Two Habits.

I am occasionally asked for advice. On various things, but mainly how to get your first job, how to promote, what pen to buy, that sort of thing.

But over time two things have stood out as the most important things to pay attention to, for ANYONE working freelance. At the end of the year, I reach a certain 'milestone' birthday, and these are the two single habits I'm most grateful I instigated a quarter of a century ago. It's time to write them down. If you've ever asked me for advice, here's probably the most important piece I could give you.


One.

When I was 15, I walked to school and biked everywhere because my boyfriend lived a few miles away up a hill. A couple of years later, the new boyfriend ALSO lived several miles away up a hill: if I wanted a social life, I had to get pedalling.

When I moved away to college, I walked everywhere or took the bus. This walking, combined with carrying lots of stuff, ensured my legs and lungs stayed strong, even though a more or less constant state of deadline-driven anxiety kept my body weight low, compromised further by the odd minor breakdown due to 'My Creative Life Is Over'! or 'I just know my best work is behind me!!' dramas, when my body decided it just couldn't eat, even though I wanted to.

Just before graduation, my NEW boyfriend (not one of the first two, and not the one I've got now) was given a car in repayment of a weed debt that couldn't be settled by the owner. He didn't need it, so he gave it to me. Once past the anger I felt at having a car forced on me that I could no way afford to run, I realised this custard yellow Citroën 2CV might actually be quite fun, and very useful.

I also realised that once I'd moved back home for a bit, started driving and stopped biking uphill and walking to college, the organic exercise I did daily would dry up. So 26 years ago, I joined the gym.

Now let's be clear about my motivation here. 'Being Thin' has never been a goal;  =that’s vague and difficult to aim for anyway.  I've mainly been blessed with the type of body that could eat to its heart's content and not expand (thanks Dad; thanks Brown Grandma). I've got a racing metabolism and a hearty appetite; a very fortunate pairing. And I've got small bones, but those bones are at risk from a family history of arthritis; I watched Blonde Grandma suffer, her little feet and sore legs curling up with the pain of afflicted bones. I knew from an early age I would have to do everything I possibly could to avoid this.

So I went to the gym to lift weights and be strong: strong bones would mean a healthy body which would mean I could work hard, and for as long as possible - into my 80s, I imagined. Grip strength, good posture, a strong back, sturdy legs and stamina were going to be as vital a set of tools as my pencils and Mac. My sister and I met at the gym 2-3 times a week, even when I moved out to a village and had to bike the 24 mile round trip to get there.

We struggled, we laughed, we worked out to 90s dance hits and wore black lace crop tops *would love to insert photograph here*. She eventually moved away and the crop tops were eased out for something more practical, but I've never stopped going to that gym. The same one. I might have experimented alongside it with a running obsession, kettlecise, aerobics waaaay back and years of yoga, but 26 years later, I'm still in there several times a week, through skinniness, not-so-skinniness, ultra-busy-ness, hectic times, stressful, buoyant and sad times. It's where I go to think, relax, focus, and push out the bullshit. If you were in any doubt, let me tell you: it will try, but there's no room for the bullshit of your mind when you're trying to lift something as heavy as you.

Filming a yoga DVD, when I was a yoga FIEND.

Also filming a yoga DVD.

In fact I'm going to the gym more now than I ever have. It's like a management system for my mind, as well as the obvious benefits for the bod. I'm more hench than I've ever been, and I'm curious and excited about that. When I rope-grapple, any nonsense thoughts that try to waft in are simply punched in the face by the effort of keeping going. Whatever I'm fretting about is KO'd by a few deadlifts. Since technique is everything, with injury a real possibility if you do something badly, you have to be totally present. (Needless to say, the phone is banned from coming to the gym with me.)

My brain, quite a lot of the time. A BIT TIRED.

Running. When I was a running FIEND (I went off it overnight. Just like that.)

Two.

I've always been careful with money, sometimes a bit too careful. If I've got money, I angst myself to death about spending it, with big servings of guilt when I buy something nice 'for me', even though I WILL buy the pricey-to-ship American makeup and the big bat necklace, while also basically being a proper fretful tight-arse (I view this as essentially a good quality to have. I can thank my Dad for that one, and Grandpa, further back, who was a self employed businessman all his life).

So. Aged 24 I opted into the pension scheme as soon as possible when I was doing some part-time lecturing a few months after graduating. Just a couple of mornings a week, it was tiny and it would not rake in a luxury-enabling fortune on its own, but it was a start. And the only thing I really understood about pensions was You Have To Start. The lecturing hours grew to a 3 days a week, and thus did the pension contributions.

