Self-Care

This is my 81st post in a row. Nothing particularly special about that number, just noteworthy.

As a refresher for those who may have just recently joined me, I started this blog on March 14, 2023, with a view to documenting my book-writing journey. I planned and still plan to write a post every day for 365 days in total. Ostensibly until I have a manuscript in hand.

I guess I wondered what I would learn along the way. Well, here’s something I’ve picked up. Life intervenes. That was inevitable and I knew that starting out. I did wonder how I would handle life’s interventions when they did come up.

So far, I’ve managed to keep writing daily posts through my daughter’s visit with all of the delicious deviations and distractions, all the machinations and legal/financial back and forth and endless phone calls involved in buying a house, going through a stop-start immigration process, which is still stopping and starting. All that is on top of just daily living.

So today I felt myself vacillating. I was going to sign off on this post with two sentences and excuse myself. But then I realized that this stage is as much a learning stage as any other. I need to remind myself about self-care.

There have been minor but time-consuming medical procedures to contend with on top of all the aforementioned issues. I am exhausted. A temporary casualty of my “busy-ness” has been my faithfulness to my 3X weekly women’s writing group. I miss it and the consistency of carving out those two hours three days a week to get grounded and just write.

If a friend of mine was going through what I have been going through, what would I tell her? “Honey, it will be just fine.” “It is a marathon, not a sprint.” That is generally a good perspective to keep in mind whether chasing a degree, a house-building project, child-rearing, or writing a book.

The world will not fall apart if you don’t publish every single day for 365 days. No one will punish me. I am good enough at doing that myself.

I once did a 60-day yoga challenge. That meant showing up consistently for a one-hour yoga class every single day for two months. Boy, there were days I didn’t want to go. So I did workarounds. My favorite workaround was yoga nidra. I felt like. a naughty child because this yoga “practice” essentially means lying flat on your back and breathing deliberately and deeply for an hour. Heck, I could have done that in my sleep. In fact, a couple of times, I think I did.

The point is, I have created for myself something of a false idol with my goal of daily publishing something I’ve written. It is a worthy goal and I have no plan to shirk it. I just don’t feel the need to twist myself into knots whether or if I do or not. Heaven knows it might be a welcome relief for readers!

A technical glitch had me miss a day in my publishing continuity this week. I did not read about this grievous oversight on the front page of The New York Times. Oddly.

So I am off to bed. Clear conscience. Happy to have gathered this assembly of words together and to push them out into the world come what may. We, women, are notorious for putting all sorts of absurd and unrealistic expectations on ourselves.

More and more I prefer the route of self-care when life warrants as it often does. That goes for me and anyone else out there who occasionally struggles with the weight of life’s load.

Get yourself into a comfortable position. Put that extraneous clutter out of your head for a while. Breathe deeply. Relax. You can thank me later. You’re welcome.

Self-Regulation

If anyone detects a throughline in my posts lately, you are right. I am a little obsessed about the ups and downs of my emotions. No, I am not manic-depressive. I am, however, something of a stress case.

I am stressed by the complexities of the household move we are making. And, in good old hunker down and get ‘er done fashion, I’m trying to act as if it is not bothering me one bit. But it is bothering me. Quite a bit.

Yesterday a lady from whom I had purchased two armchairs on Facebook Marketplace leaned on me rather imperiously to come and collect them. I have 73 things on my plate at the minute. Picking up her chairs was somewhere around 65 on my priority list. Why couldn’t she ease off and understand the stress I am under?

Turns out she was under some stress, too. Imagine? They were packing up to leave the following day on an extended trip. She had just had two disks inserted into her spine. As I watched her walking upright around her living room, I was impressed and amazed but also embarrassed by my childish reaction to her insistence that I pick up what I bought.

I thumbed through my mental Rolodex (remember those?) and the common denominator in this type of uncomfortable situation was me. Something to do with growing up without boundaries sometimes makes it very difficult to impose them on myself.

