So far most of my blog posts have focused on healthy eating and exercise, which promotes having a fit, healthy, and strong body. I’m a big advocate of juicing because it deliveries a wide variety of nutrition rapidly to your body and helps counter our unhealthy eating habits.
Equally important is our state of mind. We live in a fast-moving society where this generation is experiencing unprecedented amounts of stress and information overload. We’re not focusing enough on how to keep ourselves sane and mentally fit for these challenges. We all have different ways of escaping stress but we don’t give up enough time to do so.
My wife recently asked her friend to paint us some protea flowers, since this is a favourite of hers and we have subtle hints of this theme throughout our house. When they were done my wife excitedly revealed them to me and while they looked okay, I couldn’t help giving her my honest feedback that I felt they could have been painted better. They lacked detail and looked like they had been rushed. Charlene then promptly challenged me to do better.
I did art at school but hadn’t picked up a paint brush for over twenty years. I had replaced this artistic skill with photography so to paint again felt daunting but I had already stubbornly taken up the challenge. To make the challenge harder to chose to paint a Nguni cow, which is a long-horn cow found mostly in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The detail was quite intense and to capture this in a water painting was not going to be easy.
Still, this was the perfect project to immerse myself in and escape the daily pressures as I worked stroke by stroke in pulling together the final image. It meant using many of my evenings that I would normally devote to clearing work emails to rather work on the painting. Most of the time I worked in silence and it’s amazing how therapeutic this can be.
It took a lengthy two months to finish the painting but the reward was huge. Apart from being satisfied with my painting effort the quiet time of simply escaping the everyday rush of life and allowing my mind to relax was worth every second.
Whatever way you choose to relax is up to you but I encourage you to find this balance and not only focus on building a healthy body but also a healthy mind.
John Westermeyer 