On 3 August 2016, I popped open a Yogi tea bag, felt inspired by it and shared it with everyone at work. Feeling a little bold, and not entirely sure why, I accompanied it with my tiny take on what the tea bag was trying to tell me. I called it my inaugural “Hot Tip.”
The women loved it because we’re easy bait for anything whimsical, love feels and heart-warming. The men gruffly accepted it and covertly read it behind the safety of their computer screens. I sent them every work day and discovered that they were a lovely way to start the morning. They made me reflect. They enabled me to untangle an aspect of myself that I didn’t really understand. In other words, “Margie’s hot tips” really became “Margie’s quasi-therapy sessions”.
The more I wrote, the more I learnt, and the more I realised that they also gave other people a positive spring in their early morning step.
Now, as I write “Margie’s hot tips #100”, a part of me feels pretty proud, because so much happened in those five months and the hot tips are, in a way, a time capsule which reflects a hugely memorable period in my life. There were my last few months at a job I was loved for 7 and a half years. My new life role as an Aunty. The trip to Tassie I went on with my gorgeous friend Abi. The time I filled my coffee cup with brownies (and put the lid on it so that it looked like real-life takeaway coffee) from the Swissotel buffet at a law conference because, YUMMY AWESOME. The fact that these hot tips finally pushed me into creating a website which supports my creative beating heart: whatmargiewrote.com– all of it has been a fabulous journey.
It then comes as no real surprise that the tea bags are now repeating themselves. Duplicates all around. The anally retentive perfectionist in me feels a little strange posting about tea bags that I’ve already written about– and so maybe “Margie’s hot tips” have come to their natural end.
Not without a grand exit though, this last one is a special one. Hanging out from a vintage Korean pottery mug, and seated regally between some gorgeous ornaments, it reads: “If you let yourself be successful, you shall be successful”.
It’s an interesting one and turning the idea of success over in my mind, I don’t naturally tend to think of the heady heights of earning lots of money or amassing several investment properties. I think of success on a smaller scale; a day-to-day basis: “Did I do the best I could that day? Did I gently, gently push myself outside of my comfort zone and just give it a go? Did I get out of my own way, and allow myself– for once– to learn without needing to know what the end game is?”
Ultimately, my feeling is that success is the inner reassurance you experience when you feel at peace with yourself and your humanity– to the point where you cheerlead yourself on. You encourage your own endeavours. You feel scared and unsure and so so nervous, but you stop analysing and get out of your own way. And you just do it knowing that at some point, this experience in your life will come together with the rest of the beautiful jigsaw puzzle that your life tapestry is– and all make sense in the end.
Have a gorgeous Thursday, you heart-stopping daisy chains of sunshine xxx
