And in august I was 5 days in Malaga for another Urbansketching workshop (Pushing your sketching bounderies). It was great as well, with a nice group of about 20 very different sketchers from different countries, all very motivated to push our sketching bounderies! So now I’m wrting you from the airport in Malaga, waiting for my flight. (As I’m always stressed to miss my flight I usually leave to the airport about 3 or even more hours early! So I’ve got plenty of time to write :-))

The summer allows us to dream, traveling or not traveling… Being away from home, even if it’s not far, gives us however even more the opportunity to take some real distance from daily life and to think more deeply about how life is going: do I want to continue this job? Do I want to continue working this hard to get more money or do I take less money to work a bit less but have more time to do things I like more for myself: to take more time for my hubby and for my personal ‘for-purpose’ project Art for Dementia? These last months I have been so busy I didn’t have time for the art workshop with my old friends… 🙁  When I hear what dying people regret most at the end of life, it’s always about that: not having done enough what really matters to them, and done too much what other people expect from us… Memento mori…

The end of summer is nice as well. As nice as the beginning of summer. Even if I don’t have small children around, I still have that feeling of a fresh start of the (school) year from when I was a kid, with new notebooks with blank pages, new writing stuff… We can start everything all over again, from a blank page, and do our very best. A bit of a new year’s feeling on the 1^st of January, with a list of good resolutions. I prefer the month of September as start of a “new” year, as I find January and February the most boring months of the year: too dark and rainy in Brussels… feeling tired from winter… Hangover from too much food and drinks. At the end of summer I have more energy, there’s more light, people are in a happy mood,….

I’m going to eat healthy, with fruit and veggies and drink a bit less wine than last year, and I’m going to go to bed early to have more sleep (Just read Arianna Huffingtons “Sleep Revolution”), I’m going to do more sports,… because that’s all healthy. I’m going to watch less Netflix series and read more real books, do less shopping and go more often sketching and walking in the forest,…. I’m going to declutter and clean up this and that mess at home,… I’m going to spend less time on the internet and less time on social media to have more ‘real’ time with friends and family….

Of course these end of summer resolutions have the same destiny as new year’s resolutions : a lot of them are diluted after a couple of days/weeks, but being over my forties now I’m not anymore too disappointed with it, because my perfectionism is diluted as well : You Only Live Once, so I say to myself I do my best, and just start all over again, enjoying those restaurants and glasses of wine, and the mess at home.

Because it’s home and life is messy life…

So what are your good resolutions for September??