Decluttering, the holistic way!

I am wondering if another important part of reducing waste is to also reduce the stuff that is cluttering your own mind.
I'm sure, if I took a holistic approach to this, I would be thinking that cluttering begins from the inside out and, it's all well and good reducing your financial output, your waste, your car miles etc, but if your brain is still immensly cluttered and projects aren't getting finished yadda, yadda, is this really conducive to a cleaner, more useable workspace?

As most of you know, I'm a student and I work, and I'm a mum. It's a continual juggling act to ensure that one doesn't take over from the rest and make sure everything stays balanced.
My current workload is one night, one day per week and being on call for the next month. These are non negiotiable parts of my life and I don't want to impinge on these.

Study, on the otherhand is another assignment for an OU module, one Certificate in Applied Health Science assignment, a piece of writing for a magazine and I'm also staying up to date on Midwifery info and reading up when I get the chance.

Crafting; I have a pair of trousers pinned out for Master Beehive the younger and I'm still working on my waistcoat. I have one Facebook give back handmade pledge giftie to finish and a desperate idea for my friend who is having a baby in July.

I sat down last night and looked at what was giving me the biggest stress in my life right now and it's the Open Uni module. It's a degree module in Human Biology, which I'm doing in order to broaden my knowledge of the human body before I begin in September. I don't need it as I have my unconditional offer, and frankly it's a massively tall order to go from GCSE grassroots knowledge to degree module standard, and independent learning at that! The TMA's are enjoyable, I'm learning loads and I think are doing me a lot of good, however, the thought of an exam in June whereupon I'm going to need to know the finer workings of the brain and eye, just fill me with undue nerves and stress. I am a visual and kinaesthetic learner, if I don't understand a concept and it is explained to me in other ways or demonstrated, it goes in and sticks, if I just read the same words and text over and over, my mind blanks out!

What's the point? I will have learned what I need to learn from the textbooks and passed the assignments, yet I don't have the confidence, or, more importantly the time, to do the exam, the revision and give it the justice it will need. So, I think this may be the bit to let go of.

When I was interviewed last year, I asked what I ought to be doing to ensure that my knowledge base was on a par with where it needed to be before commencing and was told to not do anything other than move and settle in. I was told my knowledge base was over par thanks to the NCT diploma. I guess I just didn't listen or believe them because my background wasn't rooted "in Science".

But is midwifery purely a Science? Isn't there an element of Art too? Shouldn't a "good midwife" be able to listen to her clients and interpret their words, palpate a stomach rather than going on a recent scan or a tapemeasure, hear a baby's heartbeat through a pinard rather than relying solely on a CTG? Of course, it's fundamental that a midwife understands the female body and how pregnancy changes things. It's crucial she knows fetal diameters and landmarks of the head and pelvis. She should be able to read and intepret partograms. It's very important she knows about the heart and circulatory system, but not as stand alone subjects. Science and Art are symbiotically related within Midwifery, a midwife needs to be able to not only use her knowledge, but also her intuition and growing experience and that of the woman she is with.

I am not being naive enough to say that midwives don't meet many women who have complex health problems that are affected by pregnancy, probably increasingly so with the age of first time mothers increasing and the rising rate of obesity, and that they don't need to know how to work with these women, because they do. So don't worry that I'll not be informed, knowledgeable or read up, or that I'll be an arse that thinks I'm "too good/radical/speshul" for the hard slog of medical text books (and my slog may be harder than most!).

But if "normal" birth was actually perceived by everyone as spontaneous vaginal birth that is free of drugs or interventions and more births were left alone to just happen and not induced or augmented; if more low risk women were allowed the option to birth at home or in a birth centre; then the midwife, the expert in normal birth, will be able to do her job without feeling that science and medicine is taking over a natural, physiological life process. Midwives would see waterbirth on a daily basis, the art of birthing a breech baby would not be a slowly dying one, home would be the first port of call for most parents when they're contemplating where to have their baby as all this would be a normal, everyday occurrence - as it used to be!

Birth is only as safe as life gets, sometimes life needs a helping hand, but most of the time we're allowed to make decisions that we feel are best for us, we aren't helped with our daily physiological processes normally, unless there is a problem and then...thank god for medicine. So...let's keep birth physical, normal and out of hospitals as much as we can!

I'm not sure I'm doing anyone good putting myself under exam pressure over these next few months when I could be finishing other work in progress and maybe drinking tea?

Intelligent tea drinking for the soul - who's in?

And just because it's always good to digress from what you're meant to be doing and what is the inspiration of the blog...I sorted out my fat quarters - doesn't it look pretty - that has to open the heart and mind to more learning, just by looking at something pretty.