I’ve finally joined a gym!  Only taken me 50 years to get round to it, but here I am getting up extra early, 4 times a week and heading off into this strange environment with heavy weights, sweaty bodies, and all this equipment.  I was shown around by a very nice young man, and given the protocols of cleaning down the equipment and your hands after using each piece.

Little, did I realise how often I would need to go to these little units and clean down each piece during my visits.  I soon began to spot the regulars who’d be in around the same time as me, and that talking to people was really not the done thing.  For someone like me who likes to chat and smile and engage with people, it felt really quite alien to be in a room with so many people and not chat, so of course I did!

Not great long conversations, just a “hi”, a smile, an “I’ll do that don’t worry” when I wanted to jump onto the next piece of equipment and it needed wiping down.  After my millionth visit (it soon felt like it), to the sanitising unit to pump the fluid and wet the blue paper, I found myself waiting in a queue or either side a fellow gym goer and couldn’t help but laugh and jokingly said “I wonder how many couples in the future will say they met over the sanitising unit at the gym”.

This hit such a cord with me, that yes, you’re reading about it now!

But how on earth are, couple’s meeting now?

Is it all online?  The Supermarket queues, the gym?  There are so few places to go and socialise it really must be truly impossible, but not only that how do you get past the first few meetings?  And then, decide if you want to risk it and go further?   A kiss?  A hug… or more?

Then, of course, the question leads to teens and children and how they are perceiving the world right now in terms of relationships.  How will they be affected in the future?

I want to believe we are all learning about our own personal boundaries and yes, it is different for each and every one of us as to what they will be.

Communication on this is key, so surely this is something that will improve between us too.  But until we’ve reached the other side of this, experiencing our emotions and physical relationships is being navigated in very different ways.

Much like the river NILE, is not a straight river, but twists, turns, over spills, and has draught patches in it’s long life, so do we.  So if I just use the NILE to work this through in relation to our relationships right now how might that pan out?  Let’s break it down a little,  shall we?

N – Navigating (learning new ways to experience falling in love. that go beyond the physical?)

I – Intensity of each and every emotional and physical sensation as they arise in our body and what to truly do with them to get to the other side.

L – Life our unique life and everything that is has given us to date, the good the bad and the ugly.  All those jigsaw pieces of wisdom and learning

E – Experience. How each and every experience we have had, and reacted to, and now we have the opportunity to learn to Navigate the Intensity of our Life Experiences in a very different way.

What if we can?

What if by doing so it could have a knock on effect to our loved ones, our family, friends, community and our planet?

What if our emotions that start at the sanitising unit in the gym, is a thread, that has our past, present and future running all the way through it.  If we can remove the old stuck knots of our old emotions by vibrating them off like a musical string instrument wouldn’t that just be a wonderful gift?  And perhaps we could, keep vibrating those strings/threads to replace the old emotions with new vibrant, joyous more loving ones, which would lead us to make more compassionate decisions for the future.  Wouldn’t that have a ripple effect through all the other strings/threads of emotions?

Gosh, what beautiful music we could be making indeed, if we just took the plunge to sort our own knots out.  Perhaps we wouldn’t need the sanitising units then after all.  Perhaps our music would be heard playing beautifully, by just the right person who needed to hear it, and resonate with it. Perhaps this way, they may be attracted to each and every note along the NILE to find you.

What if it that is, actually possible, right now and we just needed to start the NILE journey.

My thought for the day.

RE x