When Life Gives You Plums…

The past couple of weeks have been blessedly quiet after what has been a somewhat ‘complex’ period.

A mixture of heavy workload, personal development plans and a bereavement (see previous blog) had left me feeling a little bit broken. No major breakdown, just like I’d been rinsed through and needed to refresh and reset.

However, one of the absolute pleasures of the freelance/work-from-home life is the ability to take a break, step into your garden and pick fruit. Or even just to sit in the garden and ponder the great imponderables.

So it was that yesterday, one of the hottest days of the year, I spent a precious few minutes picking plums in the garden. There is something about fruit picking that I find incredibly mindful. Like my other passion, swimming, I can just immerse myself as I check which fruit are ripe, which need more time and which have gone over and need to be composted.

1.6kg of plums looks like this

1kg of plums made 2kg of jam.

And when you’re married to someone who enjoys making jam, I mean it just doesn’t get any better than that, does it? In fact we had more plums than jam sugar, so I made compote too.

So this very brief post is to remind you to take those little moments when you can. Simple pleasures bring great rewards. They’re the times when you can recharge your batteries, let your mind freewheel in the background, and maybe come up with some ideas and solutions to problems you thought intractible.

I still have some way to go before I’m on the other side of all the admin which follows a death, but at least I have the ability to recognise when I need to take a pause, and in turn this is allowing me to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

So whatever fruit life gives you, use it to make something positive. Preferably something you can spread on toast and enjoy with a nice cup of tea.