As I was pulling up my hood to (unsuccessfully) protect against the relentless gusts I was joined by a fellow windswept parent.
A parent who, I must admit, I have something of a mum crush on. She is immeasurably kind and wise - she's the yardstick I refer to (in my head) when I'm having a parenting crisis.
She is my distinctly non-religious and eminently capable female version of "What would Jesus do?"
We got chatting about weekends - she'd just been on a mindfulness weekend to aid her working life and her personal one. (See! This is the kind of thing she does!)
The weekend had involved a visualisation exercise where she and the other attendees were asked to create an image of all their worries and concerns, write them on the side of a log and sit on the riverbank and watch as those logs drifted downstream.
You weren't allowed to touch the logs as they went past, you weren't allowed think of an answer to the concerns they raised and you certainly weren't allowed to launch yourself full-pelt into the river to slow down the logs.
You simply watched and acknowledged the logs as they drifted by.
This had really helped her, she said, as she's prone to hurrying to find solutions rather than taking time to calm herself down and think without clouds of anxiety hampering any decision.
I like the thought of it. I'm also prone to leaping into decisions, to reacting on panic, to blindly trying to clear lots of things off my list without properly thinking them through.
I don't know if it's a personality thing, a distraction thing or a reaction to MS mayhem thing - a way of gathering some sort of decisive control from the uncertainty this disease brings. Even if that decision might be the wrong one.
At the moment, I feel that I'd like to try for a bit of calm in the middle of the mayhem and if it's some floating logs that will do this for me, then I'm willing to sit on the bank and give it a go.
:: Like a hurricane by Neil Young
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