My journey to daily mooching began, I suppose, in late 2012. A traumatic incident which left me with PTS whilst also needing to persist with my role as a self-employed single parent of two teenagers. In between failing to navigate a freeze response to the trauma, I was doing my best to keep looking after the needs of family and clients. In late 2018 I succumbed to pneumonia… It took me five months to recover to some degree of normal health. Less than a year later, we were all sharing the depths of Covid lockdown with all the pressures of the then collective existential stress. As I write this, sitting in a favourite café in early 2022, we should not underrate how deeply tired many people still are from this episode in our lives.

Having begun learning more about meditation in 2010, I had in the interim been fortunate to discover Buddhism, thanks to a search engine algorithm which took me to Alistair Appleton’s Mindsprings website just in time to book up for a weekend course on entry level mindfulness. Since then, fate, coincidence and serendipity have taken me to places where I have been able to sit and learn from some truly great Buddhist teachers. Some of the best opportunities turned up whilst on looooong waiting lists for 'proper' support... More recently, I have become much more interested in personal growth, daily reflection and journaling – this personal practise has helped me to develop deeper resilience and more skilful ways of living and interacting.

In 2017, as part of my Master’s in Development Management, I did a course module about using Systems Thinking to solve real world problems. Did you know that one of the most important aspects of systems thinking in practice is daydreaming? Having previously considered this one of my greatest weaknesses, the day I discovered the true value of dawdling about, pondering abstract stuff was quite a turning point!

Daydreaming is a veritable superpower – it is to be practised regularly

With such encouragements, I have noticed that where I can have time away from my desk, everything works better, especially analysis, writing and communication tasks. It's also great for my mental health.

The umbrella term I have for this is ‘mooching’ and it covers activities such as walking, having a coffee in a favourite café, sitting under a tree, sketching, photography, gawping at the view, playing patience, doing something I used to love doing at the age of seven, drinking tea... anything that doesn’t have much of a purpose in itself, but you may find yourself humming a little tune to yourself as you go – that’s the kind of vibe I’m talking about.

In autumn 2021, I was browsing around in a bookshop and Liz Gilbert’s book ‘Big Magic’ fell off its shelf and landed near me. It is one of my Randle Laws that one should always immediately read books that randomly fall off a nearby shelf. I discovered this Law a few year's back when standing flummoxed in a local bookshop, wondering what to get my Father for Christmas. I had absolutely no idea. Then the perfect book landed on the floor just behind me. Before the thump, I hadn’t heard of Big Magic, or if I had, it hadn't registered. It is brilliant!

'Big Magic' has influenced me to deepen my mooching behaviour

and

to develop it into a fiercely protected daily practice

The practice is simply to get intentional about mooching:

• each day, set out to create a deliberate act of mooching
• over time, get reflexive and inquisitive about what sort of a difference it is making to your happiness, creative thinking and general productivity

That's it. Not complicated.

Just a little of what you fancy each day to bring you benefit via a little space and ease. 

Daily mooching for the win...