Reflections after the second Block Course

I have just returned home after spending 3 days in Raglan for the second sustainable practice block course.  I really enjoyed staying at Solscape - its fantastic views over the harbour (with gorgeous colours at sunrise and sunset) and voluptuous greenery made me feel as relaxed as if I were on holiday.  The learning was good fun and the people made it even better.  The first day and a half was spent on the community/business paper we are embarking on, and the latter half was used to teach us more about the power of social media... so in the next set of posts will likely feature these two topics predominantly.  However, I've noticed its turned into an info-dump at times, so I'll start popping in a few more purely reflective posts (like this one) to get more out of it.

What are the predominant thoughts I'm coming away with from this block course?  I'm definitely feeling more confident!  Steve's 'anything-is-fantastic, the-more-spontaneous-the-better and learn-your-own-way' thinking pattern is rubbing off on me more an more and I feel all the better all the time.  I can feel my true creativity coming back too, which I realise now is one of my strongest assets.  I've identified my 3 month goal (the length of these next papers) is to pretty much finish up all my assignment requirements, but they are the minor detail in the intention I'm putting forward to just practice applying all the things I have learned (whether they fit into the modules or not).  A reoccurring theme that has come up when I've dedicated time to thinking about what I want, and that is to have my fingers in a lot of pies.  Any time in my life - if there were literally(!) many flavours of pies in front of me - all I wanted was to have a taste of each.  I can confidently confess that I am a generalist who loves the big picture overview and its variety! So, what I'm going to do - apart from my assignments - is aim to help out all the other people in my class (and honorary members beyond) in lots of little ways.  A usual classroom wouldn't reward that, and that's probably why it took me so long to figure out.

Little extra comment:  On Sunday morning, whilst I was out at golf, I received a txt from mum to call her, and she told me that her dad passed away over night (daytime 5/5/12 in germany).  Fortunately, he had had a nice day with her sister (lunch and a visit to Oma's grave), and went to sleep just 5 minutes after returning to his room.  I was a little surprised at the news, but mum was so good about it that I didn't feel horrible.  We knew he wanted to go.  Oma passed away just under a year ago after battling cancer, and they had been together for over 60 years!  Later in the day I spent some time processing it, and the cliche feelings of appreciating time on this earth came on.  Mark and I went out for dinner to toast Opa and got talking about our future options.  Afterwards, when we were home, I showed him a really interesting video I thought would be quite fitting for him to see (sustainability focussed of course haha!) - and the experience was amazing... I had always shown him this-or-that video, but in this one the message was so that things really clicked into place for him.  We are on the same page now more so than ever before.  Thank you Opa for kicking it off! Prost!