I did lectures and talks at other colleges and noticed I could be enrolled into a teeny slice of pension action there, too, if I chose to work on a contract (even if it was just two lectures a year) rather than 'per lecture' - so I did. Doing lecturing alongside illustration ended after five years or so, when sleep became too important to continue missing out on, but the pensions remain in place - static, but still there.

And as soon as the business could handle it, I started a company pension. A carefully chosen, well-performing, ethical private pension scheme; starting small, but increasing as time went on. You can claim a company pension back through your business - it counts as an expense or a 'cost' - and bloody hell, am I glad that I did. Even though the scare stories about pensions abound, and there is never ANY guarantee a pension fund is going to perform the way you want it to, with monitoring and annual reviews, it can do well. Every month, that money could easily be spent on something else - but I don't notice it leaving. I can't afford to notice it; it has become habitual, it happens in the background. And let me tell you how much better I sleep at night knowing it's there.

I was recently talking to someone on Facebook who was asking about starting a pension, as a freelancer. For one reason or another I worked out they were younger than me, but not much, and they were just starting a pension. They asked me how much they should pay in, starting now, to be able to retire at 65 - and I was too fearful of scaring them to tell them the actual figure I had in my mind, so I advised a professional opinion.


Our pensions are by no means putting us clear of the woods yet, but we have them. There's something, it's been growing for years, and it's doing OK.


Sarah's conclusions are therefore these.
If you are starting out as a freelancer - or even actually, just, NOW:

1) Start your fitness. 
Don't wait till you NEED to; it can be done; but it will be harder; you will suffer more!
Note: Whatever it is you do, you have to like it. If you go to boxing classes and secretly hate it, you'll never go. If what you choose requires you to go to classes and you're not a 'joiner', you won't go to those either. I hated team sports (there's a reason I'm in the job I am) so netball and its ilk was OUT.  You might hate the idea of flailing around in what is basically your PE kit in front of any other human beings whatsoever, so you can do it at home - for free, if need be - there are plenty of 'in front of the Telly/DVD/YouTube' schemes around. If you love the endorphin rush of aerobics or HIT, you'll be there every class.
You might need to try a new things, but when you hit on the thing you like, go; a lot.
Your 50 year old self is up ahead of you now, begging you to do it.

2) Start your pension.
I know, it's hard. I've paid it through difficult times when people were taking 2 years to pay up (that's a whole other blog) through to times when things are more comfortable. But START. If you're in your 20s...again, your middle aged self will sigh with relief knowing you've kicked off a lifetime's habit of setting future money aside.
No one has that proverbial, clichéd crystal ball - who'd have predicted plague, floods and these particular politics we're having right now? So all the more reason to get going, eh?

Both will help you work, rest and play better.
BOTH are insurance for your future self, and the people around that future self.

This is advice purely from my own experience across a quarter of a century. 

You don't have to take it of course. But in an uncertain world where there's such a lot we can't control, these two things we can. Don't stick your head in the sand!

Related blogs:

http://blog.inkymole.com/2010/07/inkymole-is-running-for-cash-part-one.html

https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-display/showROFundraiserPage?userUrl=inkymole&pageUrl=2

Walking Each Other Home

"We sit on the edge of a mystery. We have only down this life; so dying scares us - and we are all dying. But what if dying were perfectly safe? What would it look like if you could approach dying with curiosity and love, in the service of other beings? What if dying were the ultimate spiritual practice?"

So begins the new book by beloved, world-renowned spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and his close friend and fellow teacher Mirabai Bush. This book is the 'follow-up' to Ram's other writings, arguably the most famous of which is his 1971 'Be Here Now', which has become a classic manual for conscious being, and an account of his spiritual journey, consulted and referred to by millions of humans worldwide. I was given the opportunity to illustrate this book at the beginning of this year, and as a long-term yoga practitioner (*cough* as I picture my yoga teacher noting my recent absences!) with a growing, more recent interest in the 'self that can't be shown in Instagram' - the spiritual self, the one that's hardest to recognise, be true to and look after - I grasped this opportunity with both grateful hands.



My yoga teacher had talked of Ram Dass many times and I'd seen his books in her collection, so I knew he was culturally very significant, and much-loved; he's a bewilderingly curious character. Born Richard Alpert, he began life as an academic and clinical psychologist, a colleague of fellow clinical psychologist Timothy Leary at Harvard University, before establishing the Harvard Psilocybin Project with Leary, which is precisely what it sounds like - experimenting with and documenting the beneficial effects of hallucinogenic drugs - and the 'Good Friday Experiment', the first double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience in 1962 with Walter Pahnke.

