Dream big, live bigger!

New Year, new me!

Dream big, live bigger!

A year ago I  had a dream. Today I am living it everyday. Not because of luck but because I worked tirelessly, enthusiastically and authentically to create it. Five working weeks into 2014 and I am ecstatic with the courageous choices I made last year. It’s fair to say I am a lot wiser and freer than I was one year ago. I’d be honoured for you to read what I learnt:

• Risk it all because then you’ll know how much it’s worth!
• Say yes to every opportunity. You’ll never know if it’s right for you ’til you try it on.
• Grow vegetables and if not vegetables, herbs. Life just taste better this way.
• Back yourself!
• There are pretenders out there. Ignore them and get on your way. You’re great. They are not.
• Be nice to animals.
• Get a credit card and travel. You’re a long time dead.
• Show – don’t just tell – your family how much you love and admire them. We’re all just little kids wanting people to tell us we’re doing good.
• When people tell you have to prove yourself, don’t believe it. The only person you are accountable to is the one who looks back at you in the mirror. Fact.
• Buy local.
• Cherish the ones you love most because when shit gets real you’ll need them.
• Learn how to parallel park and drive a manual.
• Don’t be scared of spiders. They’re teeny. You’re big. And they do more good than harm.
• You don’t have to be a mother to be a woman. You don’t have to have kids to be a nurturer.
• Say thanks lots and lots and lots and lots.
• Buy art because you love it.
• Always, always, always be good. In one way or another, karma is real. You’ll never know when the person you treated despicably will share your deeds with people who influence the course of your life.
• Get a tattoo.
• Just because someone is indicating in their car doesn’t actually mean they are turning. People get distracted. Fact.
• Death is really, really hard for the person dying. Be there for the ones you love, to hold their hand and send them gently on their way. It matters.
• Do exercise that you LOVE with people you LOVE!
• Believe in YOU because you is all there is to make change happen.
• Make change happen!

I’d love to leave you with a quote that will be my guiding light for 2014, New Zealand’s election year. It was said by my great grandfather – the man we called Grandie – Prime Minister Sir Walter Nash whose influence on my family and life plays out still:

“I don’t want to get rid of poverty just to ensure that prosperity is maintained; I want to get rid of poverty because it is bad, it is wrong, it is immoral, it is unethical, it is un-Christian, it is unfair, and it is unjust, and it is everything that is bad. I mean involuntary poverty – where a man is told that his hands are not wanted, and that his wife and his youngsters will be deprived of the necessary things for health.” – Rt Hon Sir Walter Nash.

And Happy Birthday Dadda for Monday. RIP.

Happy New Year everyone!!

With love all ♥ and all love ♥

xx

I watched my Dad die

My Dad, my one, Hal Nash

The title of this blog is deliberately provocative. I want you to read this post and re-post this post. I want your friends to read this post. I want everyone I know and everyone I don’t to read this post. We all need to understand the meaning of this post.

This time a week ago I lay beside a dying man, and if you make the courageous decision to nurse someone until death I want you to know exactly what that means. Because I didn’t.

My Dad had a 40-year history of genetic heart disease. He is a testament to modern science, extraordinary willpower and the loving, diligent care of my mother who chose to cherish his health, at times, above any other need. He survived two triple bypasses, a cardiac arrest, a heart attack, a stroke, an aneurism, ongoing angina, and a whole host of related issues. And he survived the lot of them. So much so that his doctor of many years predicted – correctly – that he wouldn’t die because of his heart. And he bloody well didn’t.

My Dad died of the complete collapse of his body, of multiple organ failure. While his heart pumped on, the rest of him stopped. Three extraordinarily long days later, his heart finally caught up and his slow, cruel, desperate struggle ended.

What is equally extraordinary is that my mother and I took the bold and wonderfully, stupidly naive decision to care for him at home until he died. On paper, this meant we were with him 24-hours around the clock holding his hand, talking to him, mopping what needed to be mopped, washing every towel in the house – twice – making him comfortable and keeping him aware of what was happening around him interspersed with the care from Cranford Hospice nurses who were nothing short of amazing. Fortunately my sister, a brilliant triage nurse, joined us for Dadda’s final 19-hours and undertook care that Mum and I were no longer able to stomach.

