Author: Amanda Viviers

Across the last week, I have been recreating the paths that bought me here today. If I was really honest with myself and you, I haven’t been feeling that great. Maybe it’s peri-menopause, or the aftereffect of a big few years of change— I’ve found myself questioning everything. 

I had breakfast with a dear friend and we encouraged one another as fellow creative writers with young children. Unpacking the change in season as our parents get older and the juggle of jobs, businesses and the desire to be present to our families. 

We chatted away and I found myself reflecting on the lessons I had learnt from swimming over the last year at the local pools. It’s a little bubble of humanity with so many different narratives and stories writhing. Each week, even through winter, I jumped in the pool and swam laps. 

A lot of my conversations with my therapist ended up talking about my swimming. The cold water and it’s reset of my nervous system. My inability to stop thinking about my work, spending most of the laps, trying to solve problems. My changing body and the desire to move it, but how sluggish and overwhelmed it feels. 

Last week I lost my AirPods, the awful part of the story is that I had only worn them a couple of times after getting them late in the year as a unexpected birthday present from my husband. He said to me “keep looking they will be somewhere random.” He smiled and said “your stuff always reappears”.

The deep sadness at the loss of my little sound machines, was this overwhelming disappointment I just could not shake. The feeling of loss, was the blur of what the last few years has entailed. I just kept repeating, my life is a blur and I spend so many days trying to help others, that I lose my own things because my kids, my family, my work are all swirling around my heart and life. 

Those big feelings these days often precede my time of bleeding and the anxiety that rises in my soul is a breaking of my need for more. Then I slow down, I dig my feet into the sand and watch the sun set on another day, reminding myself that tomorrow is another day. 

The air pods were found tucked away to bed in a little blue basket, I’m sure somewhere that I had once thought was a place of safety. And I find myself wanting to crawl into that basket and hide myself away as well. The daze of lost things always moves heavy on my soul, because I want things to be simpler, easier and less hectic. 

As I listen to friends who’s children have now grown up and left their house they tell me “suddenly your days are quiet and you miss the meaningful hurry. You miss the chatter and full table. One day, it will be so very different”. 

So how do I keep hold of my things, stay present to my family and still dream up ways to reconcile the hope I deeply feel in my heart when writing. Can these things ever reconcile? 

I remember the little sentences I spoke to my friend at breakfast and reflect the mirror of advice back to myself. 

“Just keep swimming. Swim through the problems, swim through the heartache, swim through the exhaustion. Just show up to the pool of your everyday and swim again.”

The fluid nature that my heart longs for, is to not hold onto it all so heavy. Just let the past remain there and the future is held in the hands of God. 

Just be present, to each stroke, each breath, each anxious thought and release it into the hands of an ever-present loving God who wants to traverse this season in the everyday with me once again. 

Each time I am present in those moments that I want to run away with my thoughts and solve all the problems on my own, I remember that my helplessness is met in the messiest places by the helper. I’ve realised lately that the things I worry about and obsess over, when released into his care are profoundly lighter. 

Everything is going to be okay. 

And even when it’s not, we can continue to show up to the difficulty with the honest answer of telling the truth. 

Three journaling prompts I wrote to my subscribers this week focus on the following themes- connection, authenticity and gratitude. 

1. What am I thankful for?
2. What do I need to be honest about?
3. Who can I reach out to?

Write your answers to these three questions and you will be surprised at the perspective shift that comes quickly. We all long for connection, truthfulness and a realistic view on what we have already. 

Continue on dreamweaver. Just keep swimming, show up for another day. Let’s be honest, especially with one another. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t set revolutionary goals this new year. Each year I choose a book of the Bible to focus on, rather than trying to rush through the whole and this year, I am going to read a Psalm as often as I can. Mostly each day, but also give myself the grace, to just lean towards Jesus, no matter what the day holds. Not out of religious practice, but seeking out the answers of His present help in time of need. To delight in the beauty of who He is. 

“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”

Psalm 27:14

Psalm 34: 4-5 “I prayed to the Lord and he answered me from my fears! Those who look to Him for help will be radiant with joy”.

I stood by the kitchen bench watching my Aunt make sandwich after sandwich (in the days when gluten wasn’t the enemy). She would make a stack for each face looking around the corner, the number of eyes went on and on. 

She had a growing gang of children around her legs, her apron floured and floors dirty. Not counting the eight she birthed, cousins, neighbours and school friends swirled her kitchen bench. It wasn’t unusual for her to slap butter and jam on two dozen rounds. Next a watermelon was sliced on the terrace. And children would scurry from every hiding place, including the teepee we had constructed from a tree and sheets in the block next door. 

I just remember standing next to her in the kitchen watching row upon row of sandwich being constructed and telling stories from my day. I remember her presence. I remember the smell of her baking and the rollers in her hair. 

