Lately, I’ve been a bit busier than I had planned professionally. In terms of financial health and my microbusiness, that’s a very good thing. In terms of the considerable quiet space my brain needs? Umm, not so much. I need more downtime than I’ve been getting, honestly. On top of that, the weather has been a titch uncooperative. We need some nice, dry and hopefully sunny days to stop thumb-wrestling Mother Nature and get our garden into the ground. Finally, due to a hiccup with ordering prescription cat food, I need to take my sweet baby Twister to the urgent cat vet tomorrow so someone will re-prescribe his food. (He’s not out, thankfully, but we only have a few days left and the mail-order food wouldn’t get here in time. I ordered it last week but there’s been a shipment delay. Poor guy.)
And all of that is why these days I tend to slide into Thursdays with an equal sense of both fatigue and release. I’ve literally got only two half-hour appointments on my schedule today and thanks to an incredibly long day yesterday, I was able to get a ton of work stuff done and mow the yard. That means that as fatigued as I am, today should be easier. Man, do I need easier right now.
This morning, I’m going to keep the promise I made to myself sometime between the second push mower battery and the hour on the lawn tractor yesterday: I will take it easy. On my docket? As little work-work as possible, a 2.2 mile run to get myself back on track for the Fourth of July 10K and a second glorious cup of coffee without any responsibilities. I will also schedule sweet Twister for the urgent vet and figure out what to do with the pork tenderloin for dinner. There’s got to be something better than what I’ve been doing.
But all of this waxing and waning about my supposedly “dream-come-true” semi-retired life, got me thinking. If life really full of the mundane, the tedious and the responsibility regardless of your status? Or do we sometimes just fail to appreciate the good and emphasize the bad? I mean, I was living for the opportunity to work part-time, for myself and from home for decades. Now? It still isn’t perfect.
As with most questions I ask myself, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Sometimes, regardless of how sunny your disposition is, life gets overwhelming. More work than you expected, a special project, a serious illness, a busy period at home with renovations or a new pet, family issues… the list goes on. I think it’s unrealistic and inauthentic to say that at those times, reality does not change. You’re not living your dream life; it’s been temporarily (hopefully) suspended. But at other times?
I remember as a kid and being so excited for the holidays that I wanted them to stay all the time. My mom would wisely advise: “if it was Christmas all the time, it wouldn’t be special.” (Seriously, what mother doesn’t say that?) Yet the advice holds today: if you’re living your dream-come-true life, doesn’t it periodically become mundane and stop feeling special? And at those low points, can’t a little extra work filled with some rainy, cooler-than-expected days just make you feel disappointed?
So, I get it. It’s to be expected that life sometimes gets mundane and tedious in the best of circumstances. But still, if my theory that finding joy lies in appreciating what you do have and if my efforts at designing a life I don’t need to escape from are real, then there’s another truth out there for me to admit: I let the mundane and tedious take over and get in the way of my joy.
Ouch. That stings just a bit. And yet, realizing that this time it really is me is also empowering. My real life’s job, despite a little extra work and a few hiccups on my horizon, is to embrace my joy. I need to own this. But telling myself to “buck up, buttercup” isn’t exactly the trick to making it all better. Instead, I get back to Thursday and what today means to me.
Thursdays lately have become an easy day. Since I now have a couple of meetings on Fridays, Thursday and Friday tend to rival each other these days. There’s no longer three-day work-free weekends but there are four-day weekends with partial work. For now, that’s good enough, particularly if I embrace what Thursday offers me: a chance to wind down and carve out a little quiet time.
If I’m truly honest with myself, that’s what I need the most: quiet time. As a highly reactionary person, quiet time stops the bees buzzing in my head and gets me back to appreciating what I’ve built. No, quiet time doesn’t clean the house or figure out what to do with that pork loin (which seemed like such a great idea at the time I put it in my cart), but it does settle me.
Today, that’s what I’m craving most and that’s what I intend to give myself. At some point here in the next hour, I want to lace up and go for my first official training run in six months. Then, perhaps I’ll putter around the house which could use a little of my puttering. I’ve got calls at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. today but when I close the books at 3 p.m., they’re going to be closed for the day. And then? I’ll figure out that damned pork loin. Seriously, I will.
Owning my own joy is part of building this life that I’ve wanted for so long. I just need to remember that the roses don’t bloom unless the garden gets tended.
The Yuppie Homesteader 