I was on the train this morning and my iPod shuffled onto “Song Sung Blue” by Neil Diamond. Suddenly, in an “Alice in Wonderland” moment, I was no longer on the train. I was no longer an adult. I was a whispy haired blonde child in my garden in South Africa, the sky was as blue as it can only be on a Highveld summer’s day, pigeons were cooing gently and Springbok Radio was floating in the breeze out of my mother’s kitchen playing “Song Sung Blue”. I could almost hear our neighbour and my mum’s friend, Aunty Bridget, going “Cooo eee” over the fence and asking whether we would like to come and have a cup of tea and a crumpet.

Songs for me hold memories and sensations locked in between their bars and notes and I just need a few chords and the chords of my memories are struck and pulled and I am somewhere entirely different. The song ended, the train shook, and I came flying back into my body as an adult on my way to work in Australia, but I took that little girl, who had been in the garden listening to the Harvards droning overhead and gave her a hug and thanked her for still being there with all her wonder for the world and her memories of sunny African childhood days.

Where were you when Song sung blue was floating on the soundwaves?

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Tomorrow I am getting my road bike for The Argus. My friend’s husband (THANK YOU) has been enormously generous with his time and negotiations skills and has hounded the manufacturer with the promise of the sale of two bikes with Shimano 105 gears, in a stop start economy, and has scored us beautiful bikes at a never to be repeated price. He has managed to have the taco-meter, pedals and all sorts of extra’s thrown in. With this work being done for me, I have managed to focus my energies on more important things, like what do I call this new addition to my family?

All my vehicles have had names. My Honda in South Africa, was called Hondela, as Mandela had just been released from jail. My first Australian car was called “Waltzing Matilda” and her brakes appeared to live up to that name. My current baby is called “Gunther” because he is German and has a deep “voice”. My husband’s 4WD is called the “No Girlie Man, Kluger” after Arnold Schwarzenegger made a similar comment when he first became Governor of California. So what to call my new bike? Well, even though I only meet him tomorrow, I think his name will be “Buya Futhi Kusasa” – Zulu – which roughly means “Come Again Tomorrow”. This will reflect my Julie Andrews style of cycling, my African roots and my timing and placement in any cycle race. No need to panic, Lance Armstrong, any comeback you make with me in the peloton, is quite safe!

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Tanya No Dieting

My daughter shared this video with me today. It is about a man called Clive Wearing who contracted a virus and lost his memory. He can only remember about the last seven seconds of his life. He has no past and cannot comprehend a future, yet he remembers and loves his wife. He has all his faculties and can speak, he appears intelligent and lucid.

It made me think, who and what do we love so much that we would never forget? Who is so ingrained in our souls that the recognition and remembrance of them is as joyous as the first time we have seen them? We are a complicated mix of the inexplicable and sometimes things like this as sad as they are, confirm that we are connected in mysterious ways and love, truly is all that really matters when you reduce it to the most basic emotion that keeps us alive.

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So just when I was when I thought I had ensconced myself beautifully in the saddle and was able to almost do the Joey -Tribianni- of- cycling- “How you doin’?” – I fell off my bike!

Not literally, figuratively. I hit a wall.

I was fine one minute and not at all fine the next. How does that happen? You are seemingly in perfect health and next minute, spots in front of your eyes and wham! – migraine? I have not had a headache like this since I was 14, and for those of you who do not know, that was a loooooong time ago. It would not have been so bad, if I was at home or at work or somewhere other than spending a day at a client! It is easy to get filled with the hubris of your own health, the assuredness of your body doing exactly what it is supposed to and then when it doesn’t it is quite alarming and rather embarrassing, but a wonderful reminder that we are all human and as much as we think we are in control, we live with a thin illusion that we are in the driver seat. Most of the time we are allowed to think we are invincible, but we are not, it reminded me of a quote from a Resilience Program, I did a few years ago – “Most Executives, think their bodies are just things that take their heads to meetings.” Mmmmmmh, not far from the truth, it can be difficult to pick up the little signals that you need to slow down and even when you do, it can be hard to do something about them when you have so many pressing and seemingly important things to do. BUT, there is one thing that is definitely unavoidable, when your body decides it will not go any further, it needs to be fixed before anything else can be done. It is the great leveller, like the baggage carousel at the airport!