Somedays I wonder what stories my children will remember, you know the inconsequential butter and jam moments, that run quickly through my life, but remembered 30 years later. I think my New Years theology focuses more on the highlights, the goals achieved, than the lowlights of preparing food for the circle who gather. 

I never heard my Aunt complain, that’s probably because I didn’t live in her house full time, although sometimes I’m sure she thought we did. The memory of that little moment, wasn’t about the lunch being collated for anyone who was close-by, it was her present attention. Her nods, smiles and wonder. Her warmth, slowness and intention. The homemade biscuits, cordial and table. Somedays I wonder if I’ve missed moments lost inside my mind. In fact, I’m sure I have. Lost within my lies. 

I grew up recreating moments in the future, to hold onto the surety I felt in the now. You can find me dreaming up new and better possibilities rather than staying present to the current reality. This recreating in the future doesn’t happens when I’m stressed, overwhelmed and anxious. It is always when I feel great, a memory in the making and those filled with goodness. Like I can’t just exist in that moment of presence, I need to recreate it again, control the future in case it never comes again.

Do you spend the present trying to control the future? 

Rather than experiencing the holiday, I would be planning the next one.

Instead of celebrating the win, I’d be processing what it would take to achieve more.

As I sit at a table with family and friends, I find myself trying to recreate the moment in the future. 

I think I believed the lie; if I try hard enough, I will be enough, more than I am right now and pain won’t ever dawn our door again. 

It is a lie. 

I discovered the lie recently when my husband said out loud about our house “this house is enough” and I looked up from my phone and my head tilted. I’d never really considered that what I had in my life was actually enough. Of course when I reflect on the disparity between my life and others, the global famine, the rental crisis be the increase of family breakdown from the pressure of post pandemic world. I am stilled, grateful, humbled but then I continue on believing what our culture sells us in every ad retargeted that we need more.

Recently a university professor asked me if I struggled with perfection. Straight away I replied “of course not…oh, maybe. Gosh, I’ve never considered it that way” and he smiled. 

You see enoughness has never looked like perfection, because I just couldn’t ever imagine anything feeling finished. This feedback was contextual to me failing an exam, that I’d worked really hard to try and pass. In the same week I couldn’t finish an ocean swim, although I trained all year and the day before finished easily. 

The desire for more runs deep within my theological veins. It’s a place I have traversed often in prayer, moments of surrender, when I just can’t take the pressure any more. A lie that contentment is a place in the future, rather that the platitude of gratitude for what I have rather than have not. 

The second lie I uncovered recently that took hold in the corridors of hope twenty years ago. The teeth gritting determined stance of living a supposed “purpose-driven life”. This pressure of making meaning and every moment mattering created a vortex of helping others for this helper. 

If something wasn’t purposeful then maybe it wasn’t worthy and then I find myself back at my Aunts 70’s kitchen and her jam countertop parade and the feeling of contentment swirl the drain once again. 

I swing from dreaming of deleting every social media, cancelling my radio commitments, throwing my latest manuscript in the fire and saying no to everything for a year. To wanting to record a podcast, write a weekly newsletter and fire up my blog once again. 

You see writing is an act of presence for me, it’s a rebellious act of regurgitation, where the lies stuck in my mind, get recalibrated once again. The problem is I then begin to feel the weight of performance and achievement whisper promises of enoughness and I recoil once again. Performance, purpose and more are themes of my autobiography and the only prescription is perspective. 

Each New Year I ask myself a set questions, that help me to repent my desire for notoriety once again. This writing practice is not about resolutions, losing weight, finding faith or new occupations. It is the heart beat of reconciliation, that audits my obsessions to find presence once again. 

Recently I’ve believed another lie (in my pursuit of unravelling the purposeful life context) that God doesn’t really care or walk with us in the details of our days. 

Can He really be present to every need in our world?

Without thinking I wrote a text to my close group of friends and said “If I die the same age as my Dad did, then I only have 20 more years to go.” And I’m sure they didn’t mean to, because I’ve known them for such a long time, but the messages rolled on through and no one acknowledged this moment of sheer vulnerability, even with a joke of “stop being morose Viviers” but losing two fathers in a short space of time does something deep in the fractured foundation of your surety, your understanding of what’s important and what’s not. 

2022 bought so many difficulties, so many that are not publicly consumable and some just not my stories to share but somehow with the headwind that has blown strongly against my hope I’ve believed that God is not present in our pain. 

However I come back to perfection again, I remember all the times He has been present in my pain and the lie is exposed. He is my help, my perfection and my surrender.

The word that I am focusing on for 2023 is “presence”. My present attention to my family. My seeking of His presence in my very ordinary moments and remaining present in the moment rather than running off into the future. Just like my Aunt making jam sandwiches for the children who gathered around her skirt, may I sink into the very moments of grace extended in my everyday. Remembering that hope is on its way.

