Time is a Tease
Featured here are recent photos from my seaside walks — like any photos I ever share, if I’ve shot something you love, drop me a line to order a 24x36 canvas shipped anywhere in North America all-in for $150.
“The struggle is real.” Someone said that somewhere on the interwebs once. It caught on, and here we are. The struggle is real is a truism we all relate to, and as much as we often chuckle when we hear it, it’s one of those human-condition catchphrases that connect us.
As a freelancer, time is my friend, my enemy, my aspiration, my tease.
Some weeks, clients are near invisible and work is dauntingly scarce and I can have a breather. Other weeks, I’m a hot property and there’s not a moment to lose.
I don’t have pets, kids, a lover, or anything else that commands my time. I’m lucky/cursed that way during this pandemic. There are no friend appointments because, well, pandemic. I moved to the island after everyone had created their safe “bubbles” and I’m a loner anyhow, so I’m patiently waiting until things are safer to hang with people I value and respect, of which there are a number locally, since I lived here before and have Many Connections.
But I do have a bad back, and sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not. Last week, it was not. The result was, chronic pain threw my whole week off and I now find myself snowed under.
Photo: Moonrise at sunset. These days, sunset’s after 8pm. I’ve always become dormant after dinner, so it’s a bit of a struggle to shift that thinking and put on pants, shoes, and get out there. But the beauty makes it worth it when I succeed.
Worse, that pain makes Every Little Thing hard to do. Either you’ve had serious backpain and you’re nodding your head, or you haven’t, and you’re trying to understand, but you probably don’t. And that “every little thing is harder” slowly pulls the thread out from the whole fabric of your life – you eat worse, you neglect the house because even sweeping can inflame your pain, laundry piles up.
So, when I get to the end of the pain and feel better, I then must contend with the emotional toll of repairing all the things that fell apart for a week or two.
Recently, I’d been so proud – for the first time in my adult life, I’d kept my home Basically Clean for about 2-3 weeks in a row. Dishes done nearly every night before bed, hanging up the coat, all the things, man. It was so adulty!
Historically, two things have conspired against me on the household front. One is mild ADD and the inability to create routines that work within the confines of my reality. Two is anxiety and the remnants of whatever happened in my noggin when I had my head injury nearly 20 years ago. I remain changed, and for some reason, housecleaning is one of the things that I’m constantly struggling with.
So, there I was, so proud of myself, staying on top of All The Things, then last week rolled around and for about nine days in a row, pain was a constant.
Clean house? Buh-bye. Workload? Mounting. Headspace? Clouding.
Photo: Speaking of clouds and time — I “timed” this walk perfectly, as a friend I’d baked some bread for was running late so we made plans to meet up later and I hustled out to get a look at the seaside with 90km/hr winds blasting. I tweeted this with the caption “something wicked this way comes,” while standing right there, then began my walk home — the rain opened up but stayed about 100-200 feet behind me the whole way home. Five minutes after I’d gotten home, a hailstorm unleashed and winds got stronger. It was a wonderful moment.
This morning, I awoke with a nasty headache. Medicated, went back to bed, awoke at 10 pain-free with a ringing existential alarm.
Heart quickened, anxiety kicked in, fear hit me right between the lines.
THE INVOICING. THE CLIENT’S SPREADSHEET. THE OTHER THING. THE HOUSE IS A MESS. SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT. SHIT.
Then I emptied the dishwasher. This was something I could do, one small thing, about 6 minutes of effort. And that snowballed. Dishes into dishwasher. And my starting-to-clean mantra, “everything that can go away, goes away.”
Next, I tackled a healthy breakfast, then got a loaf of bread begun to bake before bed tonight, I hope. I zipped around, putting things away, then frantically watered all my seedlings and the fledgling garden I began planting yesterday (SQUEE!).
And it reminded me how I got successful with cleaning and keeping an orderly house, by just doing a bit here and there. Every time I got up, I put a few things away or cleaned something.
Without backpain, that’s easily done. (With it, not so much.)
And maybe that’s the secret to life, too. Do what you can when you can.
I’ve cobbled up a to-do list today, and on it are work-y things, but there’s also “make bread,” and there’s “eat a healthy dinner,” “sit on the patio for 10 minutes in the sun and do nothing,” and “see sunset.”
I don’t profess to have all the answers. I struggle as much as anyone to keep my head above water in a pandemic that often makes me wanna bury my head instead.
And through it all is time, the constant we can’t shake. It’s ticking away and it’s uncatchable, unstoppable. These days slipping away. Sometimes, all we have are scattered free moments. What will you do with yours?
This morning, as I sat there freaking the hell out and thinking about my day ahead, I saw an article recapping all the responses from a Twitter author’s query asking for “the best advice anyone ever gave you,” and in it was a line about a woman who asked her dying grandmother her life’s regrets.
She said, “I wish I spent less time doing the laundry.”
So maybe my to-do list isn’t weird. Maybe “see sunset” needs to be on more of our to-do lists.
Even if these little scheduled moments like “sit on the patio for 10 minutes” mean I’m working straight through till Sunday till I take two weeks off from my part-time day job – a necessity for many freelancers – maybe each day can be a little better and a little less scary.
Scheduling in things for my soul may make the difference on some inner level that doesn’t compute with the bank balance. How do I calculate the existential value of that walk for a sunset and the sunshine on my patio, talking to my aspirational wee lettuce, bean, and cucumber seedlings while the birds chirp in the ratty ol’ cypress that gives me morning shade? It’s incalculable, isn’t it?
Photo: This image, this moment, exists for maybe two weeks a year — when daffodils are in season. That’s just 3% of the year that you can see THIS. Of that, it’s just 30 minutes a day, or about 2% of that 14 days, that you can enjoy this moment. We make so many choices of our time spent, but we don’t think of how fleeting all these natural “moments” really are, and we fail to prioritize them accordingly. Or I know I do.
I know my paid subscribers are waiting on my tackling my book chapters, but that will come – I’m chasing the money wheel right now and writing like this is therapeutic, but editing memories of a different life are, well, less so, especially as we enter a stricter pandemic lockdown with nerve-wracking news of transmission locally.
That other life of mine seems like an alternate reality these days, but I do long for a night where I sit here drinking wine, parsing words of old from the other side of the world. Who was that woman?
Anyhow. Back to the present.
Something deep within me tells me April will be a remarkable month for me somehow.
Perhaps a sort of existential catching-up with oneself, a reckoning of inside and out. I don’t know what’s coming at me, but I somehow intrinsically know it will be a momentum-building month to colour the rest of my year ahead.
Maybe I’m wrong. I’ve had such feelings before and I’ve stopped trying to understand what they harken, but I find the emotional premonitions are nearly always right. I don’t have much in my life, but I do have a gut that makes its instincts known, and I try to listen. So, I’m listening.
And with those words, well, moneymaking beckons. Somehow, amongst it all must come sunshine, sunsets, and healthy food.
Tick-tock.
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