I'm Natalie Lou in your listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello.

How are you doing?

When you think of the term bare minimum, what springs to mind? Growing up the bare minimum in an exam situation for instance was and this might be an Irish thing was you get 10% for writing your name correctly on the exam paper and the absolute minimum was 40%, a very basic pass.

39 and below and you had failed. Now of course you were encouraged to get

above and beyond that. It was understood that the absolute bare minimum on a subject was getting that 40% pass.

The bare minimum is doing just enough to get by. It's the smallest possible amount of something, the smallest

amount of conditions for something to happen, for it to be okay.

It's what someone can get away with,

the least possible expenditure of bandwidth,

so time, energy, effort, and emotions,

the least possible commitment. It's dialing it in,

ticking the minimal amount of boxes. There are times when doing the bare minimum might be necessary, like when our bandwidth is consumed by a challenge,

or where for whatever reason we're incapacitated.

For instance, after dad passed away in March 2017,

in the first couple of months afterwards,

I just did not have it in me to be doing a great deal.

I dropped as much as possible out of my schedule, not least actually because it took 27 days for the funeral to happen.

A similar thing occurred the following year when I think a combination of grief and

Tinnitus and having trained for and run a marathon in four months I went for a period of feeling low again I had to drop as much as I

could and do what I felt was absolutely necessary in order to take care of myself.

And even actually in those first few weeks of the pandemic, oh my gosh I slept my head off. I just didn't have it in me to do a great deal. And I think that it's in these times when we do really the bare minimum,

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