I had grown up accustomed to having inappropriate responsibility heaped upon me without oversight or intervention by my parents. There were very few rules in our household when I was growing up. Beyond those where we worked to keep up appearances of normality and hide the addictions and violence between the parents going on behind closed doors.

In a worldly and sophisticated city like Paris or London, our family might have been perceived as Bohemian. Being a Bohemian had a certain artistic cachet in a big city. In a small conservative town, it was simply seen as neglect.

I ached when most of my friends were called home to supper or nervously checked their Timexes as it inched closer to the time they had been told to be home. Me and my two sisters rarely had to be home at a specific time for anything, let alone sit-down meals.

There was no set bedtime on any night – even school nights – throughout my childhood. We stayed up with and partied and socialized as long as the adults did. The line between freedom and neglect was very thin in the household I grew up in.

As I grew older, my lack of internalized boundaries often showed up in a wide and rapid range of my felt emotions. An old boyfriend often used to say: “Margot, you’re “too.” What I thought was charming and coquettish behavior, others likely perceived as bad-mannered and precocious. I longed to be calm and cool like many of my other girlfriends. I had no idea how to do that.

With time, it got better and easier to settle myself down in stressful situations and hold my tongue and not say something I would invariably come to regret. I eventually taught myself strong and consistent boundaries. Most of the time, the dyke holds.

But I was already tired and overwhelmed and rundown by the time this lady started demanding something of me that mostly just felt like “one more thing.” I was still smarting over the paint-ruined carpet of the day before and had just had an inane conversation with the security system installation representative. I was beat. I am beat.

What is different now from days gone by is recognizing me in all of my “bitchy, over-the-top, I’ve had enough and need to lie down” glory. What followed my little phone outburst of sarcasm and displeasure with the lady I had been rude to were copious declarations of mea culpa. That’s progress, I guess.

Tomorrow – aside from the things I must do – will be about attacking that absurd and overburdened “to-do” list and cutting it down to a manageable size. It is okay to take time and let weeks, even months pass before we settle into our new digs. As is often said in healing circles, I’m “setting boundaries.”

I’ll be setting boundaries both with myself and with the unrealistic expectations I created for myself. Easing up on myself and letting go of some of the irritants somebody else can take care of.

Now there you go. I feel better already.

I’m Such A Hypocrite

Do I present as someone who is cool, calm, and collected? Most of the time? I try to. Well, I am here to tell you, I am a fraud. I aspire to be one of those “too cool for school” kids. I consistently fail.

Seeing a massive blob of dark navy oil paint on a pale brown carpet in the bright light of day in my “brand new to me” house set me off. Remember yesterday when I said how calm, cool, and collected I was over this little “accident?” I was either delusional or lying. I was actually livid.

Here is what I hate about “mistakes.” They inevitably cost time, energy, and money. How much depends on the magnitude of the mistake. Murder someone, get caught and you’ll likely end up paying with your life for the rest of your life.

Car “accidents” alter the course of people’s lives. In horrific and tragic ways. I have experienced those tragedies with people in my very own circle. The outcome is – as in the wake of all accidents – there is aught to do but pick up the pieces, work at healing, and try to put life back together. Irreversibly altered.

By comparison, a square-foot indelible blob of navy blue in a piece of carpet paint has cost me very little. But it has cost me. To start, the carpet has to be taken up and trashed. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, I worked frantically with water and paint remover, and cleaning spray to remove the blob. That now bemuses and saddens me a little bit. The fate of that carpet was sealed at the moment that paint can fell over.

So the initial “move-in” plan was to get the rooms painted – bippity, boppity, boo. Painting would have taken a day or two. Then the carpet cleaners were to come in. I was going to give the carpets a day or two to dry really well. Then – when the carpets were practically desiccated – the furniture could be moved in.

We would sit in our new living arrangement and “ooh” and “aah” over our new digs and hoist a glass of bubbly together to celebrate. I don’t see that happening now for a month.

