If not now, then when?

Maybe it will be a normal-ish day. I have high hopes as we go into the weekend.

The last couple days have been off-routine and off-schedule, as life goes.

Last weekend was a little intense with anticipation, late nights and then the Blue Jays loss. There was the time change and family stuff. I got all that out of my system in Monday’s post.

I have to say, after years of silence and complications on the blog, it is such a relief for me to be writing regularly again about my life. But wow, I miss a couple days and there’s a lot to catch up on.

Let’s start with the darkness.

I don’t mind the time change that much. The truth is, I feel a kind of seasonal release when it happens - the nights are dark and now we can just stop doing so much.

It’s the opposite of the expansiveness I feel in May and June when days go on and on and you can get so much done. I find those days invigorating and productive. But by this time of year I just don’t want to be as productive. I don’t want to be as productive outdoors, and I can’t. But I also just want to be less productive, period.

It’s not a shift to “and now I will conquer all the indoor tasks I have been putting off for 6 months” energy. Nope. I just want to do less.

I am naturally resistant to high productivity messaging, of all kinds, not just the capitalism fuelled ones. I don’t know why I’m like this because not all productivity is bad, in fact I find it desirable in certain contexts, high yields in the garden, for example.

When people talk about high productivity, I internally resist and I have for years. I’m not going to analyze this too deep right now, because I’d like to publish this today, but if you have a similar experience or know of writers/researchers, etc. who publish about this I would love to investigate more. (I’m already familiar with Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing”.)

Basically, I’m looking for affirmation for this tendency of mine. Deep down I don’t think I’m lazy but I’d sure like some big brained ideas to support my position.

My desire to slow everything down increases with the darkening and cooling days of fall. And then boom, we get the time change, and it’s like permission to say “that’s it, we’re closing up shop for the evenings”.

But of course this is not how our culture is set up and it’s not even how my own expectations are set up.

I have lists. I have obligations. I have hobbies and creative pursuits.

This post was not intended to be a thorough excavation of this aspect of my life and my personality and so I’m not going to dig further into this. I want to talk about some other things. But I will summarize my experience and thoughts about the time change.

First of all, the time change is a very clear example of all the constructs we live under. Like “time” itself, the time change is completely made up and that always irks me. All these human made-up things that we have to abide by, go along to get along, even though it messes things up in people’s lives. It makes me so frustrated.

On top of the frustration with all the made up things we do as human, that so many of us just don’t want to do but have to do because this is the play we’ve been cast in, is the actual experience of the early darkness. And this part I like.

That time I set up the camera to take a photo me reading by the fire in my pjs

Now that I am past a season of life with a lot of external obligations, namely past the time of raising kids and having my days guided by taking care of and providing for the wellbeing (and ALL that entails) of dependants, I have much more freedom to live my days as I want.

I don’t like a lot of external obligations and I’ve gotten them down to the minimum - basically my paid work. And there are zero evening external obligations in my life.

I don’t have to accomplish anything for anyone else during that time if I don’t want. This is such a gift.

But the drop in evening productivity puts some pressure on the day time hours to get stuff done in a way that isn’t true during the long days of spring and summer.

During those days I can say, “I’ll get to it this evening”, whatever it is, though usually it’s some outdoor task, but I can’t do that now. If I want to go for a walk outdoors I have to do it during the day.

The daylight hours become precious and feel too short to do all the stuff that needs doing.

So this week as I welcomed the darkened nights that for me feel like a cozy quilt on winter’s bed I also experienced the tension of having less energy and less hours to complete the list and knowing the list will need to change.

It’s time to let go of some of the things I had hoped to achieve and accomplish before winter.

Other things about this week that I wanted to mention.

I got sick on Wednesday with a 24 hour something or other.

I started feeling ill on Tuesday night and hoped I would sleep it off. Got out of bed Wednesday morning, acting like I had slept it off, fake it till you make it kind of thing.

I finished my hair routine in hopes that it would kick start my energy for the day.

On Tuesday night I showered and washed and conditioned my hair but it was too close to bedtime to put the product in my hair that helps hold the curl. So I did that part Wednesday morning.

Fake it till you make it became fake it till you fall back down. I felt knackered by 9am and slept all morning on the couch, wrecking my hair.

I tried again around noon. Got up. Wet my hair down, re-scrunched the curls. If a hair routine could turn a day around things had to improve. They didn’t.

After a short rally, cooking myself oatmeal for brunch, I was down for the count most of the afternoon in bed.

I don’t know what it was exactly. There was a dull headache and just so much tiredness. For all I know it could have been the time change!

