Is it true?

Jun 14, 2019
Kemi Nekvapil Weekly Words Blog

Since my family’s year-long caravan trip around Australia in 2015, we fell in love with caravans and the lifestyle they foster.

We now own a beautiful 1970’s caravan called Beryl. We bought her last year, and her renovation was my top passion project in 2018.  Everywhere I went I had a tape measure, and I was always in a hardware shop.

Beryl is beautiful, and she is parked 2 hours out of Melbourne where we have access to excellent mountain bike trails (the other 3) and running trails (me).

We get there as often as we can, sometimes all together, sometimes as a romantic weekend, sometimes solo jaunts.

We basically live off toasties, (one of my first buys was a retro 1970’s Breville toasting iron) and hot chocolates.

As soon as we arrive, we all exhale. We all get to ‘be’.

We have a few ‘Beryl routines’ that we have created over the past year, we all push ourselves physically during the day, we go to the local brewery on a Saturday night (they make the BEST vegan brownies), there is a lot of reading with afternoon naps and odd night-time discussions we never get to have in Melbourne because we are all in separate rooms.

One of my personal routines is to visit the local boutique chocolate shop and buy a jar of their dark chocolate covered salted peanuts and raisins. I love them, but I think they put more raisins in than peanuts and I love the peanuts.

There is so much time to think and dream and bliss out in caravan life.

The last time we were in Beryl, I was reading a book and nibbling on the chocolates, and I said to myself “They really should have a system that ensures there is an equal amount of raisins to peanuts, this is annoying me now.”

And then I had a genius idea, count them! See what the ratio is.

Because there is so much time to think and dream and bliss out in caravan life, counting raisins and peanuts seemed an entirely plausible way to spend my time.

And guess what?

There were more peanuts than raisins.

I was truly amazed. For months I had been having this internal dialogue about the lack of peanuts, and I had made it all up, it was a pure assumption.

Then I started thinking about what else have I made up? What else do I have an internal dialogue about without the actual facts to prove me right or wrong?

How many assumptions do we have about our lives, our family, our colleagues, our self-worth, our competence?

I invite you to start counting your peanuts and raisins. What is true? What have you made up? What are you assuming?

#countyourpeanuts could become a viral movement because we all make things up when we have no facts to support our thoughts, therefore our actions, and this can lead us to have a distorted view of the life we are living and who we are within it.

It is worth taking the time to find out the facts; it could give you a whole new way of looking at a current situation or shift the relationship you have with yourself.

Wishing you a weekend of counting peanuts. xxx

Note: As I will be deep in training with Brene Brown next week, there will be no ‘weekly words’ in your inbox until June 28. xxx

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