I recently read a meme on Facebook:
‘I’ve thought about running away a lot more as an adult than I ever did as a child!’.
My primal instinct has always been flight not fight and although I laughed out loud on reflection I thought about all the times I did want to run away as an adult.
Ending up at a free camp site 4 hours from Melbourne, my camp chair plonked in the river on a 40 degree January day. Another time taking the kids to Adelaide, when I was aiming for Alice Springs and another flight of fancy in my twenties a trip alone to Nimes, France, the list goes on…
Right now in my life I don’t want to run away from anything or anyone. It’s a nice place to be.
Fight
Fight is an interesting place to find yourself, anger rising until it has to explode. I’ve always liked to think I am a lover not a fighter however there are times, especially with my motherly instincts that fight can be ignited. It’s not somewhere I generally inhabit and it usually involves conflict with a vacuum cleaner to be honest, bloody things! I’ve broken more than I care to mention maybe I should stop fighting with them and run away next time.
Flow
Flow is my favourite place to inhabit and I believe we all have moments of flow, when your brain switches off from distraction and you are purely focused. I experienced this whilst writing my first book. However after experiencing such huge amounts of it in one year I could then appreciate the other ways in which flow works in life, at work or studying, even housework or spreadsheets. Sometimes shutting off from the world is easy, sometimes not. Meditation i believe is another form of flow and one I have only recently discovered, such a blissful state.
Freeze
Freeze is another place I have inhabited on a few occassions and apparently trauma can bring this human reaction on. Again once it has been ignited I believe it is easy to relive. It’s not necassarily a nice place to be but the brains way of protecting us. It’s not always trauma, time can freeze in wonderful moments too watching a band or holding a hand when all of our emotions are hightened and the brain seems to slow down and freeze frame.
What a lot of F’s!
