- I’d take a couple of weeks to relax and read and get healthier
- By stepping away from the stress at work, my body and mind would recuperate
- I’d spend more “quality” time with my kids
- I’d roll up my sleeves and tackle the pile of projects that I’ve deferred for the last two or three years
What my summer actually looked like:
- the sounds of construction at our house for the first relaxing weeks
- travel for a work trip for which I’d booked non-refundable tickets
- family reunions and a family funeral in different parts of the country involving planes, trains, and yes, very long automobile rides
- managing my kids summer chaos schedules, which mostly involved biking two and fro and reminding them to pack their own lunches, then reviewing those lunches after having been scolded by a school for the peanuts that the kids had packed by themselves
- a short trip with my younger son to Indiana to pick up my older son, only to return to Indiana a month later for a funeral for the sudden, unexpected death of my aunt
- I tried to but failed to:
- arrange for a plumber to fix the sink
- arrange to build a tiny house
- arrange for a handyman to build shelves in the bedroom (or build them myself)
- reframe and hang photos and art (after I did managed to pull down a bunch of stuff)
- complete sorting through the digital photos and building photo books for 2015 and 2016
- move our music to the cloud and consolidate media from hardrives and other machines
- finish repotting my plants after having rescued one from work
On the upside, I did get both of my boys excited about jigsaw puzzles, and we managed to put together several over the summer. I know. Thank you. I’m so proud.
I also read a great deal. The hours of travel may have been nightmarish on my running schedule and hence the tightness of my waistband, but it provided ample reading time. Also, I started reading audiobooks. I can do that while doing other things, such as dishes, jigsaw puzzles, walking the dog, operating large machinery. Who knew?! I cannot believe I waited this long to start reading audiobooks. Of course, it does make it difficult to highlight passages. No, difficult really doesn’t cut it. With the library audiobooks there is simply no way short of stopping the feed, pulling out a notebook and transcribing the words. With Audible books you can mark parts, so that theoretically you can return to those marks and do this transcription at your convenience. Sadly, with my poor recall, I rely heavily upon highlights to remember key aspects of a book. Without them, it’s almost as if I haven’t read the book at all. Poof. Still, if I stick to audioform for all the books I’d be embarrassed to admit to reading, then it works out fairly well.
Remarkably, leisure is much like any other void. It is a vacuum. It sucks in things to fill it. In some ways the pull is stronger when the void is greater. It becomes that much more difficult to forcefully protect the time that you want to use for specific things. When I work, when there is so little time to spare, then time becomes budgeted. You may not get to spend it completely on the things that you want, but you can dole out a bit at a time. Should I be unemployed again for a period of time, then I would need to allocate more initial time for the floodgates to spill open. For wreckage that that involves. Later, I would arrange a stricter schedule to reserve the time I want for projects with less priority. I would also have to learn to be more rigorous and mindful of spending time on writing. The reading has been and will continue to be necessary, but note taking afterwards also deserves time.