May His hope, help and friendship hold you steady friend in anything that 2023 brings us.

Here’s a list of 25 questions to journal with and find ways to shift the inner critic and move towards compassion.

1. Acknowledge how you feel today?
2. How can you give yourself permission to do something life-giving today?
3. What do I need right now, small, big or in-between?
4. Who are the people in my life who are nonjudgmental, trustworthy and genuinely have my heart in mind?
5. How can I spend more time with them in the next month, send a text or email now?
6. What is one healthy thing I can do to support myself to reframe the current mood?
7. When do I feel happy?
8. What are the stories that are regularly playing in my head, listen with curiosity?
9. What is one story that doesn’t support me, which I can re-story?
10. How can acknowledge a persistent problem in my life, can you write a list of what is not working?
11. What is one feeling that I struggle to feel?
12. What habits help me move through this emotion?
13. What do I need to feel loved from my partner or close friend, name three things?
14. What makes my heart come alive?
15. How would I speak to a friend who has the same problem I am grappling with today, write a short letter or text to them to encourage and then replace your name?
16. How do I wish I was parented when I was six years old?
17. What is stopping me from being kind to myself?
18. What is one tiny step I can take to chip away at the wall in front of me, stopping me from starting to address a project or problem?
19. What is one word that I feel comfortable saying to myself when I need support?
20. What is something interesting I’d like to explore this week?
21. If I loved myself fully, how would I treat myself every day?
22. What’s one small way I can start doing that today?
23. What’s a lesson I can learn from a recent mistake?
24. What are my greatest qualities?
25. What is a brave move this week?

To take a personal retreat with more questions like these to reframe with self-compassion, listen to this playlist and order your copy of Begin Again, a personal day retreat guided journal.

Our culture at the moment is playing a worldwide game of dominos. Each movement creates movement in another piece of the chain reaction. Comments wounding, decisions with ramifications and how do we personally respond?

We each have moments of connection and personal revelation and we want to find a way to stumble and articulate the truth of our own story.

It’s easy to share something that others have written. Especially when it resounds deeply within your soul and you know there is something about the words that compel you to respond. You even get rounds of applause from the people in your online groups, who think the same thoughts as you, whom the algorithm has joined together in perfect synchronicity.

Then you find another thought, story and follower.

Another person just like me, someone who believes the same things, has similar experiences and deeply set worry paths in their minds. It is this belonging and commonality that propels your conversations forward and suddenly you have the kind of friend you have always hoped for.

Until you don’t.

The scariest propellant in this season is the commonality of offence that draws groups of information together into a swirling riptide of emotion, is that it takes brave thinking to apply the information in a way, that swims against the tide. We are in an era of more information than ever before and who do you believe has the wisdom required that applies those concepts into brave living.

Bravery is a word that is easily written in a farewell card or the screen saver to our phones but what does it truly mean to explore a new way of living, that says goodbye to popular opinion, to truly understand the bias of the communicator. This means having a critical and analytical approach to things in order to provide an objective judgment.

But how!

It’s not a well-taught skill at school. Universities thrive on it, but somehow, somewhere along the way, we lose the capacity to remove ourselves bravely from the writhing culture around us.

Our world swarms with information. Often many facts are published in a way that people accept the validity and authority of the person proposing them but brave thinking empowers us to question those propositions in a way that helps us to make our own choices.

To live bravely we need to understand these five things…

Firstly think about the problem you are solving and its context. We cannot make decisions that help us to live with courage if we don’t understand the true context and situation that we are facing. Fear can often back us into a corner where we are unable to see the true nature of the problem, we only believe the one that is presented by the most compelling force. Understanding the smaller parts or the problem makes it easier to return to the big picture and identify the core question that needs to be answered in order to improve the situation.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Do your own research. Do your own fact checks the statistics, look up the original person who posted the information, find the original artist/ author/ scientist. Question the authority of the person who has shared the information. Question assumptions. The bravest thing you can do is ask great questions!

Identify Bias. Self-Reflection is one of the greatest tools for identifying your understanding, beliefs and bias. This is why I am so passionate about journaling and the power of unpacking the emotions surrounding our own stories. We can easily surround ourselves with people who don’t allow us to move from these invisible boundaries that hold us to our past beliefs and upbringing.

Reframe Your Relationship with Authority. I grew up in a family that had a healthy respect for authority. All adults were called Aunty and Uncle and we were raised to do what we were told. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when you outsource your authority in a way that you don’t question the brave thinking they are partaking in on you allow others to steer your life’s direction. The interesting thing about self-authority, is you have the permission to truly unpack what it is you believe and make your decisions accordingly.

Find friends who allow you to free your thinking! Friendship for me has never been about similarity, I have always gathered a diverse group of people along my life’s path. Women who are older than me, girls who are younger. People from different heritages and cultures. Storytellers, scientists, politicians and entrepreneurs.

