A Year of Living Encouragingly
A look back at the stuff from 2022 that encourages us to look towards 2023 with positivity and optimism
Orson Welles put it rather well:
“We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves”
Sometimes during these ‘in-between’ days, we drift off and reflect on what has passed. Over the years, we have come to think of it as a chance to catapult ourselves into a new year on the back of fond memories and inspiring ideas.
As we reflected, we noticed a post by the always-interesting
“100 things that made my year” … loads of good stuff in there.It got us thinking
Do we have our own ‘100’? Or fewer.
Pick a number, any number. Or don’t pick a number … there is always a risk with these arbitrary targets. Numbers 1 to 37 roll out with alacrity. The next 15 or so get the grey cells ticking over … notebooks are raided for 20 forgotten ‘highlights’ … and there you are with another 28 to find and, nothing. Cue, making stuff up … or ‘fillers’ which aren’t highlights at all.
So, we’re not picking a number to aim for. But it is the perfect time of year for a list. Our Feasts + Fables newsletter ‘Field Notes for Curious Minds’ will include a ‘list of lists’ on 1 January. Perhaps we might add this one too.
Here we go then … A Year of Living Encouragingly
After 4 months on the road, we retreated indoors and spent 3 months in Wales, house sitting and hiding out in a cabin in the woods.
We spent some of that time offering Encouragement Sessions - our handfuls of tangfastics for the soul - to more than twenty folk in need of a boost.
We got to house-sit a distillery (do check out the exquisite Jin Talog).
It was a year of reading. Fifty-seven books in a 57th year.
We have greatly admired folk who encourage other folk to write. Take
who offers themes from her compelling memoir as prompts for aspirant writers. The community Tanya has built inspired us to try and build our own Substack community.Arriving in Santander with a plan to head straight to France, we turned right instead of left. It was a spur of the moment choice that unlocked beautiful Asturias in Northern Spain. Sometimes it is good to shake up the plan.
We pretty much stopped taking the news; enough already of having our strings pulled by a manipulative media.
It turns out that booking yourself in for a half marathon is a great way to encourage yourself to move more. We hiked and jogged around Northern Spain and France to get ourselves in some semblance of shape.
If you go to the same events, you meet the same folk and do the same sort of things. This year, we shook things up by booking ourselves into the Love Trails Festival on the Gower Peninsula. That led us to meet …
Neil Frankel of the Movement Project, who has a fabulous way of playing with movement. A gentle soul with a huge heart. Talking of which …
… we were strolling around at Love Trails when we were stopped in our tracks by a “it’s Mrs Feasts and Mr Fables, isn’t it?” from the ebullient Owen Pillai (his Instagram is super-inspiring). Owen is the epitome of generosity and encouragement. He has built the Anti Gym Gym Club community around great values and a highly supportive energy.
We turned hours of internet searches into actual getting out and about to house hunt. There was a huge wish list. Reducing our ‘must-haves’ made the searching process a good deal easier.
Trusting serendipity seems to work out most of the time.
We travelled 850 kilometres to go and hang out with friends in Barcelona. Crazy amount of travelling but, well, hanging out with humans rocks.
Sometimes, when you are travelling, the temptation is to be always on the move. We learned to slow down and spend several days, even weeks at a time, in the places that took our fancy. Campsites at Can Coromines and La Viorna will live long in the memory. Slow down, notice more.
Did we mention the folk who encourage writers? Take Fiona Melrose whose #2badpagesaday challenge nudged Mr Fables into crafting a first draft of a novel-length manuscript. The editing process starts now.
As Stephen King says in his excellent book ‘On Writing’ “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: Read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut”. The combination of #57Books and #2badpagesaday fulfilled Mr Fables’ obligations in that regard.
I guess Elon Musk’s clumsy handling of Twitter has been an encouragement; an encouragement to explore other ways of building communities, which is truly what social media should be about (“social media not sales media”). It was certainly our prompt to check out Substack.
Oh, and all that house-searching. Well, it paid off. We only went and bought a teeny farm in France, our very own Encouragement Farm.
Encouragement Farm will, we hope, be a place where we seed our values, each of us growing as humans as we live more seasonally; a place to harvest the ideas behind our Manifesto. Perhaps, too, it will be somewhere to lure folk, a haven for kindred souls to gather and recharge their spirits through gentle encouragement.
Growing gently into 2023.
Love the whole post !
Thank you for sharing this wonderful list.
I particularly resonated with number 13.
Happy new year!