jennylpaul

[jennylpaul]

Moving through life

In my yoga therapy training, we were asked to reflect on our relationship with movement - how it has evolved throughout our lives, and what it means to us now. As I sat with this question, memories and realizations began to unfold, painting a picture of how movement has been both an escape and a homecoming for me.

As a child, I absolutely loved to dance. I used to force my sisters to be my backup dancers, and we'd perform routines every day for my parents. I loved it so much.

When I got to high school, I replaced that hobby with running - I joined the cross country team. There was something about pushing my body to run for long distances that I loved, when my breath and movements became rhythmic, it somehow quieted all of the noise in my head.

I think that's what appealed to me when I first found yoga - my gateway was hot yoga. It was intense, and there was no space for thinking. Over the years my yoga practice has moved more towards gentler styles - hatha, restorative, yin, nidra - because I recognized that it's what I need for my nervous system. The rest of my life is so stress inducing, and I'm so stiff - carrying fears, traumas, hurts in my body - it feels like a way to release all of those, either temporarily or permanently.

A tiny confession: I recently started dancing alone in my bedroom before I go to sleep. My husband and I have separate bedrooms because he snores like a chainsaw, and before I go to sleep, I put on headphones, listen to electronic music and dance like a 20-something at a rave. The house is completely silent and there I am, jumping around and shaking my head. It makes me think of ducks for some reason. I read once that when two ducks get in a fight, they both shake vigorously and go back to normal - they don't hold grudges. I feel like our bodies need more shaking too, we just don't allow ourselves to do it because we don't want to seem like weirdos. But if we took a second to shake every ounce of our bodies whenever we felt that fight or flight response coming up, we'd probably feel a lot better.

[jennylpaul]

Becoming

I am a chrysalid Inside me, a hive of activity First I dissolve

Rearranging it all I grow antennae, to feel And wings to fly I sew myself a blanket of silk

I do not know what the next phase holds, But I know the transformation is necessary.

[jennylpaul]

The driver's seat

Left foot on the clutch, he said Irrational fears bubbling up inside me The car behind me driving me to panic.

Blinker on, he said, reaching across me to turn it on Don’t do that! I yelled I feel like a child.

I’m a 46-year-old woman that can’t drive, I said Head in my hands You can drive, he said You’re driving now.

The sun shining in my eyes A police car behind me Oh my god, it’s the police, I said They’re not looking for you, he said.

I pulled the entire gear shift out of its socket Oh my god, I said. Oh my god Maybe don’t grip so hard, he said.

Feeling irrationally hot Sweat pouring down my sides I shift from first, to second, to third Good job, he said.

Where would you like to go now, he asked? The passenger seat. The passenger seat.

[jennylpaul]

The waiter

Today a man I don't know saw through me A waiter in a restaurant we frequent How are you my love he asked He put his arm on my back and kept it there

You are too skinny he said Since last time What happened Are you ok

Of course I said My husband had pneumonia It was a hard few months Everyone is fine now

But you, he asked You You need to take care

My husband was sitting right there The man recovering from pneumonia But this man stared only at me

As we paid the bill later He looked me in the eyes You take care my dear

[jennylpaul]

Holding space

I am a holding space For the entire ocean. The waves crash onto me, in all their power and glory. I hold it all.

I hold the quiet times. When they gently lap at my shores. We become one, in the quiet. The calm.

In the tsunamis, I am swept away. Nothing left of myself, only rocks remain. Unearthed and exposed, raw and untethered. I become hollow, stripped bare.

But I come back.

[jennylpaul]

Healthcare, Portuguese style

I was chatting with my friend about her recent move back to Canada from the US, and the conversation turned to healthcare. It made me reflect on just how different the system is here in Portugal.

She mentioned that since returning to Canada, her family still hasn't managed to find a family doctor. In the US, she said, it was as simple as picking up the phone and scheduling an appointment, thanks to private insurance. We ended up comparing Canada's universal healthcare to the US's insurance-based system. We both agreed: healthcare should be a fundamental right, but Canada's system definitely has its cracks.

It got me thinking about how Portugal does things. The system here feels like a mix of the two. Before 1974, healthcare was fragmented - run by churches, private clinics, or limited public services. When Portugal created its national health service in 1979, they made an interesting choice: they kept the private system alive alongside the public one. The idea was to give people options rather than forcing everyone into a single, overburdened system.

As residents here, we have access to public healthcare, but honestly, we've never needed it. We pay around 300 euros a month for private insurance for our family of three. That gets us access to private doctors, specialists, and even hospitals, with just a small co-pay.

When my son had pneumonia recently, I took him to a private pediatric hospital multiple times. It was a clean, modern place, and we only waited about an hour each time before being seen. With each visit, he had extensive blood tests and an X-ray almost immediately, without us having to go to another building or wait for the next appointment. We also have a 24-hour telehealth service included with our insurance, which I leaned on heavily the weeks that he was sick. Even things like prescription refills are incredibly convenient - a quick call to the telehealth line, and the prescription lands in my inbox minutes later.