The subtext to this post is, death is neither poetic nor graceful. To watch someone you love enter the experience of dying will likely be the most painful, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking journey of your life and one you are ill-equipped to do. A dying person is bewildered, afraid, resistant, extremely stubborn, physically heavy and immobile all while their body rapidly and crudely decays while they are still alive.

Mercifully, they have slipped into a place so deep that you cannot reach them; whatever your beliefs, it is apparent that they are no longer they.

Death is ugly. It smells, shudders, shakes, swells to double its size, slips in and out of breathing, and no matter how hard you will it to, it doesn’t go in your time. Yes, death is very far, far away from beautiful. But if you open your eyes to this most bittersweet and epic of journeys, you will see an abundance of grace and beauty and it will be the most poignant, magical journey of your life, and of their passing.

Through my father’s death, I discovered the meaning of love, tenderness, family, true patience, time and the profundity of the subtle, perplexing energy we call embodied life. I became inextricably entwined with my mother and sister, both of whom I respect and love beyond words, and the sheer power of women. I understood what it means to love my brothers and extended family and how deeply these bonds run. I saw grace shine through our undertakers, Dunstall’s as they held our hand through Dad’s final days as a physical presence on planet earth.

I wouldn’t swap my experience for all the world but I would invite you to enter your own personal journey with your heart, mind and soul wide open. Only then can you deliver what you need to in what will be the best and worst of times, through the power of grace.

Rest in peace my beautiful father James Halward Nash, my brave Dadda who passed away at 5.20am Tuesday, June 18, 2013 surrounded near and far by the family who loves him still.

With love all ♥ and all love ♥

xx

Post script: Here’s a beautifully written blog post about grief written by Adrienne Kohler, who reminds us that “we grieve because we loved.” Thanks Adrienne.

In the bliss of free-falling

On the edge of my world; a mountain and me.

It’s easy to start this post with a symbolic image of me perched on top of Mt Tongariro at the beginning of autumn at the precipice of a life-altering decision. But truth is, I was thinking about my next move long before this adventure began, and every decision we make – as well as those we don’t – is life-altering. So cutting straight to it, I’m currently free-falling in body, mind, heart and soul.

This post, however, is not a cathartic purging of my self-inflated heroic journey into an unwritten future, technically we all do that everyday. Rather, I write this with the fervent hope you take strength from my willingness to take a leap of faith, my accepting of the grace of ‘what is’, and that you succeed because of it.

First, I want to start with a prologue (yes, actually). I was extremely privileged to see and hear Kiwi entrepreneur Derek Handley speak last week to Auckland Grammar School students. He had a room full of 13- and 14-year-old boys silent and transfixed in the after lunch no-go-zone. Yet they sat, melting into his words. Not because he told his triumphant tale of becoming a gazillionaire, but because he demystified the concept of ‘risk’ with the authenticity of a big brother. Essentially, he acknowledged that failure – were we to call it that – is the greatest teacher in the path to our success. If we believe anything is possible, he says, then nothing’s impossible. Exactly

Getting to the point of this post, what exactly was this great faith leap I embarked upon?

It’s hard to capture it in a nutshell but basically I have let go of what is around the corner. I have more-or-less had to. I left a full-time permanent job because I needed to be happy. I don’t know what my life will look like six weeks from now – nor in fact in one week – and I am terrifyingly delighted. Or delightedly terrified. I am living in the present, because the present is all we have. And I am happy.

And now for the actual prologue. As I sit and write this, my father is beside me facing a journey of the extraordinary – or possibly, the very ordinary. After years of a happy, abundant and active life, his over-worked heart has called time. He is now undertaking the journey of having his body shut down. But rather than this being a sad tale, it’s a time to celebrate and laugh. It’s time to inject joy into every minute of every hour. And while he’s still alive, I am doing exactly that. I have danced, sang, laughed and shared with him every single junk food delight I could get my hands on in the supermarket. I bought Dr Seuss’ magical book Oh, the places you’ll go! and read it to him, because it’s a book about how my Dad taught me to live my life.