The next week will be filled with getting on the phone to make appointments with other painters, meeting up with them, getting estimates, and deciding among them before the job even starts. That’s at least a week.

I’ll be schlepping back to the hardware store to get more paint plus carving out time to be on the job site to “supervise” people. Clearly, I should have supervised this job, too. I just told my concerned husband my mood would improve when this situation improves.

As I often do, I am looking for the lesson in this very minor disaster. Good parents teach their kids a lot of little life lessons in the safety of their home environment before they are launched in to adulthood.

Children should be encouraged to make a lot of little mistakes when they are young so they don’t make them again when they are established adults. It is the rule of “the hand on the hot stove.” If it happens once when you are a child, it is unlikely to happen again later in life unless there are copious amounts of alcohol involved.

The consequences of adult mistakes are often much harder to unravel. The emotional and temporal costs are hard, too, but harder to put a price tag on.

So in the wake of this screwup, I am looking for the “blessing in disguise.” We have decided laminate flooring is the way to go in the now carpeted areas given our lifestyle and lackluster housecleaning chops.

My dear friend and architect Diane – who knows just about everything there is to know about houses and job site screwups – gave me a boost when she sent me a message saying: “Hey, maybe there is hardwood underneath the carpet!”

Unlikely but it gave me a chuckle and a glimmer of hope. Sometimes that is enough to get you through inevitably difficult life patches. Friends rule.

Stuff

Days of reckoning. We are moving into a new house and the dreaded stuff sort has begun. What to take – and why. What to leave behind – and why. What to let go of – forever. What does that even mean?

The stuff will either be useful or not. Beautiful or not. Sentimental enough to be worth keeping – or not. I am both excited and daunted by the prospect.

Stuff has been something of a creative and escapist pastime of mine. I have lived a life filled at various times with either lack or abundance. I have learned important lessons from both states. Abundance has been nice and it is extremely comforting not to have to worry about where the next infusion of money is coming from or what bills have to be paid this month.

Lack taught me much, too. I learned how little I really needed to survive materially. Once the basics of food, shelter, and clothing are covered, almost anything else is gravy. There were days when I accepted charity from the church. I learned humility and grace from those experiences.

I also learned about money in a more fervent way than I might have had I not been driven by want.

I am fascinated by humans’ ingenuity in the realm of invention, innovation, creation of beauty, and practicality.

Perhaps oddly, soft furnishings come to mind, for example. There are so many different textures and colors and patterns to choose from. Knitted or woven shawls were a standard part of a woman’s daily costume for centuries. Women gained both social and practical satisfaction by joining together in quilting bees.

The appearance of dish towels, for example, would have emerged from the practical necessity of housewives and servants in days gone by to get the washing up done in a timely manner after meals. A fascination with the practical uses of fabric emerged in concert with the general use of “soft furnishings” as decorative additions to living spaces. Quilts, afghans, comforters, cozies, foot warmers, and for a time, the ubiquitous doily that adorned every piece of wooden furniture. The product of some woman’s effort and talent in crochet or tatting.

There has long been self-expression in stuff, whether it is homemade goods, fashion, home decoration or jewellery. It is interesting to contemplate how “taste” or “personal fashion preferences” emerge. As a child, I used to pore through the Sears’ catalog and dream about all the stuff I would acquire when I was a grownup.

I remember a particular fixation with a pretty red dress with white dots and a red underslip. It had a modified type of small Dutch red ruffle at the neckline and ties that pulled the dress in tight in the back. It had pretty little transparent red short sleeves. I thought it was the prettiest dress I had ever seen in my life.

I wonder what I would think if I saw that dress now. I might be embarrassed at how quaint and dated it looked.

So as I am facing the stuff I’ve collected over a lifetime that needs to be faced in order to transition from this life to a new life, I feel the familiar pull of sentimentality for some objects. Faux practicality for others (I may be able to use that someday). Or the penny-pinchers decluttering dilemma (I paid a lot of money for that!!)