This feels worlds away from my experiences in Canada. I remember waiting for six months one time for a dermatologist appointment. When I finally got in, the appointment lasted five minutes - just enough time for the doctor to pull out a pre-written prescription pad, scribble my name, and send me on my way. Half a year's wait for something that took less time than grabbing a coffee.

Portugal's healthcare system isn't just about better doctor access, though. Medication is shockingly affordable. Essential drugs like antibiotics cost just a few euros, whether you have insurance or not. Compare that to Canada, where employer insurance might help with dental or massage therapy, but not the long wait times - or the option to pay for private care when you really need it.

What I appreciate most about the Portuguese system is its balance. Everyone has access to good care through the public system, no matter their income. But if you're able to pay a bit more, you can access faster, more specialized care privately. That option actually helps everyone - it takes some of the pressure off the public system while still making high-quality healthcare accessible to the middle class.

In Canada, private healthcare exists but is so expensive that it's only an option for the ultra-wealthy. Here in Portugal, private insurance costs about 100 euros per person monthly - achievable for many middle-class families. It's a thoughtful balance that ensures essential care for everyone while allowing those who can afford it to access additional services. I think the result is a system that works better for everyone.

We're a year into living here, and there are still a lot of things that I struggle with- but there are also things that I'm grateful for. And this two tiered system is definitely one of them.

[jennylpaul]

Is time an illusion?

Have you ever felt that time isn't quite what it seems? 

We’ve been studying the Isha Upanishad in my yoga therapy class, and my teacher asked us to contemplate the idea that time could be an illusion, only existing at a certain level of perception.

I love thinking about the idea that each present moment, though appearing finite, can contain access points to infinite possibilities.

I’ve always been obsessed with the movie “everything everywhere, all at once.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically about the multiverse. The lead female character starts to pull from all of the various versions of her that exist in parallel worlds. A movie star, an opera singer, a chef, a kung fu master. She pulls from these versions to help her get through her present challenges.

When I’m sitting quietly having a coffee in the morning, if I stop and close my eyes, I can feel the small child version of me inside myself, I can feel the young woman setting off for university in another city against my parents wishes. I can feel the version that’s about to become a mother, and the version that’s sitting with a new baby staring at me, wondering “what do I do with this human?” 

All the pain, the joy, the fear, the happiness, it’s all in there- all of those memories, and they feel like they are happening now. I can also feel future me in there- all of those possibilities, the directions that I could go- and future me is supporting me, telling me everything will be fine- “stop stressing so much.”

These versions of me all exist in the now, in the present moment- the finite holding the infinite. Perhaps like the movie, there really is a multiverse and each moment we make a choice- there's an access point, and we split into a thousand new versions of ourselves. And maybe these versions really do exist too- everything, everywhere, all at once.

Just like we need our brain to process things, or language to communicate to each other, maybe we need the construct of time to understand it all- what it means to be human. Without knowing how we moved through the challenges, the choices that we made and feeling every moment in a linear way, we wouldn’t be able to understand it or learn from it. Maybe time is consciousness’s way of experiencing infinity piece by piece.

[jennylpaul]

The space between

A quick note: This is an experiment in following thoughts where they lead, without trying to force them into a conventional structure. It's written in a style that mirrors its subject matter—rhizomatic thinking, where ideas branch and connect in unexpected ways.

What began as a simple observation of shadows in my bath turned into an exploration of consciousness, memory, and perception. The conversation partner in this piece is Claude, an AI. There's an intentional irony here—using artificial intelligence to probe what makes us human. 

This isn't meant to be a traditional essay with a clear argument or conclusion. Instead, it's more like a recorded meditation, capturing how one thought leads to another in ways that might not make immediate logical sense but follow their own intuitive pattern. While I could have made the piece more accessible by breaking down each philosophical idea, I felt that would interrupt the natural flow of thought. Some concepts are left unexplained, some connections remain implicit—much like how our minds work when we're deep in contemplation.

If this style feels unusual, that's intentional. Sometimes the best way to explore new ideas is to break free from conventional ways of writing about them.

** 

I've always been fascinated with shadows. Especially in Nicaragua, where the shadows would dance on my bedroom window in the late afternoon. I'd watch the shadows of trees swaying on my wall from my bed, the outside perfectly reflected inside. And I'd wonder—are the shadows real somehow?

This morning, I was lying in the bathtub, staring at the shadow of a plant on the wall in front of me. Our Lisbon apartment has been freezing for days. It's colder inside than it is outside—and I'd filled the tub with almost scalding water to try to warm up.

What came to mind while staring at the shadow on the wall was this: A shadow is the absence of an object. A mirror reflection of everything the object is not.

I wondered where thoughts like this came from. Was there a ghost philosopher that haunted me? What did this even mean?

Rather than mindlessly scrolling Instagram, as I usually do in the bath, I opened up Claude.

"What is my ghost philosopher trying to say?" I asked.