So, if I have been quiet, I have been putting my ego back together, fragile little thing that it is, I have nursed my head and the Osteo has unclicked whatever it was that I did to my neck; my sense of humour has been reinstalled and now I am ready to face the world again. I will try to do this with a bit more regard for the physical side of myself that tirelessly carries me to all the maniacal things I get up to.

Thanks body for falling over, I will try to take better care of you, just try to give me more subtle reminders when I stray…please!

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So there I was at the Sunday Spinning Class and suddenly, totally, fully I was doing what all the other people were doing! Four weeks in and my body just seemed to “get it”! I turned up the dial, leaned forward from my abs, pushed my hips back, pedalled with my feet (hehe, yeah, I did) and put my arms in the racing position, tucked my elbows in and sailed up the “hill”! It actually started to feel like it was mildly me, that I could do this, that my legs would carry me and that they would actually enjoy doing this over time.

Just goes to show that you have to start at your own pace, build it up and maybe, just maybe, you actually will eventually change if you don’t give up. Does that mean, I can do a 100km race in the wind and up a mountain? I have no idea, but I have enrolled for Around the Bay in a Day, the 50km ride around Melbourne in October, so that will be a milestone…I suppose I had better get a bike…and some insurance!

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I am a change agent. I have hardly worked on anything else in my career. I could just take on the job title “Corporate Renovator” and hammer it onto a shingle outside my office. But today I was faced with an unthinkable demon. Are there areas that I really don’t want to change?

I have loved technology, the ability to reach out, connect and do things that used to take days or hours in nano-seconds, but for once I have resistance that is holding me back. I love books, adore books, from the time I was seven and an enlightened fourteen year old boy loaned me his entire collection of the Famous Five, my world opened, expanded and never shrunk again. When I go on holiday, clothes and shoes have been left behind while 10 books get shoved in a suitcase. Not just any books, but novels with words strung together so magnificently that you have to sigh and re-read their sentences; business books with concepts that brilliant people have pulled together and made simple and powerful; spiritual books that have stretched my soul, widened my perspectives and watered my internal garden. I generally need at least several in each category if I go away, so that I can entertain every part of my mind or moods. So, it would seem that acquiring an iPad would be a logical move for me. But I am so torn. It is like asking me to trade my relationships for a long-distance love affair.

The inability to hold the book, turn it over, read the back cover, muse at the intentions of the graphics on the cover, feel the sensation of turning the pages, just seems too much to give up. And what of the sharing? I love nothing better than standing in front of my floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and running my fingers along the spines of my books to find one that a friend MUST read. How do I do that when they are data bites on the inside of that magnificent, artistic device that is the iPad? Don’t get me wrong, I think the iPad is gorgeous and wonderous, but how, do I give up my love affair with the book? The practicality is a no brainer, the convenience beyond anything I could imagine, I could pack 3 extra pairs of shoes, but the loss, the loss…

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My genetic base is full of contradictions. The Italian and the Dutch fusing together to create a blonde-headed, green-eyed, emotive, food lover! I have often referred to myself as “Spaghetti and Cheese” to describe the combination of my Dutch and Italian heritage.

Growing up, when “exotic” food was not accepted in WASP-ish circles, I would denounce any association with pizza, spaghetti bolognaise or lasagne. In the small town I grew up in, it was just way too uncool in the ’70’s to be admitting to anything other than meat, three vege and a yorkshire pudding. In fact, I would beg my father not to cook anything Italian and certainly not to cook it if anyone outside the immediate family was to eat in our home. At that point in time I was a skinny little waif, who was just trying to fit in. Most of my friends had never seen a pizza. It was not until the ’80’s, when Pizza Hut emerged, that suddenly my father was “hip and happening”. Now the world has become obsessed with food, certainly Australia has, if MasterChef viewing is anything to go by. Food seems to have become the new way to fit in, the more diverse the better.

I must have been the only person in Melbourne, who had not watched a single episode of Master Chef. Television and I are not big buddies. But last night, I thought, I should see what the fuss was about (perhaps a tad late, it being the final episode). I have to say, I fell in love with Adam, the Japanese lawyer from Tokyo, who decided he would try his hand at being a “MasterChef”. What I loved about him in the short 60 minutes I saw him, was that he integrated his head, his heart and his skills into what he was doing, but he did it with utter humility. He is the perfect combination of when you bring your passion, skills and intellect to something you can’t go wrong. And when you leave your ego out of it, you have to emerge as he did, authentic and a winner.

