Bloganuary #3: Being mindful about broken boilers

At some point during the three weeks of us shooting across France and the UK, our boiler decided it didn’t want to… boil(?) anymore. We came home to an apartment which was cold and uninviting and sad.

All my best-laid plans – plans involving washing our clothes in warm water, and enjoying the simple pleasures of life (like central heating) – were suddenly out the window, and I was up a ladder trying to fix the boiler.

Our boiler is in a very inconvenient place and involves not an insignificant amount of acrobatics to get to.

It’s moments like this – standing at the top of a ladder, leaning into a dusty cupboard, exchanging yells with my wife about which valve might be the DHW inlet valve* and where was the filling loop, and trying not to think too hard about spiders or worse, rats** – that I remind myself that I really need to work on this mindfulness thing.

*the Youtube video she was watching said there should be two blue valves and we had one blue valve, three black, and a yellow one.

** we had an infestation earlier this year. I suppose actually I should have been trying not to think about dead rats as the landlord did eventually send an exterminator when someone on the bottom floor opened a cupboard and a rat jumped out at them.

We did sort out the boiler, thankfully. Our very cold flat became a warm flat after a few hours. I still haven’t put a load of washing on, but sometimes we just need to take the victories where we can and spend the rest of the evening watching episodes of Tracker on Disney+.

Today, I am trying to be more grateful. Grateful for working boilers, hot water, heating, and my ever-resourceful wife. I’m trying to breathe a bit more – I got a Fitbit for Christmas and it has a nice two-minute breathing exercise on it.

I’m also trying to sit down and do some of the stuff I planned yesterday.

I’m starting the Artist’s Way…

… Next week.

I’ve got to get myself back in order after all the chaos of travelling and boilers. I’ve got to find my rhythm.

I also have an essay to write for my class next week (I’ll try to write it mindfully though).

So that means today is PLANNING. Which in my case means getting the llama post-it notes out and sticking them to each chapter of the Artist’s Way book.

If you don’t know what the Artist’s Way is, it is a 12-week guided program to examine yourself as an artist and rediscover your creativity. Lots of artists swear by it. I used to work for Lapidus – the writing for wellbeing organisation – and I’m pretty sure a lot of their members could recite the book off by heart.

Llama post-its. A must for the modern artist.

I have attempted to complete the course twice and failed. This is for many reasons, one of them being a lack of llama post-it notes. The post-it problem has been solved.

It also makes sense to start the Artist’s Way course at the beginning of a week, so I will be starting mine next Monday.