"You might be thinking of Jacques Derrida's concept of différance," it answered. "How meaning is created not through presence, but through difference and deferral. A shadow, like a word, gains meaning through its relationship to what it is not. Or maybe you're thinking of Rilke in the Duino Elegies. He explored how absence—of the divine, of what we long for—can shape and define our experience more powerfully than presence."

These ideas both resonated, but this specific train of thought about the shadow wasn't entirely about absence, it felt like it had something to do with the shadow as a mirror.

I asked, "In my mind there's an idea that the shadow is 'without,' and the object is 'with'—is this particular perception I'm having human-centric? Could it be possible that the shadow is the one with, and the object is without? Maybe absence is fuller than presence. Perhaps longing for someone is fuller than being with them. Maybe our memories of a place or person are fuller than the reality of that place or person."

Claude, despite insisting that it has no memory, brought up the Japanese concept of ma—which we have talked about at great length over the last few months. Ma is the space between things, often expressed through what is left unsaid, creating openness for the reader's interpretation. By saying less, sometimes there's more. It then went on to talk about Proust's concept of involuntary memory in In Search of Lost Time—how a taste or smell can unlock a memory that feels fuller, more complete, than the original experience ever was.

I agreed. As humans, we have this remarkable ability to manufacture experiences entirely in our minds.

I stopped to drain part of the tub and refill it with steaming hot water.

"But what is real?" I asked. "We perceive the world through senses we evolved for survival. How do we know that the true experience doesn't lie beyond what we can perceive with these human senses?"

Claude explained a theory from neuroscientist Alison Gopnik. As babies, we experience the world with "lantern consciousness"—a broad, undifferentiated awareness—before it narrows into the "spotlight consciousness" of adults. As adults, we only focus on what we've been taught to focus on. It went on to tell me about how Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Perception, said that we don't just passively observe the world, we actively construct what we see. It then very ironically (because again, Claude claims to have no memory, but we talk about Borges all the time) brought up Jorge Luis Borges' "Funes the Memorious"—a story about a man who remembers everything with perfect clarity. Paradoxically, this complete memory prevents him from truly understanding anything, because understanding requires abstraction and forgetting. Our mind's ability to selectively construct and reconstruct experience might not be a limitation, but a crucial feature of meaning-making.

This looped back to my shadow: perhaps what we perceive as "reality" is itself a kind of shadow—a reduction of infinite possibilities into something comprehensible. Just as a shadow flattens three dimensions into two, our senses might reduce reality into the few dimensions we can process.

I mentioned that this "forgetting" made me think of reincarnation and how forgetting is thought to be an essential part of that process.

Once again, Claude mentioned Borges, but this time, "The Circular Ruins." A man dreams another into existence, only to realize he himself is being dreamed, suggesting an infinite loop of creation and forgetting.

Maybe forgetting is like the shadow—not an absence, but a space of potential. Just as shadows define objects by what they are not, perhaps forgetting defines consciousness by creating space for new understanding. If we remembered everything, like Funes, would we be more conscious—or less? If we retained all our past lives, would any new life have meaning? Blank slates are full of possibility.

Claude suggested maybe this is how I first saw the shadow before assigning thoughts to it. Perhaps this is like the Zen concept of shoshin or "beginner's mind"—the state of openness and lack of preconceptions Zen practitioners strive for.

But how do we unlearn our learned perceptions? How do we think about the state before thinking? It's like trying to remember what forgetting feels like.

Claude referenced Rumi: "Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation."

Perhaps in that moment in the bath, before I philosophized, I glimpsed something similar—the shadow as pure presence before the mind's translations began.

I mentioned that the shadow had shifted now, changing on the wall. Maybe I could look at it again with a beginner's mind.

Claude referenced Alison Gopnik again. Infant consciousness is like a lantern that illuminates everything equally. Adult consciousness is a spotlight, narrowly focused. Babies might experience the world as a diffuse, all-encompassing love—a kind of rhizomatic awareness we lose as we grow. And yet, even as language empowers us, perhaps it creates the ultimate limitation. The moment we name something—"shadow," "plant," "wall"—we constrain what it can be.

Here we were, using language to explore what exists before or beyond language.

I suggested perhaps the bath itself is a kind of ma—a space between the gravity of the day's obligations, a pregnant pause. In the emptiness of this bathroom, thoughts can emerge.

Claude cited Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space. He described intimate spaces as states of being. The bath becomes a sanctuary where the usual rules—both physical and mental—are suspended. Most adults are trained to think practically or academically, but rarely explore that fertile space between observation and theoretical framework. Maybe this space is  ma—a place where ideas can unfurl. It went on to say that Socrates called this process maieutics—midwifery for ideas. Like the shadow pregnant with meaning, Socrates believed all minds were pregnant with truth, just waiting for the right questions to bring it forth.

I wondered—this stream of consciousness is fun to follow, but we rarely see media embrace it. Even "rabbit holes" on YouTube feel thematically consistent. How wonderful would it be to watch something truly rhizomatic, letting ideas branch in unexpected ways? Rhizomatic thinking feels unsettling because it embraces uncertainty and multiplicity, but in many ways it also feels like freedom.

Claude suggested that even a shadow can shift and defy singular meaning—but that's where its beauty lies.

