Hello 2018, you’re looking mighty fine!

Welcome to the cliche – new year, new blog, new me. But I don’t care. This blog is something I’ve been thinking about doing for months, and now seemed like a pretty good time to get on and start it.

So what’s going on here then? Those of you who know me will know I’ve been blogging a long time – over 10 years in fact, in one way or another. But over the last couple of years I’ve been going through something of a transformation, and that’s changed the amount of time I have to write. I no longer spend my weekends sat around at home in front of the computer – instead I’m usually out and about, and quite often dancing. Actually, over the last year I’ve hardly blogged at all. I often feel guilty about not blogging, but then I remind myself that I don’t have to, and that (most importantly) there’s no point in writing if you don’t have anything worth writing about.

But you see, writing is one of the things that I’m most passionate about. You could say it’s one of my reasons for living. When I ran into the concept of ‘ikigai’ recently (a Japanese word which basically means ‘reason to live’), it got me thinking about all of my reasons for living, and I wanted a space in which I could explore all of the things I’m currently passionate about.

There’s work of course, and I am lucky enough to do a job which I genuinely love and feel happy and proud to do, but I do think a reason for living can be a lot more than one’s career. For me, my ikigai is everything else. It’s all the things that get me out of bed on a day when I don’t have to get up and go to work. For example, this morning, 1st January 2018, I rolled out of bed at 7am so I could go and join my first ever Park Run, a timed 5k run. Why? Because I’m committed to challenging and bettering myself, and because I’m a little bit crazy.

Often, when I’m tired and I’ve had a busy day or week, I feel like I could just curl in a ball and hibernate for a while, but usually on those occasions I find a bit of oomph and I take myself out dancing, because dancing cures everything. (I’ll talk more about dancing in coming posts, I’m sure!) Dancing is definitely my ikigai.

So, ikigai is the name of the game, and this year, this beautiful new year of 2018, is when I’m going to let the words tumble out of my fingers and see what happens. Thank you for joining me – I promise it won’t be boring.