Time On My Hands

I feel a little bit like a mouse running around in a wheel inside a cage at the moment, the subject of some great experiment.  The experiment would be titled something like “Give Someone Who Never Has Time All The Time In The World”.

As I have previously mentioned, I have just parted company with my primary customer after two years.  Right now I’m taking a break, before finishing up my book publishing project.
But when you take someone who is so used to doing something each day, and then change it up completely, strange things happen.

On Monday morning I woke up at around 7:30 with the sun streaming in through the curtains.  My first thought was along the lines of “usually I’ve been in the car for half an hour by now”.  But after the initial novelty of making a cup of tea and sitting in bed thinking how everything was nice and jolly it all got a bit…odd.

I literally did not know what to do with myself on Monday morning.  With all this free time I really couldn’t grasp that I literally had the entire day to do whatever I wanted.  Well actually that isn’t strictly true, we were taking Mum out for lunch but you know what I mean.
The weekend was fine, just like any other.  I spent all day Sunday playing Heavy Rain through to completion and then we made a final push and completed watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Top tip, seven episodes in one evening is a touch excessive.

But when Monday morning came around I had this kind of twitchy “I should be doing something more productive right now”.  I can see why people become workaholics and burn out in spectacular fashion.  But I’ve already done that once in my twenties and don’t want to be replicating that behaviour as I hurtle towards my mid-thirties.

Fortunately as the day progressed things started to click and I realised the only person I had to answer to was Sally (and Will when he wanted feeding), nobody in the village wanted their computer fixing and it was perfectly fine for me to do relaxing things.  I even sat and read a book, something my short attention span couldn’t possibly comprehend this time last week.

But once I really got into the swing of things I found myself really enjoying stupildly mundane things.  Like going food shopping.  Typically we either order food online from Waitrose or race around the supermarket at speed.  Get in, grab stuff, get out.
But when you go shopping at midday on a Tuesday you get the run of the shop.  We spent AGES in there looking at all the stuff and picking up a few things we hadn’t tried before.
Of course there is a downside to this course of action, ending up with a larger shopping bill.  But I never said the system of discovery was cheap.

I even went on a bus today.  Hampshire’s most impatient man waited out in the cold for a bus so we could go shopping in Ringwood (they were free day passes).  It was fun too, I got to see places I wouldn’t normally do and with the added bonus nobody needed their computer looking at.

The moral of the story?  If you get the chance to for just one solitary day stop everything and just marvel at the mundane.  It may prove to be something of a challenge, but it’s worth it.

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Category: General, Personal