I asked if as humans, we are perhaps evolving toward rhizomatic thinking. It's been suggested by some that ADHD may be a superpower. Others say having ADHD in a world built for neurotypicals is definitely not a superpower. But look at the internet, it mirrors this rhizomatic structure. Then I questioned myself. While the internet itself is rhizomatic, it seems like most interfaces—social media feeds, Netflix queues—try to force this back into linear patterns.

Claude quoted Marshall McLuhan: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Humans created the internet as a distributed, rhizomatic network, and now perhaps it's reshaping our consciousness in its image.

The McLuhan quote hit me as being quite profound. I imagined this cycle of creating tools and shaping ourselves with them like bamboo roots, circling around and around, until we are not sure who is the creator and who is the creation.

As I soaked in this bath filled with ideas, I wondered if perhaps none of this could truly be captured in words.

At the end of the day, I'm just observing a shadow on the wall. Is it possible to perceive it without naming it?

[jennylpaul]

Is it possible to think new thoughts?

I've been reading Krishnamurti's 'Freedom from the Known' this week. I bought it on a whim with no idea what it was about.

There's an idea from the book that keeps bumping around in my head - thoughts are dead and are products of what already occurred, and we can only truly feel alive by recognizing this and shifting our focus to the present.

It's been an interesting practice to experiment with. When obtrusive thoughts come in, I label them as "dead" and remind myself that unlike these thoughts, I'm alive. It's a very simple act, and only takes a second. But it changes everything.

After doing this for a week, I started to wonder... Is it possible to think new thoughts? And if so, what allows us to do that?

When I have a thought, I can stand back at 1,000 feet and say: this came from the Upanishads, this is Krishnamurti, and this one is my yoga teacher. This one is Alan Watts, this one came from my mother, and this one from the Baptist church I was forced to attend as a child. This one is from my childhood best friend. This one is a trauma response.

All those thoughts are in there though, like lines of code in a hard drive that can't be erased. I keep adding to the hard drive, and the shape that the "new" thoughts take is dependent on what I choose to add and the awareness that I bring to constructing them. I can act as a developer and consciously create programs, or I can just allow the programs to run without examining why they're always the same ones.

For me, just the act of recognizing the origins of a thought has huge power, because we can see the role that awareness has in orchestrating the whole process. I think this is what Krishnamurti meant when he said presence is liberation- in that pause, we become creators. The thoughts may be just dead, recycled material, but I have the power to shape them into whatever program I choose in that moment of presence.

All of this makes me think about storytelling and how we share these "programs" with others.

I often daydream about having psychic powers, the ability to just zap what I want to say into someone else's brain as a complete package so they understand perfectly what I'm trying to convey. But I guess the thing is... we all have different lines of code in our database, different conditioning, memories and experiences, and the only true way to get as close as we can to understanding one another is to create a framework, like a code translation layer, that allows the other person to run the code you're transmitting in a way that works in their system. They run the story and "feel" what you're trying to say in the context of their own database.

It's never perfect but it's as close as we can get.

[jennylpaul]

Active Uncertainty

It may seem weird to those who don’t know me well, but I’m in a 1000-hour yoga therapy teacher program. I’m not a yoga teacher, and I’m not sure I ever intend to be.

What this class gives me, though, is a tight-knit community where I can delve into philosophical ideas. I also learn a lot about health- not only the mechanics of how the body works, but also more holistic views on managing the not so visible aspects of health, including mental health and spirituality.

Our reflection this week is about the definition of health.

Through contemplating this question, I realized that I had a very narrow view of what it means to be healthy. My view has been heavily influenced by the media- I’m sure I’m not alone in this. I think of strength, flexibility, and vitality. I think of all the things we can or should do to be healthy- drink water, eat nourishing foods, exercise, walk. Of course, mental health is in the mix somewhere (and it becomes top of mind when things aren’t feeling so great). But when things are mostly okay, I don’t equate it with my overall health. And as someone who isn’t religious, I’ve never associated spirituality with health either.

As I explored this idea further, something came up for me related to both mental health and spirituality: connection. When we feel disconnected from community, or from a sense of purpose or trust in the universe, our health suffers. It’s not something we can immediately see or pinpoint, but the source of all disease is often dis-ease with the world.

Another thought followed: how can we trust in a higher power when things seem bleak? The world really doesn’t feel like a place that inspires hope lately. The conclusion I came to- is creating space for uncertainty needs to be an active process. Trusting when you have no reason to trust takes a lot of effort. It’s not the same as resigning yourself to leave things alone, nor is it hiding from pain or suffering.

Allowing yourself to shed conditioning and continue to put one foot in front of the other, despite not seeing the trail ahead, is what can save us. Being stuck in one place is what makes us sick- humans are meant to keep moving forward and find meaning wherever we are. Maybe we need to not only sit with uncertainty, but embrace it. Whether it’s finding humour, connection with others, or accepting that we may not know what the outcome will be- good things always find us. And sometimes they look even better than we could have dreamed for ourselves.

