The days are long, but the years are short. Looking back at the post I wrote last year, I was nicely surprised to find a photo of the cherry tree looking really quite different to the one I see each day.
Across the last year, I’ve been blessed by Anna steadily transforming the garden. We’ve said goodbye to gravel, the rocket I planted has been a constant source of salad leaves, and Anna has planted a variety of flowers and strawberry under the tree, tied trellis together to support raspberry plants to grow up the fence, and installed a herb garden along the wall near the door.
I sent Anna both photos above and joked that next years might just be a garden of all the dead plants I fail to keep alive in her absence. Anna and Joe move to Spain in about 6 weeks, and Jacquie moves to Edinburgh. Their friendship has been a treasured part of the year to date and I will miss them a lot, though the goodbyes mark exciting new chapters for each of them.
One of the reasons I write these reflection posts is to remember the day-to-day before it is out of reach. Mondays at Holly’s + choir, Tuesdays with Anna, Friday club, parkrun on Saturdays, Sundays at Polys – these have been the rhythms of my weeks. Seeing friends each week is such a lovely way to keep routine and to be able to follow one another’s highs and lows and all the ponderings in the middle too.
Into the midst of these rhythms has come the joy of celebrating: gaining a sister-in-law, friends getting married, moving house, getting ordained, birthdays (I recently learned that when you turn the age that your birthday date is within the month, you celebrate your “champagne birthday”).
In May, I went on holiday to Annecy with Amy. We managed to catch our connecting train with a record 0 seconds to spare, and enjoyed a week of cycling, hiking, and sight-seeing in Annecy, Geneva and Lyon. We went swimming in the lake, got jumped out on by a YouTuber, ate an incredibly fancy lunch, learned the hard way that lunch doesn’t get served past 2pm, and admired just how stylish our Lyon host was!
One of the things that has changed in my life this year has come about thanks to a mild obsession with the BBC programme ‘Sort Your Life Out’, and is the basis of my annual reflection on what I am learning. ‘Sort Your Life Out’ is a charming show, in which a small team packs and moves the entirety of a family’s belongings into an warehouse, where it is sorted and then lovingly re-organised back into their home. It has managed to better instil in me the need to create systems.
One of the spillover effects of the show on my own life was the realisation that I didn’t have any system for my clothing. The permanent feeling of not knowing what I want to wear turned out to be a result of keeping a lot of clothes that are either too worn out, don’t quite fit, or don’t match anything else I own. (Randomly buying clothes in charity shops is not a system, and doesn’t automatically lead you to a functioning wardrobe, who knew?)
Since then, I have mapped out the functions that I need my wardrobe to be able to meet, and set a requirement that for each of these 5 functions, I need three tops and two bottoms that are all interchangeable with each other. I then eliminated the clothing that didn’t make it in, and intentionally purchased just a few items (like some charcoal trousers, a plain white t-shirt) which has made the rest of my wardrobe a lot more versatile.
I now have a much better idea of what I like and what I actually need, so rather than buying the next black floral top I find in a charity shop (I had 4!), I can instead limit myself to only looking for a white or bright-print long-sleeved top suitable for winter. Getting dressed in the morning feels a lot easier too, because everything in my drawers is stuff I like, fits, and has things to match.
Having been through this process, it seems very obvious, and I feel a bit daft not to have done this sort of thing sooner given how much of a difference it has made to a seemingly mundane part of my routine. But hey, I’m learning! And the ease of doing the set-up of a system and feeling the difference has left me energised for finding other parts of my life that need a more systematic approach too.
thejoyofrachel 
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