As I am about to face the hoard, I am forced to admit that stuff was at one time more important to me than people. Easier to acquire and oddly harder to let go of than some acquaintances. Stuff doesn’t push back. Not deliberately at any rate.

So wish me luck, dear readers, and a following sea. I am aware now that the people going through this process are actually more important than any of the stuff we bring into our new situation.

Today already I smashed two out of a matching set of four coffee cups. Our painter – with copious, if ineffectual, apologies – spilled about a cup of dark blue paint on our light brown carpet, destroying it.

There was a time when I would have lost it over the carelessness of the painter and my own clumsiness for breaking the cups. I admit I am much better at taking them in stride. I think I am also growing much more practical. We had too many cups and I can now switch out the flooring to the waterproof laminate I wanted to install anyway.

Under Thirty

I heard an odd story today from a Home Depot “associate,” or whatever elevated term they are calling them these days. I remember when labeling theory was all the rage and it was somehow believed that calling something “lesser than” a different name would elevate the dignity of work. That is when janitors became “sanitary engineers.”

So when I heard this story today, I flinched a little. We hear that millennials suffer from being overcoddled as children. These are the graduates of kindergarten programs where “everyone got a medal” or positive feedback no matter how dismal their performance. “Every child is special,” intoned educators. “Every child deserves praise and recognition.”

Granted that is hard to argue until it goes beyond the beyonds. How that somehow got translated into no longer letting children experience the consequences of their actions beats me. In my book, it defies nature.

So this associate told us today about a young person/millennial employee who got angry at a customer. Apparently, he turned on his heel, in front of the customer, “left his post,” as it were, and walked out of work and went home. I was speechless for about a milli-second then rolled my eyes and shook my head. Customer service has been reduced to a level where it often feels as if the person serving you expects you “to make their day,” and not the other way around.

The story got better. This young person showed up at work the next day, unapologetic and worse, endured no consequences for his behavior from management. Not even a stern lecture or reprimand. Perhaps they gave him a medal for being “so special.”

I rant about this not from the perspective of a horrified person, but a deeply saddened one. I do meet upbeat and positive salespeople of all ages. We seem to make each other’s day. Banter and problem-solving together. Considering options. This color or that.

But human nature is such that it takes something like – in truth, I don’t remember how many exactly – 90 or so positive statements to make up for a negative one. This is particularly directed at parents with a view to imbuing their offspring with a positive self-image.

But does it really? What did it for me was accomplishment. Or handling a delicate interpersonal situation well. Like telling someone something hard that had to be said but leaving them with their dignity. I was terrible at all of that as a young adult. It took years and tons of mistakes to wrap my head around it.

I often muse about the unjust society young people are presently stewed in. Paris Hilton is a role model? Because of an accident of birth and good marketing chops? The Kardashians? Marketing on steroids.

It is cruel and unfair for young people to think they can all become rock stars or models or actresses and make a million dollars before their thirtieth birthday. If that is their goal and belief that they deserve it, it is not hard to imagine why they are short-tempered and churlish with the masses they must serve while waiting for their breakthrough contract to be signed.

No doubt countless numbers of ambitious cute guys feel ripped off when it dawns on them their boy band isn’t going to make it in music’s big leagues. They are in for a world of disappointment unless that perspective gets turned around.

Tonight my husband and I ordered takeout pizza. I was exhausted. we had been schlepping around Home Depot all afternoon. I was probably unnecessarily short with the young lady. Certainly not friendly and engaging.

As I was leaving, she walked away from the cash register, waving a hand with acrylic green glitter nails, and sneered, sarcastically: “Hope you have a better day, ma’am.” It was not said kindly. It was unnecessary. A missed opportunity for kindness and compassion.