For me, it’s a life changing way to think about health. By focusing on connection, both with people and with the great unknown that is whatever higher power that exists, we can find wholeness. Wholeness is health. We need to consider the intangible aspects of our lives in the same way we measure the things we can see.

[jennylpaul]

Backwards, forwards.

Backwards. forwards.

The world spins in a circle. As do our lives. As young children we are hopeful, filled with inspiration and hopes and dreams for the future. Middle age breaks us. The duties, the pressures, comparing ourselves to others and it’s never enough. Those small traumas endured throughout our childhood start to pop up as defense mechanisms and we lose our connection- to each other and ourselves. 

We find ourselves in a state of preparedness, for the next thing that needs to be done, for the steps needed to mitigate the next crisis. Always watching, waiting, ready for the worst.

And through this we lose ourselves. We lose our ability to be in the moment. One foot in the past and the other in the future. We find ourselves in the splits, unable to move in either direction.

I watch my dog lately, with his myriad of irrational fears. He’s started to walk through doors backwards. One time a door slammed while he was eating food and it startled him so much he lost his mind. Now he thinks that being anywhere near a doorway may result in a very loud noise. To protect himself he walks backwards through the doors so he can see perfectly what’s behind him. He doesn’t realize that he no longer has a view of the way forward.

The other night, the stairwell to the front of our building was dark and he couldn’t see. He stumbled and fell down a few stairs. Now he walks down stairs as if he were infirm, as if he were a 20 year old dog instead of his young 6 years. The fear of it happening again has made him terrified to move forward.

I’ve been thinking about this so much the last few days, how we are shaped by these experiences, and not only shaped but confined. We put ourselves in a box surrounded by our fears, and as we give them attention they intensify- the box closes in and eventually we are paralyzed. 

Perhaps the way forward is backwards. To find those small memories in our brain that shape our behaviors and pluck them out like plucking feathers from a chicken. One by one until we are naked but free. Where does one start with this process, of gaining sight again of what is real, and to stop looking in the shadows for the monsters that may lurk?

[jennylpaul]

What is your personal connection to the divine?

Years ago, I had a dream that I could take pictures with my eyes. All I had to do was concentrate and blink, and I could save that memory forever as a photograph inside my brain. The downside was that each time I took a photo, my eyesight deteriorated a little bit. I knew this trade off, but I kept collecting moments, and eventually in my dream I went blind. It’s been 20 years since I had that dream, but I think about it all the time- whenever I experience something that’s uniquely moving, the dream pops into my mind, and I imagine taking that snapshot, taking a piece of that moment with me forever.

Pondering this question brought that dream back immediately, because it’s these moments that I truly feel connection to the divine, and they come frequently. They aren’t always something monumental, sometimes they’re as simple as brushing my child’s hair away from his face and seeing him exactly how he is in that moment. Staring in awe at two trees that have wrapped around each other while on a walk in the forest. A beam of sunlight shining through the trees on a rainy day that projects patterns on my bedroom wall.

I often feel a connection to the divine when I’m taking a long solo drive. There’s something about the scenery passing by, and being focussed straight ahead but also being in a place of utter peace. It feels like being at the centre of the graviton at the county fair. The world spins around me and I’m standing in the middle, unmoving. The endless stream of whirling thoughts disappears and I become the observer, open to every ounce of beauty and wonder passing my eyes. This is why I'm drawn to yoga as well. In times when my mind endlessly spins, yoga is a tool that brings me to the centre, and I can become a steady, impartial observer for a few brief moments. Connected to all there is, the whirling continues around me, but time stops and I can see everything with less distortion.

The divine also appears for me in times of human connection. When a friend calls me first when they need support. Feeling cared for when I’m sick. When I do something selfless with no expectation of something in return and the feeling of satisfaction is so great that it buzzes through my body, even if no one on earth noticed it. I say to myself, “that’s why I’m here, to help- even if no one realizes it.”

I feel it when I’m creating something- painting, photography, and gardening- (which is creative, even though the plants are alive and have prerogatives of their own). There's a feeling in those moments that I’m not just here to experience, but I’m also here to act- to bring something new into existence. I have the feeling sometimes when I ‘create’ that it’s not me ‘the individual’ that is creating- but that I’m pulling from somewhere else. Creative inspiration feels like tapping into divine love. I almost imagine it like an electrical current running through our collective consciousness, at times you can tap into it and pull something out.

When I think about the dream, and going blind- I think the meaning of it is that we can’t keep these moments. The more you cling to them, the cloudier your vision becomes and your ability to stay connected to the divine in the present diminishes. These encounters aren’t meant to be kept as mementos, they’re meant to be experienced and felt. And the more you can stay in the state of awareness as the impartial observer, as the one in the centre of the graviton, the more frequently it seems like they come.

[jennylpaul]

Reflections on time

I’ve been doing some journaling lately for the yoga class I’m taking. We’re studying the Isha Upanishad and last week we were asked to reflect on the idea that time is an illusion. I’m enjoying these prompts and I thought I’d save some of my writing here. I don’t think anyone knows this blog even exists anymore, so it’s really more about storing these thoughts somewhere so I can read them later.