It made me think about how we need to take that energy to everything we do, in order to be successful, whether it is our jobs, our relationships, our projects, our goals, whatever we are holding dear at the time. I was starting to feel a bit wobbly about my “No Diet” diet. But after watching Adam, I made healthy meals that had a twist of flavour, without a twist of fat and I managed to throw in some exercise with a manic labrador and a fantastic instructor at the gym (separately!). It was the glow of Adam’s win that inspired me to keep going on. I will continue to try, even when my Italian genes cheer me on with “Mange, Mange, Mange” and my Dutch genes look on disapprovingly, but get their cheeks pinched by the Italian ones and ignored! Adam, I am taking intellect and heart and skill and I will continue to try to make good meals that satisfy my hunger, but don’t indulge my emotions. One day at a time…

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I love it when my perceptions get challenged and I am forced to look at something from a different angle. Today my cycling Bud and I hit the spinning class at the vulgar hour of 9:30am on a Sunday morning. We pedalled our legs to jelly (mmmmh…food) and as we walked out she said “Do you feel like you will finish, the race?” I flippantly replied, “I don’t know and if on the day, I feel like I can’t, I won’t feel bad dropping out.” We know each other really well and she got confused, “But how can you train and not finish? You have finished massive things at work and on all sorts of other things, how could you NOT finish the race? We have to finish…” I was kind of stumped because I know that if on the day, I feel sick, exhausted or just bored, I could just give up. I could see a muffin stand and go “Aaaah, a muffin” and sit down and never get up again, well for the race anyway.

Why would I train to not do something? I will always finish something I HAVE to finish. This falls into a category I may or may not WANT to finish. The goal for me is not the race. The goal is to get really fit and healthy and hopefully complete the race too. The goal for my Bud is to finish the race so that she will do more exercise next time. Does this make me a finisher or a quitter? I need to noodle on this and see what I come up with. Never had to think this before….

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I know who I am. At 43 if you haven’t figured it out, you need to take a crash course in you! But I need no such thing. I am a pudding. I am meant to be savoured after a long Sunday lunch with a dessert wine from the Margaret River region or maybe a Moscato d’Asti with a bit of frizzante from the Piedmont region. So what in all the gods, in all the religions names, am I doing in a Spin Class at 8:30am on a Saturday morning? Trying to climb uphill, while “you twist it up another notch” to the upbeat mania of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Life the Wolf? A pudding is supposed to be setting in its bowl at that time of the morning. But no, there she is with all the muscular main courses who are flexing their muscles and burning faster than a Sunday roast!

I made a commitment, to my friend that I would cycle in a 100 kilometer race in March 2011. So now, the pudding needs to place herself at the very least on a stationary bicycle. I knew at the time that I cycled like Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music, when she takes the repressed von Trapp children out on a hypermanic, laughing excursion. This, I too can do. Make me stand up and sing “High on the hill was a lonely goatherd” with an exaggerated English accent and a schoolmarm face and I will do it with aplomb. Some might laugh at me, some might laugh with me but in the end, I would achieve it! Make me cycle 100 kms in Lycra, what was I thinking? Why do seemingly sensible people think there is anything fun about grinding your coccyx with a pestle and mortar of a bicycle seat? If I was Jewish, I would just shake my head and sigh “Oi vey”.

Someone help me, how do I morph from pudding chick to cycling Barbie with the least possible pain? I have solved far greater problems, but this one has me stumped…

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Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful songs in the world is “Ne Me Quitte Pas” or “If you Go Away”. And since I am musing on the concept of “loss” this week. It came into my head. I wanted to Google the song and found a Cirque Du Soleil “Youtube” clip that really made me laugh. It balances the sorrow of the song and then brings in the light that a sense of humour brings to any situation. As much as we need to feel our losses, we do also need to smile at ourselves compassionately.

I thought you might like to see this artistic rendition of the wonderful song…and if my thighs shrink, from this diet that I am NOT on, I will not mourn them with this song…

Ne Me Quitte Pas Link

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