I was hurt by her dismissive attitude and gratuitous unkindness, and as I said, exhausted. I thought I might call her or her boss to tell them that. But I didn’t. First, I didn’t expect my concerns would be taken seriously. Second, I knew once I had had a good night’s sleep, the slight and the person who made it would fade into oblivion. Green nails and all.

But I did note it as a distressing pattern I encounter too frequently among “service associates” these days.

I admit the tables have turned for this Boomer. I now rarely trust anyone under thirty.

RIP Tina Turner

Talk about a blast from the past. Some can hit you harder than others.

I was scrolling through my news feed. There was Tina Turner whose image has been ubiquitous since her death last week at 83 years old.

The voice I heard in a piece circulating through the CBC television newsfeed was mine. I was a little stunned. That was a while ago.

I remember that night well. I remember cajoling the CBC TV assignment editor into letting me cover the Turner concert. As I recall, he didn’t get what all the fuss was about her.

As I also recall, he only deemed covering Turner newsworthy if I could score an actual face-to-face interview with her. “Okay, “I said. “I will.” But I did not. Getting close to King Charles might have been easier than getting near Tina Turner in the wake of her multiple Grammy award-winning album and single, What’s Love Got to Do With It.

So here is my original piece on Tina Turner’s Fredericton concert in 1985 – blurry camera work and all. A little bit of history about an amazing entertainer and woman. RIP Tina Turner. What a powerhouse she was!

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2212942403853

Mouths of Babes

I remember I liked going to church to hear “Jesus stories.” Jesus sounded like a nice man. And I liked that he seemed to get children. Or he didn’t want to see them suffer. Something like that.

Our elderly neighbor dear Reverend Oakley was always kind and approving of us kids, especially after we came home from Sunday School. I figured he was probably a good friend of that Jesus guy, too. Nice men tend to hang out with nice men.

Rev. Oakley was a war veteran and had a wooden leg. He let us knock our little fists on it and showed us the lower part. Rev. Oakley must have been very brave when he was a soldier.

I remember I loved singing in Sunday School. A favorite was Jesus Loves Me.

So I didn’t quite get my mother’s reaction when one Sunday after church, my sister and I pitched into an enthusiastic rendition of Jesus Loves Me for Rev. Oakley’s exclusive entertainment.

‘Jesus loves me, This I know, ‘Cause Old Oakley told me so” … We went on, “Little ones to him belong, They are weak and he is strong, “YEESSSS, Jesus loves me. YEESSSS, Jesus loves me, YEESSSS, Jesus loves me and then sotto voce and reverentially, of course, “Old Oakley told me so.”

It may have been my Uncle Scott’s fault.

He was a lovely man with a dry wit and frequently took it upon himself to teach us nursery rhymes.

A favorite went like this:

“Spider, spider on the wall, Have you got no brains at all? Can’t you see that wall is plastered. Get off that wall you stupid …… spider.”

Mom would “tsk, tsk” and my father would growl faintly and disapprovingly under his breath. My sister and I could not have been more proud than when we are finally able – word for word – to recite the whole spider poem that Uncle Scott had taught us. Uncle Scott was the best.

I long for the days of innocent wordplay. They seem unlikely to come again. Back then, there seemed to be respect for words and their power. To inform, to entertain, to amuse, or to confound. They were still largely innocent. At least they were to us kids who took such delight. in learning and reciting them. Which is silly to say, of course, because we were the innocents. We weren’t old enough to realize words could be weapons.

Memorizing poems used to be a thing in school. My mother used to recite countless poems verbatim. Such were the mandatories of her education. The Highwayman. The Charge of the Light Brigade. Others whose names have now escaped my memory.

For fun as teenagers, a bunch of us would sit around the living room with Ogden Nash books and read one or more of his poems at a time. Each poem was more humorous and delightful than the next.

Sounds archaic, doesn’t it? Today teenagers sit together anywhere and converse via texts. Language has been stripped down to its’ barest of bare bones. Which is a kind of code for decimation.

