Merry

I gave up blogging when I began to coach gymnastics so regularly and all encompassingly (less than a sentence in and already upsetting the spellcheck…) that there wasn’t much in my life except a growing collection of my own children who no longer wanted to be written about and and children it would have been entirely unprofessional to write about. Somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to write about grief, and after that writing, everything else always seemed a little hollow. And then I owned a gym and there wasn’t time to even do anything else worth writing about. Possibly I could have written about what an absolutely terrible idea it was to open a business that entirely consumed your life…. but…. I was too busy.

Creativity has been in short supply these last few years… even having things to put on Instagram to keep some sort of record has been in reduced to a few times a year. Occasionally I manage to grab a picture of the boy giving me a thumbs up, but not a great deal else. And I’ve become a lot more private too – the world is a big and unforgiving place now, not one to bare your soul on, that’s for sure and certainly not one to venture a controversial opinion on if you own a business that might become the butt of a campaign. So, privacy. Quiet. And a little bit of a loss of reasons to do things, because once a showgirl, always a showgirl – I do like to have a reason to make and do, even if it is just to put a picture of it somewhere.

Lately I’ve been enjoying a new (and, drumroll…) slightly controversial version of creativity; while teaching myself to bring the power of AI into our business to try and free up a little me time from the grind of the humdrum parts of running a business, I’ve quite enjoyed using it to create ways of exploring the world differently. I’ve always been a sucker for a tech tool and the opportunities of this particular one fascinate me. I’m not going to debate all the ins and outs of whether it is a good or bad thing, there are plenty of better places for that, but I’ve been inspired and fascinated by how much my way of using it has explained to me some of my own learning style, how I access the world, what excites and drives me. I’ve discovered I love systems, categorising, finding ways to pull together common threads and create resources for myself to learn from. I’ve been a little gutted imagining how I could have used this when the girls were little and what MuddlePuddle could have been like if I had had this type of tool back then. I’ve laughed at myself quite a lot – the very definition of a brain with too many tabs open – using it like Jarvis…. projects running simultaneously in my working day, some hobbies, some work, some discovery, some slightly silly. And in much the same way they always say that if you need something doing you should ask a busy person, I’ve felt myself come alive a little again, my brain sprouting ideas in all directions with something that can finally hold them all, link the together and let me explore 15 side quests while still holding down a job. If I’d had this 20 years ago, I’d have bene unstoppable. Now, I’m just a great deal happier while also doing a better job of running an extremely busy business.

The delight of finding myself enjoying learning again – because I’m scratching the surface of using it cleverly but 1000x better than I was 3 months ago. The best thing has been creating some small projects that have set my world alight again. A history project has been one of them (I’m not discounting MuddlePuddle coming back!) and a nature project is another. The nature project is going to be the first one that makes it to here, because it is just such a perfect antidote to a busy life; reasons to walk, to garden centre, to nature reserve and take a trip out in the midge and find new places.  And along the way what else has woken up has been picking up a crochet hook, building some Lego ideas of my own, wanting to write again, finding myself singing again, filling my conservatory with plants and learning about them, planning a new garden, finding myself with colouring pencils in my hand, long walks with my husband where we talk and talk and talk. These are good things and they’ve been strangely and curiously unlocked by a tool that has allowed me to create the one thing that I have never been able to do at all – draw and make something look as I want it to.

So yes, I know the arguments, I know the ease with which people sneer…  ‘oh, AI…’ but here I am on a journey about what it can unlock in a person and what it can give them. Yes, there are problems, but it isn’t going away, so while I can, I’m going to let it give me some joy. Goodness knows I spend enough time and energy trying to give that to others. I think I deserve a little of it myself.

Also – tree. Actually took the picture while on a walk that discovered none of the flowers I wanted to look for, while discovering 65 versions of yellow flowered things I had randomly categorised as ‘weird dandelions’ all my life. More later. The tree no longer has a blue bucket under it. Honestly? Excellent use of a tool that could potentially end the world.