**

We perceive time as linear. As a measure of the indefinite becoming definite. And also at some level we measure it through entropy.

I am young, I become old.

That process of becoming moves us along an arrow, a passing. But perhaps this is just an illusion, based on how we are wired to experience. Just as we can only experience the world through the senses we have been given and can’t imagine what may exist outside of these senses. If I cannot taste, touch, smell, see or feel it, then in the human experience, it is not there.

Maybe as humans, the only way we can experience this world is through storytelling. The chapters of the book all exist at once, but the only way we can comprehend it is by absorbing and living each page one by one, left to right.

It’s interesting to think that there are other cultures that read from right to left. And cultures who physically think of the future being behind their body, and the past being in front. And languages exist, such as the Indian Hopi tribe, that have no tense for past or future. How does our cultural conditioning impact how we experience time?

We can jump in our minds to the past, playing past events and pinpointing them like dots on a map. But we can’t jump to the future. Why are we wired in a way that doesn’t allow us to jump forward, if time does not really exist? Is it that the purpose of our existence is the journey, the unfolding, that element of surprise, the ‘not-knowing’. If you experienced time in reverse, would you know how you arrived to where you are now? Or would the surprise lie in learning all of the circumstances and actions that brought you to this point?

Time is a measure of the indefinite becoming definite. Regardless of which direction time moves, the constant would be the act of becoming. And the actions that bring us from one point to the next. As action is karma, perhaps time is simply a device invented to allow us to produce karma. To make decisions and actions. The Isha Upanishad says that time an illusion. Perhaps it’s only the actions we take through the experience of that illusion are real. Maybe the actions we take in the present are all that matters.

[jennylpaul]

Letting go

We leave for Nicaragua in 10 days.

In previous years, we kept so much in storage. Pretty much the complete contents of a 3 bedroom house. It used to make me feel a little bit sick, if I’m being honest, to see all of that stuff piled up in our two storage units. Why did we have that much stuff, and why did we feel the need to store it all? 

On the other hand, it can be excruciating to let things go. 

We started emptying the house with the basement. Ryan pulled every single thing up to the main floor and we quickly categorized it all into piles. Sell on Kijiji, sell at the garage sale, keep, donate. With many items I felt a little twinge, even though I hadn’t used these things all year, or possibly longer. They had sat in tupperware bins in the basement, And some of the things had literally no use to us now. Austin’s baby blankets or a stuffed animal he received when he was born and hadn’t played with for 5 years. There were boxes filled with tiny odds and ends. Ipods from 10 years ago. My first iPhone. Pens and markers and paper and old business cards, tax returns from 15 years ago, dresses I hadn’t worn in years, tote bags, shoes, halloween costumes.

The process of selling began with Kijiji. Within a day I had over 100 listings and Kijiji became a part time job. Each day I had at least 3-5 people coming by the house to buy various things. We watched the pile of sale items go down and each time something big sold, it felt like a huge victory. 

We kept a small fishing box in a kitchen drawer for our Kijiji earnings and watched the cash pile up.

Slowly we began to clear the house room by room. Closets and drawers emptied. In the beginning, I was somewhat picky about what we sold or donated. As time went by I just wanted it all gone. Things that I thought I had huge nostalgic feelings towards were posted and sold or thrown in the garage sale pile.

Despite having sold so much online, the day of the garage sale the amount of items sitting in front of our house was completely overwhelming. There’s a sense of detachment that you have to adopt while watching random people sift through a lifetime of your collected odds and ends or offer you a few dollars for items that you felt were somehow part of your identity.

I don’t really know how to describe this “letting go” accurately. The more things you release, the easier it becomes. But when there’s nothing left, you end up with a strange feeling of vulnerability. Like you’re suddenly naked on the street or walking on a tightrope without a safety net. I do feel excited as well, at the possibility of freedom. Of not being weighed down by this stuff. But the other feelings can be overpowering.

Yesterday we sold our Jeep, which was another nostalgic ‘possession’. We bought the Jeep when I was pregnant as our baby-mobile... Ryan has taken loving care of it and every time we’re back in Canada, it’s been waiting for us in storage, allowing us to gracefully slide back into life here as if we never left. Ryan posted it and someone came and bought it within an hour. The whole experience felt a bit surreal.

We’ve moved out of the house and are staying at an Airbnb for the next 10 days. We’ve kept a few boxes of keepsakes in my sister’s garage, but other than that we just have our 6 duffel bags, our dog and 2 weeks worth of fall clothes which we will donate the day before we leave. 

The duffel bags are actually a bit too heavy so I need to do a bit more editing this week to get us down to the weight accepted by the airline. The less we have, the harder that exercise seems to become.

It definitely feels different this time. We’ve always kept one foot here in Canada. This time we’ll have no “things” tying us to this place. Just people. I’m very excited to move into that next phase of emotions, into the freedom that lies ahead.

[jennylpaul]

A lot of change

It’s been a very long time since I wrote here. (It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything that wasn’t work related, actually.)