We’ve worn matching track pants, we’ve laughed about a great great aunt with a hairy chin and a drippy nose, done the DomPost quiz and had breakfast in bed everyday. It’s been a blast. Yes, the inevitable outcome is sad, but it’s time to let the heights of joy flourish over the enormity of grief.

So, I turn my eyes to my tattoo, which reads: ‘light, love, grace’ because it is who I am and what I choose to be.

With love all ♥

xx

Loss = expansion

Loss. It’s what I am feeling at the moment. Loss of value, loss of colleagues, loss of friends and loss of family.

Loss.

I am however completely wrong, of course. I haven’t lost anything. Not a single thing.

No one is gone from my life. No talent I had before now has trickled away. I haven’t lost any friends and my family is 100% intact. In fact, I haven’t lost a thing.

Last night, Fred, the cat in my photo above, moved to Grey Lynn. I hear he’s holding his own, marking out his place in the pet-dom hierarchy. I shed a wee tear (naturally), but Fred’s OK. And so am I.

Which brings me to my point. The “loss” that I believe myself to be feeling is actually, in tactical terms, an expansion of my world. The colleagues I have “lost” are making their way in Auckland, the UK, the US, Oz and the world. My tentacle-acular connection to them has stretched right across the globe in every direction and reaches right back to me.

Added to that, I have the luxury of social media and am able to see, hear and feel them every day.

The people I left behind in London, Brighton, Devon, Ireland and Scotland are still there, being the talented, savvy, smart people they always were. Only better. And they’re only a couple of flights and an adventurous stop-over away.

The jewels of my life who live in Hawke’s Bay, Ruapehu, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Bath, London, LA, San Francisco, New York and beyond are padding down the grass ready for me to pitch up with my tent. And there’s not a single thing stopping me from joining them.

As for loss experienced through death… I have decided not to go there. Aside from saying that for me, the immediacy and overwhelming grief of loss evolves over time to expand the mind and heart, and to connect the soul to an infinite belief system. But as I say, I am not going there. I have my beliefs and I respect yours.

So… my world has expanded lately. What about yours?

WHAT I SHOULD COULD HAVE DONE TONIGHT (no more “SHOULDs”)

• Phoned my mother
• Helped my neighbour move boxes (soooo wasn’t going to happen)

WHAT I DID TONIGHT

• Had the BEST BodyJam class of my life (I’ve only been going six months, so hey…)
• Made a weird salad with iceberg lettuce, salmon and cream cheese
• Popped into Linkedin
• Reminded myself that when I point my judgy finger at someone, four fingers are pointing back at me

Join me on my trip to freedom. RIP Rin, three years this Sunday. Always missed and probably laughing at me not with me. And happy night all ♥

xx

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

My siblings and me by the swing Dad made

There’s a threshold crossed by siblings, probably traversed without fanfare. It’s the day they consider their brothers and sisters with feelings of admiration and respect.

For me, this deep-running river of feeling did not arise in the best of times but in the worst of times. It flowed – and flows – at our lowest ebbs. When my brothers and sisters face their grossest challenges; when their souls have been needled and they call on all their resources of strength to get through.

And now, whether we accept it or not, we children are perched in the greatest precipice of our lives: facing our parents closing the phrase of their lives. It’s inevitable. We all gotta die some time. And without being bleak, our father has a thriving, curious brain fighting against a tired and injured heart. And we don’t think the brain has the stamina needed to win. Our mother, by contrast, will punch on for years. We think.

To my siblings, my closest peers, I know what I’ve got. It’s not yet gone, and I’m going to nurture my friendship with you for as long as we’re all still around.

So, however and whenever the inevitable unfolds, I will be lucky to have these people to share my worst of times with.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS MORNING

• Read my academic papers

WHAT I DID THIS MORNING

• Made Dad breakfast in bed
• Ate my breakfast in bed with Dad as he ate his breakfast in bed
• Hung out three loads of washing
• Went to the pharmacist for Dad
• Bought a dozen free range eggs
• Bought the winning super-duper, mega extra Lotto ticket

Happy weekend all

xx