Now this already sounds like a fulsome life well lived. But by now, this person was also a published author and on the Board of Directors at Cambridge, Massachusetts, with several foundations to his name (did I say his PhD was on 'achievement anxiety'?) So I'm leaving a lot out of his story, as there's so much to tell - but we can cut to the travels to India, and the study under a spiritual teacher which led him to be the character we know now. For more about Ram's life, read his easy-to-digest life story here.

So. It’s long been said that I get all the ‘difficult’ topics, illustration-wise — constipation, period pain, cancer, erectile dysfunction, IBS, depression, dementia, contraception, Crohn’s — all handled by my pens. This new book is about dying, and how to do prepare for it with grace and awareness...so I wasn't surprised to receive the commission! It's another potentially difficult subject of course, and an obviously upsetting one, which was partly the point of its creation - we just don't like to think about it. But becoming older and more fragile physically, 86-year-old Ram and his friend Mirabai wanted to explore the journey towards death, grieving and loss, with humour and a lightness of touch, so that we may read it too, and look forwards with our eyes calm and open. After all - it's coming. We just don't know when or how.

I know - it all sounds very idealistic, and rather lofty when you're sitting at work stressing about finishing the next job, how to pay for this and that, worrying about the car repairs and when you'll next get time to watch another Glow/clean the bathroom/send that next promo. But Ram reminds us in the opening pages that 'we have a real deadline'. And that, of course, made me laugh; we do, and I'm a great one for thinking there's always time tomorrow, so reading parts of this book were...maybe a little sobering.



But it's a light read, and it's beautifully written. The illustrations, a mixture of real and digital ink, are sprinkled generously throughout the book from full-page images to tiny spots, and each one was a pleasure to do. I worked both in the studio and in an Edinburgh hotel room where I was based at the time for an on-location job, working on this book in the evenings. All created in shades of blank ink, and eventually turned blue for the pages, the limited palette made for some challenges with regard to contrast and clarity, but I enjoyed having parameters.

The subject matter did not spare the horses either - the request to illustrate a burning ghat had me peering sadly at image after image online, before realising this was simply the kind of visible send-off we're just not used to seeing. For them, it's not only healthy, but desirable and normal. After that, the drawing was easy. Animals and plants play a large part in the book because of Ram's location on the island of Maui, and the wicker coffin was a very meditative thing to create. My favourite illustration in the whole book however is not the busy full-pager of birds and leaves and lettering - much as I loved doing that one - but the simple, lone rock. Who knew that I would like the simplest of drawings the most, used as I am to cramming in detail. In fact, the feedback I kept receiving was to 'give air' to the images. Always keen to give 'value for money', I can lean towards crowding my illustrations, so as I did them, they moved from writhing detail to very minimal. (There are over 40 illustrations in the book, so to see them all, you'll have to buy it!)

Interestingly, within a couple of days of starting the first test image, I was involved in a distressing incident which resulted in a man's arrest and my having to give a statement to the police. The night it occurred I missed my deadline, which then took up all of my focus and worry. With the reassurance of my overseeing agent (thanks MP) and a sympathetic client, the immediate anxiety about the deadline gave way to the gravity of what I'd witnessed, and I was able to put the deadline anxiety aside and settle into some quite time dealing with the incident and the people involved before returning to the job a day later. When I look back at the piece I was working on at the time, I can see the franticness of the work, and the eagerness to compensate the client with what I felt was necessary in the light of the missed deadline - but then I also see, as the pieces progressed over the weeks, a sense of proportion introducing itself; a lightening, a calming, and a more conscious approach, despite a very big list of illustrations. Which is all very, very interesting.

I aim to read the book from start to finish now - a little at a time - and enjoy the placement of the illustrations the designer has chose. You can buy a copy direct from the publisher and most good bookshops. Choose carefully - there are myriad other, more deserving independent book shops that would appreciate your hard-earned money aside from Amazon (and who pay their taxes!)

Thank you to Jennifer from SoundsTrue for the opportunity, to Matt for helping me stay focussed on this lengthy, sprawling job among myriad others, and to Ram and Mirabai for writing the book. I hope did your words justice.

Breathe Into The Back.

In September I’ll have been practising yoga for seven years, ever since the day I started to think that weights alone weren’t the only thing I should be doing as I moved towards my 40s. I grew up with a yoga-practising Mum, so was familiar with some of the moves, which Mum would do to unwind and get time for herself at six in the morning. The sound of the yoga teacher Lynn's voice on the cassette tape was always soothing, even though I didn’t very often join in (there were also Richard Hittleman books lying around). My mate had tried a class with a bloke up at my my old school, which was a disaster because he was rude and impatient, and didn't like being asked questions, but unlike my gymnastics classes, I didn’t, this time, let one bad teacher put me off the whole practice for life (after all I could have been bouncing along bars and cartwheeling over a mat instead of drawing!)

