A reminder, that rerooting isn’t a one-time decision — it’s a practice.
I used to know exactly what made me feel alive. This morning, sitting in my garden, I realised I’d forgotten to ask myself the question in months.
When I first began Root Beginnings, I deliberately spent more time outside in nature. Having been so deeply inspired and reconnected with my roots in Jamaica, and the adventure and curiosity that came from the mountains of Colombia; my creative flow ever since has come from nature.
Nature wasn’t the break from the work. It was the work.
I dedicated my time to thinking early each morning in the forest, walking by the lake, and when time was short which it began to be as I settled into my new life; I simply sat in my garden briefly listening to the buzz of the bees, the crisp birdsong and gentle rustle of the trees in the early morning breeze.
This morning I realised I hadn’t done that in months. And I realised it wasn’t just the routine that had slipped. It was the mindset underneath it.
If you’re not at your desk, you’re not working. If you’re not doing ten-plus hours, you’re not being productive.
The exact shackles I’d built this business to break free of had crept back on, one Monday-to-Friday at a time, without me consciously deciding to put them there.
In our modern lives, we are operating in autopilot more and more, compounded with stress becoming normalised; “Our brains become concerned with surviving demands rather than savouring experiences.”
There’s also a reason being in the garden had a positive impact: research on attention restoration shows that time in natural environments replenishes a mind worn down by modern life, rather than just distracting it for a moment. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8125471/
Time in nature, stillness, and the kind of meditative attention I teach in my workshops has been shown to quiet that autopilot network and bring us back into the present. Back into our lives, rather than just managing them.
This is the work I keep coming back to with the leaders and teams I work with: the shift from autopilot, to awareness, to mindful agency.
As the world asks us to continually reinvent, I think we miss a critical step: to ‘reroot.’ To reroot is to find steadiness away from the slipstream – to trust what we already know, and to savour the moment we’re in, not just the milestone ahead.
This weekend, as we welcome the summer solstice; I invite you to reflect on what makes you feel alive? What do you savour?
- Are you automatically thinking of the next demand, the next milestone?
- What might it feel like to choose, even for ten minutes, less automation and more aliveness?
