Thursday Murmurings

In praise of Ms Spears

Nov 18, 2021

Greetings and Happy Thursday beloveds!

Britney is FREE, y’all!

Hot damn, watching all this unfold from afar, it’s hard not to feel crazy proud of Ms Spears. Talk about a woman quite literally taking her power back.

Britney Spears @britneyspears

I might as well do a hint of my thoughts here before I go and set things square on @Oprah 🤔😜🤷🏼‍♀️ !!!!!

Things that caught my eye this week:

Rethinking Loneliness: Singledom and the Stigma of Solitude.

So, first things first, if you, like me, read a lot of things online and tend to have a millions tabs open thinking ‘I’ll read that later’, then you close the tab or forget to go back to it and end up never reading all the things, you need the Pocket app in your life. This isn’t an ad, it’s just one of my favourite and most used apps and it’s changed my life. So firstly, go download that. Secondly, Pocket assembled this collection of articles around singledom. Full disclosure, I haven’t read all of them yet, but given my newly single status, and as someone who spent many years single before being coupled, the way society is skewed to favour those in couples and how singledom is frowned upon/pitied is always a subject that interests me. So I thought I’d share.

Food for Thought

On the importance of taking breaks:

I was having a conversation with a life coaching client recently. The subject of that feeling that if you’re not constantly doing something, you’re lazy, came up.

I related a Beyoncé take on this issue. At the risk of pissing off a bunch of Beyoncé fans here, stick with me…

I’m an appreciator of Beyoncé, but would never class myself as a hardcore fan. When Crazy in Love dropped in the early oughts (yes, it was that long ago), her solo career took off and she kept flying. For literal YEARS, Beyoncé was everywhere. Albums, tours, endorsements deals, adverts, the list goes on. There seemed to be a years long stretch where you couldn’t turn around without seeing Beyoncé somewhere.

And the music was…OK. Yes, she had many-a-bop. It was popular. But (this is where I piss off the Bey fans), it was also kinda…meh, you know? (Solange was always the more interesting one, let’s be real).

Then all of a sudden, she disappeared from view. There were no albums, no tours, nothing to promote. She just seemed to retreat and take some time for herself.

And when she did reemerge, she dropped motherfuckin’ LEMONADE - an iconic album of our times. An album in which you could tell she’d actually lived some life, had some opinions, did some thangs. There was more substance to that work, more heart, it felt considered, like it was truly coming from her essence in a way that none of the previous work had.

The moral of this story: take a break. Live some life. Do some things. Un-busy yourself. Your best work will come when you take some time to be inspired by life, actually live it and experience it and have something to say about it and share about it as a result.

You should subscribe to the paid edition of The Murmuration because…

In Monday’s paid edition, we’re gonna be talking about money, because we just don’t talk about it enough.

It’s time for us to get real about it, stop letting it make us uncomfortable, stop burying our heads in the sand and start getting smart about all things moolah related.

So if you, like me, are on a mission to no longer let your fear and lack of knowledge around money hold you hostage, I want you to dive in to this conversation with me.

Your weekly Biggie Smalls (P)update

This week, Biggie would like to remind you recycle properly. He cares about the environment.

Until next week, smile at strangers, spread good vibes, be nice to people.

The Murmuration