Next time you lunch/ brunch/ hang out with a group of your friends, check one thing… Do you eat the same? look the same? order the same coffee/ tea? Do you follow the same people online? Do you watch the same shows?

This practical application of brave thinking brings the refreshing moment where you are able to thrive within diversity but also receive feedback, insight and perspective from people who free your think!

Having friendships that hold opposing points of view on topics is one of the greatest gifts life can ever give your future if you have the humility to step bravely into the beauty of allowing others to think differently from you.

How are your domino’s falling this Febuary?

Is it time for some brave thinking?

Beauty and grief co-exist in a way I have never understood till the last season. Moments of transition and awakening feel a little like the promise of a new year that will bring greatness. Then we move into year three of a global pandemic and the fall out of fear across the world. This ever-present challenge has moved us towards a quick realisation that growth is always preceded by challenging circumstances. Corporately our year already has provided difficult circumstances that promise to build resilience. And in some ways I also wonder if it will break us. Then I stumble upon this scripture from the book of Acts in the Bible…

The time of prayer was about three o’clock in the afternoon, and Peter and John were going into the temple. A man who had been born lame was being carried to the temple door. Each day he was placed beside this door, known as the Beautiful Gate. He sat there and begged from the people who were going in.

The man saw Peter and John entering the temple, and he asked them for money. But they looked straight at him and said, “Look up at us!”

The man stared at them and thought he was going to get something. But Peter said, “I don’t have any silver or gold! But I will give you what I do have. In the name of Jesus Christ from Nazareth, get up and start walking.” Peter then took him by the right hand and helped him up.

At once the man’s feet and ankles became strong,  and he jumped up and started walking. He went with Peter and John into the temple, walking and jumping and praising God. Everyone saw him walking around and praising God. They knew that he was the beggar who had been lying beside the Beautiful Gate, and they were completely surprised. They could not imagine what had happened to the man.

Acts 3: 1- 10 (CEV)

BEAUTY AND ASHES CO-EXIST

We can attribute the idea of beauty, as being a place of perfection. However, as I read this story and reflect upon my own experiences, I see that everyday, ordinary places are the moments where miracles precede the manifestation of the Spirit. This is a gateway of beauty, that holds the pain and transition. We can get stuck because we believe that either our year, our month, our days are either all good or all bad.

But God crowns difficult places with provision that comes from the community in a way that brings transformation. (Psalm 65: 9-12)

THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS FOUND IN OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD

An interesting reflection from this story is that he asked for the provision from his neighbourhood. We need each other. I need you and you need me.

I am terrible at asking for help or even accepting it. I sometimes find myself struggling with the realisation that I cannot do it all alone. It is a weakness, that my independence stops others from having an answer that I am asking God to provide. God always moves through neighbourhoods. He is always supplying our needs through the hands of another and when we stop others from meeting those needs, we stop the miracle in motion, as we together grow. This is a beautiful gateway towards our common union as humanity together. I need you and you need me —we together bring transformation and hope.

The difficult part of this realisation, is we live in a season within the global landscape where we are more suspicious of one another. To face the difficulty of these days, we need each other and the beauty that comes from the ashes of this season in the world, is the way we meet one another in the spaces between.

EVERYDAY MIRACLES

Although I may be seen as somewhat an optimist, although the year looks like it is a cascading shadow, found in the aftermath of a big few years of loss, I believe miracles are breaking out. On the streets and corner corridors, there is a new way that is being announced. Recently I wrote this poetic kind of picture and it inspires me to look towards the beautiful gateways that draw us into new days. Those high mountain places where we remember our worth together once again.

Go up to the high mountain O Zion and hearald that of good news.

Lift it up, fear not. “Behold you God” He comes with might.

Isaiah 40: 9

“Herald good news, daughter of Zion. Don’t be drawn into corridors of belonging that ask you to play small, to fit within its confine. Herald a song and conversation of hope.

A hidden path, a moment of vulnerability, the potential loss in the promise of fame.

There is a company of women who are united in love.

We are united but far from uniform in the way we stand alongside. Called by name, strengthened by the might of His power. Not one missing, no one is excluded, not one the most important, not one holding all the keys.

A craftsman casts her strength overlaid with gold.

Go up to the mountain, Oh Zion, herald that of good news.

Lift up your voice with strength.

He taught you the path of justice.

He brings good news alongside knowledge

He shows paths of understanding.

There is a heralding in this season, a company of women who delight in the sound of his voice. Who bring everyday miracles of peace and adoration. Good news for the brokenhearted and healing that sets multitudes free.

Who have carried burdens from other generations… With confidence and courage that comes from the experience of His presence. Go up top the high mountains. O Zion and herald the good news. “

Beauty co-exists in those charred places friend. Have the courage to seek out the everyday miracles again.