I sit here writing this blog after having spent the past six hours typing up copious volumes of notes for a section of my PhD chapter. There are workmen bashing away upstairs fitting our new bathroom, and the dogs are going spare at them passing the glass living room door on their way in and out of the corridor. I am thinking of the tutees I have to teach this evening and am trying to make up revision schedules for them. I also have to help get the house ready for selling (almost there now), and sort out the garden. I also have to plan dinner, cancel my wisdom tooth removal consultation…..again….. and carry out a series of niggly little jobs which all add up to minutes and hours in my daily schedule.
What I wish I could do more every day is……….enjoy some more ‘me time’.
My ‘me time’ is very precious to me and I get grumpy if I am deprived of it. That 30 – 60 minutes each day to chill, read, do some sewing, play the piano, notch up a few more kilometres on the rowing machine, or watch Netflix seems so elusive. Other things like to jostle their way into my daily life so that, by the time I eventually collapse onto the sofa at 10pm (after I finish tutoring) I am lucky if I stay awake. I got a new cross-stitch project in the post today (I’m so excited to do it!) and as I gaze at the lovely picture of Lake Como I wonder when I will get the time to do it. I have about 30 more projects in my craft cupboard waiting in my to-do queue. I know I should *make* time for these things, but that isn’t always easy; besides, if I do sit down to enjoy a few minutes to myself, I feel guilty for not doing other things, so my ‘me time’ is abandoned. “I’ll make sure I take an hour tomorrow”, I tell myself. And that never happens. One could argue that, in the time I am writing this blog, I could be enjoying some ‘me time’, but I consider spilling words onto a screen as a good form of therapy (even if nobody reads them, which is totally fine by me!). Plus, at this particular moment in time, it is hard to relax with workmen about and dogs barking continuously (now where are my noise-cancelling headphones?).
I have now deleted Facebook and Twitter off my phone – I rarely use Twitter anyway and will be deleting it soon – but have kept Instagram and Pinterest. I have also made it hard for myself to look at social media on my laptop too. Hours scrolling through other peoples’ posts is time wasted – I want to use this time more productively for my own benefit. I kind of feel that I’m a bit old for social media now anyway, to be honest, and am actually a Luddite when it comes to online communication. I’d rather send cards/letters to friends or phone them for a chat. More about my increasingly antagonistic relationship with social media in another blog in due course. And don’t get me started on Chat GPT (I’ll blog about my thoughts on this on Tuesday).
I think I need to be stricter with my daily routines. I don’t like planners – they are too rigid and I like to live life as it happens. Maybe if I determined that on such-and-such an afternoon, I will do this/that, then I shouldn’t allow other things to elbow their ways ahead of my ‘afternoon off’ and postpone them instead. I do tend to put other people’s demands above my own which is probably part of the problem.
When I was a research nurse, I had a picture beside my desk in my office which bore the slogan “Sometimes I just sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits”. I need to make more time to “just sits”, chill, or do something I enjoy doing. As a very young child, I would spend hours sitting on my house staircase just looking out of the Velux window at the white clouds drifting past in the blue sky. I need to be very young me again. Maybe this could be my “Spring Resolution”.
June's Jottings 