The worst part, as always when I feel ill, is how physical infirmity triggers my emotional and mental vulnerabilities. So on top of being ill I feel full of self-doubt and worries about my character, and on this day, my under-employment. Wednesday was a employment search day so in addition to being incapacitated to do that I experienced waves of “what if I never find work” and “what if I’m not cut out for x” (x could be anything when I’m feeling low).

I’m aware of all this as it’s happening. I observe these responses in me, I am intimately familiar with them by now. And the only thing for it is compassion. So that’s what I do. I’m very compassionate and kind to myself.

The day had been scheduled for finding work and being sick triggered my latent anxiety. And then because I could rest I felt guilty for my privilege and then sad that many people can’t rest, or can’t rest to the extent they need to, when they are unwell because of economic precarity.

I had to let all that move through me and then I applied self-compassion like a compress to a wound and told myself if not now, then when?

If you can’t fully rest now, during a season when you have the time to do so without complications, i.e.: I didn’t have to email or text anyone to say “I can’t make it to work today”, I didn’t have to worry about how to make up the hours - if you can’t let yourself rest now, then when can you?

I think the uncertainty of my job situation makes it harder to rest in some ways because I don’t have the security of those hours.

To be clear, I have plenty of security in our shared household economy (the privilege I was speaking of earlier), but even that does not last indefinitely. We’re fine right now but there’s a window on that and I need to use this window to find work.

Anyway, Wednesday I was sick and I spent most of the day sleeping. I felt well enough to make myself a chicken noodle soup for supper. I deeply appreciate being able to nourish and nurture myself this way. Mom delivered rice pudding in the evening, a comfort food she knows I love and that she made especially for me, as puddings are not part of her repertoire. She’s a fruit pie and crisp baker.

I went to bed early and felt better the next day. Which was good because we needed to pack up in the morning and head to town for an undetermined period of time, since the internet went out late afternoon on Wednesday and was still out at the start of Thursday’s workday.

Apparently, there was a vehicle accident that caused an outage with the line. Internet was out for hundreds of county residents.

We set up shop at a favourite cafe in town along with tables of other internet refuges, buying food and drink and using the wifi to get our work done.

Because I’m such a home body I don’t visit local cafes very often, even though I like to support these local businesses because they add so much value to our community. Having formed a relationship with the owners of this particular local cafe I was happy to have the opportunity to hang out and spend money there.

As we were driving to town, along the river, we noticed how high the water was. We live on the estuarial section of the LaHave River, an important river system in southern Nova Scotia.

Having moved here just last summer I am still new to living on a river estuary and the inherently variable nature of this tidal waterway is a source of delight and wonder.

Yesterday’s tides were especially pronounced. Having researched the phenomena last evening, I now know they were spring tides owing to the full moon earlier this week. Long time locals would know all this already as common knowledge. I am just acquiring it, in part because I can’t see the tidal changes on the river from my house.

I have to leave the property to see the river’s edge. Being forced to go to town and return home yesterday at hours that happened to coincide with high and low tide I could see the effect of the spring tide in a way I don’t normally observe.

The forced relocation for the day’s work gave me the opportunity to learn something new. What a delight.

Having been alerted from Mom a little earlier that the internet was restored to the property, we arrived home almost exactly at low tide. And although I still had work to do, trying to catch up from Wednesday’s forced rest day, I couldn’t help but go for a walk on the river bottom.

It was another case of if not now, then when?

This opportunity doesn’t always present itself. I had to do it now, even though I need to accomplish the day’s high energy, deep thinking, or difficult tasks during the daylight hours.

For people who are naturally spontaneous and follow their heart (or whimsy), my musings must seen foreign and maybe funny. I am a routine and schedule driven person, it’s how I allow myself the freedom to not do things, by following a schedule for when I do do things.

Anyway, I had to put those plans aside when I got home so I could walk the river. And good gracious, my life is not so structured that I can’t allow myself that.

now that we’ve had some rain (hallelujah!) water is running in the culverts again

Now it’s Friday. With the internet outage right on the heels of my sick day, yesterday’s scheduled grocery and errand runs did not happen. So that’s today’s plan.

Mom and I are going out tonight. Weeks ago we bought tickets for the Lunenburg Literary festival and we’re going to go out for supper before attending the event.

Doing stuff like this is fun and satisfying. Lunenburg, and the area in general, hosts such a plethora of cultural activities and events. I rarely miss the cultural richness of city life because of all the great stuff that happens 10 minutes from my home.

Damien will hang out with Dad and watch TV. Now that the baseball post-season and the World Series is over we can return to our usual weekend and evening routines, and watching Friday night TV with Dad is one of Damien’s weekly routines.

This is why I need to write and publish every day. When I don’t there is just so much to catch up on. Stuff that matters to me. Stuff I want to tell.

So much life happens everyday. I’m really grateful I get to live it.