No - this time, after going through the Yellow Pages and the Phone Book, my sister pointed out that the obvious thing to do was look online - which, weirdly, I’d been reluctant to do, for reasons I can’t remember now. But she was right, because within seconds I’d found Anna Ashby - teacher at Triyoga in London, an ex-ballerina with almost two decades of yoga practice, and…look! She also teaches in Hinckley!

London and Hinckley. I couldn’t believe my luck! There was something in me that was saying I needed a professional - someone who LIVED the practice, and didn’t just teach it in the evenings after their day job doing something else. This felt very important to me, as I felt driven to learn with the best, or not at all. Treating it as seriously as something I’d be learning for work…or like starting a new degree. A light snobbery perhaps, but this was the first time I’d embarked on any sort of serious learning since leaving college, and automatically applied the same criteria. Anna was to become my yoga college!

That was September 2007, and I’ve been going ever since. Many Thursday activities have been missed because Thursday Is Yoga Day, and many a vicious grump has taken hold whenever I’ve had to miss a class to meet a deadline. But Anna and her classes have been a continuous feature of my life since that first session, at my old school in Hinckley, when me and Anna’s husband Michael - who later built my new website and became involved in assorted Factoryroad/Inkymole creative projects too - stood discussing the colour palette of the newly-painted mural on the school hall’s wall. Christmas presents became yoga props and birthday present requests were for yoga clothes. Everyone who comes to work with us is told to ‘lie over the brick’ at least once, to ease their aching backs. The mat is permanently set up in the top room (albeit walked over by the odd contractor who doesn’t realise what it is - meaning it has to be washed of course).

It’s Anna’s caramel Texan-infused voice, with her micro-corrections and references to the minutiae of the asanas, that I hear when I do yoga at home. It’s her fault I wang one leg randomly up the nearest wall during a conversation, ‘just to give it a stretch’. It’s because of Anna all of our interns have been forced to lie over a brick to straighten their backs out. It’s Anna’s influence that made me do a headstand on the top of Blackpool tower, and in the fields in Stratford, and on the balcony in the gym after a workout; and it’s down to her that I can now, finally, do shoulder stands without thinking my neck is going to snap and getting a migraine the following day.

It’s also down too her that, last weekend in the back of the Suzuki Carry, I finally managed a complete crow pose for more than one second!

Anna is warm, funny, beautiful and extremely professional, as you can see in this video where she introduces us to her practice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ANN1689t0

Yoga’s still here despite a three-year obsession with running, a period of resenting ALL exercise and a flirtation with kettle bells. I almost started the teacher training, thinking seriously that I could line it up as a second career or something to do when and if the illustration came to an end, or if I brought it to an end - but ironically, I got too busy, and was reminded by my nearest and dearest that I already had too many commitments. Maybe I’ll go back to that one day?

Anna and her yoga were there during the darkest few weeks of my life, helping to keep me from exploding while the yoga went on unconsciously in a dazed and running-on-auto state. In fact, only three days after the worst day of my entire life so far, when it was all I could do to operate my limbs and remember to keep breathing, she and I went to Cambridge to film her Interactive Yoga DVD - a full day’s poses repeated seven or eight times for the camera, one warm May day - including demonstrating how not to do a few of the poses! The concentration and massive physical effort took me miles and miles away from what else was going on in my life (yoga does that). The memory of a Buddhist camerawoman, a yoga teacher and a vegan trying to swat from the Buddha shrine the bluebottle which had been landing on our Corpse Pose faces for the last twenty minutes will never leave me, and was a moment of massive light and humour in a very murky week.

You can see the results of the filming here, me with considerably less hair than I have now:
http://yoga-3d.com

Last week I learned that Anna is retiring from her Hinckley classes to focus on her work in London. Although she lives locally, her weeks are split clean in two with half at Triyoga and half at home; and finally, her commitments have become such that she’s had to make some time for herself. I completely understand this decision from a professional perspective, and I applaud her decision. But inside, there’s a little tear-stained spot on the yoga mat and a worried student furrowing her brow over what comes next. I can choose another teacher of course, and part of me is excited about being forced to make a change and adapt. But they’ll never be Anna, and anyone who’s done yoga for a long time with one person will understand where I’m coming from.

We’ve resolved to practise together at her house, sometimes mine, to keep the continuity going, and I’m hoping to travel to London to be in one of her classes at the weekends now and again, when finances and schedule allow! And she lives only ten minutes down the road, so it’s not the end of the world. But it is the end of an era, and I’m feeling a bit bereft; however in the true spirit of yoga, it’s off to the last class tonight for tea and home-made cakes following practise, and then bravely onward, as Anna and I together with all of her other Hinckley studies reach into the next chapter. *And Breathe.*

Thank you Anna!