One of the things we learnt from Ed was the principle of reframing.
This is just narrative isn’t it, it’s the story you tell yourself about a good thing or a bad thing that’s happened and you get the chance to write that tale.
Ed’s major reframing moment was when he had significant family problems, injury problems and lost a teammate who was hit by a car and passed away which made him step back and wonder what the hell it was all about.
He decided to go to Australia and to try to win a race just in tribute to the person that he’d lost but he could have decided to do any number of other things including start smoking, drinking, eating takeaways and watching Netflix.
I thought about this quite a lot this week because I’m driving to work every day for one reason or another which might become clearer later instead of riding my bike.
The weather is magnificent and beautiful, and I should be on my bike but just at the minute I can’t and so I could be sad and down and fed up with this and be angry and frustrated that the world’s is against me at the moment and not letting me do the things that I’d like to do, in fact, that I seem to think I have the right to do.
But I haven’t done that I’ve just reframed it and so, it’s 4-5 minutes from my house to the practice in a car and I discovered the most extraordinary thing.
Sometimes when my phone kicks into the audio in my car and the media goes onto some crazy shuffle mode and it offers me a playlist which is extraordinarily diverse and ridiculous ranging from audiobook chapters to children’s songs, to my own music from Apple Music (all of which has been downloaded or synced to my phone in the past 15 years) and so I can just flick until I find the one I want.
So, when driving to work the last 2 days with the sunroof open and the music on has been an utter joy.
The first one that I found from years and years ago was Talk About The Passion by R.E.M.
That song took me back over 30 years to listening to R.E.M as I hurtled in a minibus across Europe, lying on bags to play a tournament for the Scottish basketball team.
The next day it was a live Frank Turner version of The Way I Tend To Be which took me back to Frank Turner’s 2000th concert with my friend Mike and I and the amazing things that we experienced there and what we’ve seen.
Both of them took me to work in such a good place, feeling so upbeat and happy and ready for the next set of challenges that are coming along.
It’s brave to reframe and it’s hard and it takes resilience but it’s a learnt skill and every time you wake up, you get the chance to start another page in your diary.
Blog Post Number - 3035
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