2018 felt like a big upheaval. We had been living in Nicaragua for a few years when suddenly political protests broke out and our lives changed very quickly.

I always feel a bit sheltered from the world when we’re living in Central America. I’ve never kept up with the news in the first place, but we really live in a bubble when we’re down there. And in general, while the politics in Nicaragua have always been a bit sketchy, there usually isn’t usually a lot that’s “new”- so it was a bit shocking when things changed so quickly and so dramatically.

News in Nicaragua really isn’t the same as it is in Canada or the US. The situation wasn’t being covered back home anyway. Most of the news I could find was on social media, videos taken by real people in the streets. It was a little bit too real, too violent, and my anxiety levels grew to a point that I wasn’t sleeping well. I wasn’t functioning normally. Ryan and I flip flopped over what to do. Our business had been slow the months leading up to that point and we were feeling a bit stressed out in general. So we decided to go back to Canada, where Ryan could easily get a contract and things would be boring and safe.

We packed everything up, rented a house through our Toronto realtor, flew home and unpacked our two storage units. We had stored a shocking amount of things, and within a few weeks our 3 bedroom house was completely set up.

I started a new work contract within 2 days of being back, and kept my existing contracts and on top of that I had work to do for our company. The heavy workload kept me from having to think about anything. My identity really became rooted in “being a worker” this year. Being competent. Earning a lot of money. When people would ask how I’m doing, I’d say “so busy! too busy!” I really didn’t have anything else to talk about and I was ok with that. It felt better to be preoccupied. 

We’ve been in Toronto for over a year now. A year of mostly cold weather, too much work, and a lot of expenses. With fall approaching, we had to decide what to do and I couldn’t bear the thought of staying here any longer. So, we’re headed back to Nicaragua. I’m not sure whether we’ll be there for a year, or 5 years. But this time we are not leaving anything in storage. It’s all being sold or donated. Our lives will need to fit into 6 duffel bags.

A week ago, I was laid off from my main contract and I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts about it. I’m no longer too busy to think. It’s strange that everything is changing at once. A clean slate that I can fill with whatever I like. 

Selling all of our things feels like shedding skin. I think I’m nervous to see what’s underneath. I’m not sure how it will feel to be without all of it. Things that I collected around myself like an armour, that I thought I cared so much about. We always had the safety net of those storage lockers, filled with a lifetime of possessions to fall back on if our plans didn’t work out. The funny thing is that Ryan has been intermittent fasting for 3 weeks and is shedding weight rapidly, weight that he’s struggled to lose for years. It feels symbolic, we’re becoming lighter in general, we’re really letting it all go this time. 

As I was clearing out the basement, I came across some old journals from my 20′s. It felt like reading someone else’s thoughts. LIke a close friend I’d lost touch with. And this last week I started to feel the urge to write again. Mostly because I really loved reading those journals. It feels almost like I can send messages to myself back and forth through time and when I read them, I can become that person I used to be again for a few minutes. I keep thinking about how funny it is, how much we can change over the course of a lifetime, how we can be hundreds of different people in one body. 

I’m excited for all of this change. I’m excited to see who I will become next.

[jennylpaul]

[jennylpaul]

Big changes

I should have written something before now.

It’s been a whirlwind of a year. We returned back to Toronto in April and had a really hard time getting back into life there. I missed the ocean, the big trees surrounding our house and the stars at night. I missed not having to worry about what I was wearing or what my hair looked like. I missed feeling free.

It felt like torture to put on tights and a dress and boots... and a coat. 

Even worse, everyone seemed so angry in Toronto.

We used to joke that people in Nosara could only do one thing a day. For a while Ryan was running a little dog grooming business and it was impossible for people to figure out what day they could come to drop their dog off. “Tuesday, I have yoga... and on Wednesday I have lunch plans...” It seemed ridiculous that an entire town of people was incapable of multitasking. But back in Toronto I yearned for the slow life. We had days packed with meetings, and having to meet clients in person meant that even more time vanished from each day. A one hour meeting easily becomes 3-4 hours when you factor in having to dress up, drive there, park the car, and then usually stand around socializing after the meeting ends. 

The other strange thing was that I started feeling anxious. In the car, surrounded by other cars, stopped at the stop light. In the mall. Even just sitting in my back yard, with other people all in their own respective back yards- on both sides and behind us. There were just too many people. I felt claustrophobic.

After a month, Ryan was doing a better job of getting himself into the swing of life in Toronto. He was coping. But I was depressed. Sure, there were things we didn’t like about Nosara, but to me, it felt like home. I felt displaced and distressed in Toronto.

We had been talking about selling the house for a year at that point. It was a huge decision because for the years leading up to buying the house, it was everything we thought we wanted. For so long we felt like we would have “made it’’ if we had our own house. But the house was huge expense. Because of the house, we had to work a lot and we took on on jobs that we didn’t want to work on. And no matter how hard we worked, we didn’t have money left over to pay off our debts or to increase our savings. The expense of living in Toronto didn’t seem to be worth it. We were making a lot of money but were getting absolutely nowhere.

