.  You see, for those ten long years, she was actually in a relationship with someone else, his best friend to be precise.

Lacking the courage to untangle herself from her steady relationship & risk destroying a friendship, she had conceded to the fact that the feelings she felt, would simply never be explored.  That was until, her relationship finally broke down & a healthy time later, she found out that her object of desire had been harbouring feelings of his own.  One year later he popped the question & here we are at their current engagement.

The point to this story is; when you know, you just know.  So why do we waste so much time ignoring our intuition.  A lot of the time, despite our intuitive thoughts & feelings, we still seem to go against the grain & find ourselves doing what's logical, rather than what actually feels right.  Yet, afterwards, we wonder why we're unhappy & things haven't worked out in our favour.

A lot of it, I think, is about trust, as in the trust that we place in ourselves & our decision making capabilities.  It's like when you had a niggling feeling about taking that job, yet, it was more money & looked great on paper, so you figured it was the best move.  Now you sit at your desk wanting to gouge your eye out with a pencil, wondering why you feel so unfulfilled.

How many times have you, like me, barraged people with questions on what they think you should be doing, or where you should be heading, only to feel dissatisfied & disgruntled, because ultimately, you were looking for someone to reiterate your own thoughts & feelings, which you can't seem to trust to be right.

When we take the time to listen to ourselves, we realise, we don't even have to ask the questions, because we already know the answers.  What we seem to be lacking is a little conviction.  We need to start trusting our own judgement, rather than continually looking for validation in others.

Sometimes of course, it's about courage, going against society's imposed rules & restrictions, on what you should or shouldn't be doing.  It's not easy to stand against a crowd, or perhaps even your own family & admit to wanting to do things differently, but that's the point, isn't it.  How many other people are unhappy & unfulfilled, simply because they haven't found the courage within themselves to make a break & take a chance.  To follow their heart's desire & do what feels right, for them.

Now is the time to make a change, because essentially, all life is, is now.  Right now.  Take the time to sit & listen to yourself, because the everyday noise of the world can be deafening.  Really begin to understand what it is that makes you happy, figure out what drives you & what it is that you really want.  Because, it's about how you feel on the inside that matters, not how things appear on the surface.

So press delete on every doubt you have & when your gut gives you direction, follow it.

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