My holiday from urgent tasks
Yesterday morning my life was awful and impossible. This evening life is good and happy. Since nothing much has changed in the last 36 hours I am reluctantly forced to acknowledge once again that my emotional state is prone to fluctuation and therefore not a good short-term measure for my quality of life. What is valuable is taking an after-the-fact look at the specific complaints I listed as to why my life was impossible. The analysis is not surprising. I am not spending enough time on activities which replenish my emotional well-being. I’m not just talking about “taking time out for me” because some of the things I find most fulfilling are when I spend time deliberately helping someone outside my immediate family. Other soul-filling activities are actually a lot of work, (gardening, writing, family photo books) but the work I spend on them makes me feel like my life has value in a way that I can see and measure. I can see the weeds pulled, the words written, the pages finished. It is kind of hard to quantify “parenting” particularly when it is like the air I breathe, omnipresent and invisible.
The holiday has created a little space where many of my other responsibilities are held at bay. It is rather like one of those lulls in the crashing waves where the ocean pulls back leaving me standing ankle deep in wet sand. There are no packages to ship, emails to answer, tasks to complete, because most everyone else is also on vacation. The schools have backed off as well. There will be homework to manage next week, but this week is clear. The waves that have pushed against me and occasionally swamped me have retreated for a moment. In this space I organized and sorted and discarded. Mostly this is a physical sorting as I discarded years of old papers and garbage. As I sorted through piles, my brain also sorted. I dredged up old memories and then filed them away in new places. As I organized, I began to picture how my physical spaces need to be arranged so that I can accomplish the tasks that are in front of me. But I tried not to think too much about the tasks themselves. Tasks have dictated the order of my days for more than half a year. The biggest value in this holiday space is the freedom from urgency. I have time to consider what is important to me rather than what must be done right away to prevent an imminent crisis.
My space will only last until Monday. I can see the urgency swelling like a large wave gathering momentum to crash across the shore. A part of me wants to start preparing now, hurry and complete a dozen small chores so that they’ll be out of the way. Instead I am doing the mental equivalent of wiggling my toes in the sand, looking at the sky, and taking a deep breath. It is good to take time off from battling the waves to remember that I like the beach.
Before Monday arrives I intend to have a plan. It needs to be simple and low maintenance, but I need some structure which demands that part of each day is given over to things which are important even though they may not be urgent.