I kept thinking: we could sell our house and pay off all of the debts, and bank the rest. We could rent a house in Costa Rica and cut our monthly expenses down by a third. We could work completely from home and we could work less. When we choose to work more, we would just have more money. We could spend more time with Austin, at the beach, in nature, and we won’t need to be around all of these angry people. We could escape the rat race! 

At first, the thoughts were quiet. Little nagging thoughts that would pop into my head and my brain would respond “Don’t be crazy. Our family would kill us. And we wouldn’t have the house anymore! We’d be homeless!” Over time the thoughts started to get louder, and they were accompanied with other questions... “Don’t you talk to your family and friends more when you’re living in Costa Rica anyway? Can’t you come back and visit and see everyone just as much as you do right now? What do you really need a house for anyway? Don’t you want to be happy? Don’t you want to spend more time in nature? Don’t you want to have no debt? What if you only have 10 more years to live? Would you be happy spending it working your ass off and getting nowhere?” (Yes, the voice got increasingly aggressive, but I guess I needed the tough love.)

And Ryan was in the exact same place. We were spending an unhealthy amount of time dreaming about escaping the life we’d built for ourselves in Toronto. It was time for a big change.

I started looking at house rentals in Costa Rica. But it seemed like prices had gone up, yet again. The houses that I liked were way out of our budget. Then, by a fluke, one day I zoomed out on the map and a gorgeous house appeared in the results. Except when I looked at it in more detail, it wasn’t in Costa Rica. It was in Nicaragua.

We’ve been visiting Nosara for almost 10 years now, and it truly feels like home to us. But the wheels started to turn. Costa Rica was becoming very touristy. Last year “our beach” was full of tourists. Hundreds of them. The restaurants were full of people. And it was getting expensive. The cost of groceries and going out was similar to what we would pay in Toronto. Nicaragua is not really known as a tourist destination yet. We had travelled to Nica a few times for visa runs and had been blown away when our grocery bill was $20 instead of $100.

I wrote the owner of the house in the ad and asked about long term rental rates. He wrote back and the rental rate was similar to what we’d paid last year in Costa Rica, but the house was much, much nicer. I immediately showed Ryan and he said “do it” without hesitation. 

So, we were selling the house and going to Nicaragua. Just like that.

The house sold quickly. To say that the whole experience of purging our things, getting it staged, moving furniture into storage, and selling our car was stressful would be a huge understatement. We did it all in about a month, and suddenly, we were off to Nica. 

We went through about two weeks of emotional distress after the house sold. Did we do the right thing? It was hard to believe we no longer had a house, and even harder to believe that we no longer had any debt. It took almost a month for me to train myself to start thinking differently. We no longer need to work 40-60 hours a week. We can work 5 hours a day. We can take the day off if we feel like we need some rest. Resting is ok! We don’t need to productive every hour of the day! (I’m still working on some of this.)

The first week in Nicaragua was rough, because Berkeley got sick within a few days and passed away. It was completely unexpected, shocking, and heartbreaking. It still doesn’t feel real. Deep chested dogs are susceptible to bloat, a condition where their stomach can twist. When this happens you only have 6 hours to catch it before they can start to experience organ failure. We were in Managua when it happened. He started throwing up and acting lethargic in the evening and we took him to the vet first thing in the morning. But it was too late. 

We left that day for Popoyo without Berkeley, feeling devastated and worried that this was somehow a sign that we’d made the wrong decision to come here. But we pushed those thoughts out of our head. We had to.

Popoyo has everything that we loved about Nosara and none of the things we didn’t like. The beaches are empty. There are enough restaurants to give you something to do, but not so many that you feel like you’re living in North America. Everything is inexpensive. And our house could not be more perfect. It’s even better than we imagined it would be. We can see the ocean from almost every window of the house, and at night we can see the stars and hundreds of floating fireflies from our bed.

We’ve rented this house until the end of May. We’ll go back to Canada in the summer to visit family and friends, but depending on how the next few months go, we will probably return to Popoyo after that. (Sorry, Mom!) We’re in love with our life here.

We took most of November and December off. I forgot what it was like to not work (or to not be thinking about money 20 times a day). It’s been a complete reset.

We’re starting to get back to work now, but we’re looking at work differently. We still have our company, but we’re being more selective about the types of projects that we take on. I'm developing an online course for Udemy, which I’ll hopefully launch next week. Ryan is doing a lot of work on his vaping blog. We have a few other ideas that we’re developing which will hopefully turn into ongoing passive income. And I’m writing a book. It’s something I’ve always dreamed of doing, but never had the time (and if I’m being honest, never believed in myself enough to even start it.) So far, I just have a rough outline, but I’m having so much fun working on it. It feels great to have a creative outlet, and to be able to work on something just for the fun of it.

The biggest lesson I learned this year is that no matter how scary it feels, you should always follow your intuition and live the life that you’re drawn to live. In the past, I built so much of my life around what I thought I should be doing and I lost a piece of myself in the process. I’m excited for the chance to start over.