Sometimes acknowledging the relationships we have can be a beautifully simple yet powerful thing to do; transformative in its way. Take the relationship I have with the cycles of the sun…how I notice the difference in my behaviour, my urges, my health according to the rhythms of solar maximum and minimum or whether the sun is “active” today. Not a relationship that many people are aware of, it seems, and yet we all have it and its one that I happened to have studied since it became more and more obvious to me over the past few years. Take today as example; awake with the dawn to meditate (though not a day it came easily…), do yoga, cramming celery through a juicer by 7 o’ clock humming Road to Marrakesh at breakneck speed (don’t know why…must have heard it and its got into my head) and with a list of “want to do’s” as long as my arm so I’m already tapping away on my computer. And this, a post that I didn’t even know I was going to write ten minutes ago, apparently first on my list. The solar wind is arrived, I assume…I know without checking; all the more obvious to me in these days of solar minimum when the long days in between can feel like moving at a snail’s pace through treacle (and my body’s processes feel like that to). Some days feel much (much) slower than this, whether I wanted it to be that way or not…and I can work  effectively with those too; allowing that there are other priorities to be taken care of at those times and, still, ways I can get worthwhile things done, even if that is resting and taking pause.

And it’s not just the cycles of the sun but the cycles of the seasons, of the weather, of the day…noticing them, how they make us feel (yes, differently, at different times..for all our modern perspective makes us like to think that we can streamline absolutely everything…), which can be so powerful. Not in order to give our power away to them but to acknowledge that they are there and that we are part of something bigger than just the minutiae of our world and our highly-focused daily preoccupations. It allows us to work with them to create the best possible outcomes. Being sensitive to these cues is, I have found, such a gift more so than a hardship that bangs on my door with unnecessary data to deliver.

The same, of course, in any relationship; with family, friends, colleagues, people who test our patience or our understanding and all those other people we hardly know but have to muddle along with. When we acknowledge that all of these represent “relationship” at some level, we stop giving our power over to them yet become the masters of working with situations that might otherwise take us along for their ride. It allows us to develop tact, patience and broader understanding (since it’s not “all about us”). It allows us to be at once humbled by the minute part we play in something vastly more complex and yet to steer our own vehicle according to the conditions, maximising our use of “what is” rather than labouring against the flow, which makes the best possible navigator of us and delivers the highest likelihood of reaching the destination of our greatest aspiration. So, with the wind so obviously in my sails, my super-productive day gets started (and its only 7.30).