Perhaps that is why I cleave to my tale-telling posts. To defend the honor of words. To protect them from oblivion. To gently reminisce about Old Reverend Oakley and dear Uncle Scott.

Thankfully in holding up words, I am not alone in this undertaking. What will the world ever do if all the writers are gone?

Tadpoles and Fireflies

Chasing tadpoles was a great way to spend time on weekends when I was a little girl. Armed with rinsed-out peanut butter bottles with holes in the lid, we’d head for the ponds near the railroad track to collect them.

I don’t think we gave much thought to what we would do with the tadpoles once we caught them. They were fun to watch swimming around in the jars. It was fun to contemplate that those little squirmy black things would one day become frogs. Of course, none of our tadpoles ever did.

There is wonder to be found in the fragility of nature. On other expeditions, we would sit quietly at night watching and then capturing fireflies in our trusty peanut butter jars.

I know now there was something in those activities about chasing and holding on to wonder. As much as I know now about phosphorescence, it never fails to amaze me. As the captive fireflies blinked on and off in their glass prisons, I was sure as a kid they were speaking directly to me if I could but interpret their messages.

The mind of a child isn’t particularly logical. That is both its blessing and its curse. In a freeform brain still unmodified by life’s harsher realizations and realities, a child can imagine damn near anything. And does. The best children’s authors know that and taper their stories to that malleable world of dreams and imaginings. I envy children’s authors for that ability. And they seem to have a lot of fun in the mix.

My friend Canadian Sheree Fitch has published dozens of children’s books It is hard to say what is more delightful and pleasing to the senses: the words or the pictures.

Parenting allows us to revisit the world of childhood which most of us lost touch with somewhere around our transition into puberty. In the course of reading bedtime stories to my children, favorite storylines and characters inevitably emerged. Watching children’s movies with kids transports us back to what was important about that time in our own lives.

Children seek structure and consistency and certainty. The best stories provide that or focus on seeking it out. There is a lot of gratuitous violence in children’s stories. Some academics say that is because childhood is full of nightmares for children. Children are largely powerless and have little to no control over what goes on around them.

I have read that is why the Harry Potter series has been so wildly popular. J.K. Rowling imbued young Harry with qualities and characteristics children long for. He was odd and longed to fit in. He had powers that could only be accessed through rigorous training. He made strong friendships with other weird and different kids like him. From a difficult beginning, Harry Potter took control of his own power and destiny.

That’s an easy sell to kids trying to sort themselves out as they grow up and experimenting with where their powers will lead them in adulthood.

In one of my unversity yearbooks, each faculty’s title page portrayed silhouetted adult graduates as children. On the Law page, a young boy no older than nine wore the black robe and white tabs of a future attorney holding a weighty tome in his little hands. The Engineering faculty was portrayed by a little girl of about seven years old who wore a hard hat and dungarees and held a slide rule and blueprints.

If I have grandchildren one day, I hope to help them explore the world around them beyond the world of bits, bytes, and WhatsApp. I want them to feel confident to test their own part in the world around them. We’ll bake cookies so they will know the magic of making their own creations. We’ll spend more time playing cards and puzzles and board games instead of in front of the television. We’ll wander in nature to encourage their appreciation of the world around them. we might even camp out and make S’mores over a campfire. That will be the greatest act of love. I detest S’mores.

And who knows? We may even find some tadpoles to collect and take home. We may talk about their dreams to become biologists or veterinarians one day. Childhood should be a time of dreams and wonder. In these fragmented times, dreams and wonder that can one day be put into action is needed now even more than ever before.

Things I Think About

What are people going to do in the future with all the digital pictures they take?

Will everyone keep all of their old photos? If so, where will they store them?

What will happen if people come across their grandparents’ old love letters and can’t read cursive?

When will the number of available bytes of storage in the world stop growing? Is there an endpoint?

What will humans do when AI can do everything? (I am not the only one asking that question.)

Will the internet ever crash? What will we do if it does?

When will we actually be able to attend “feelies” – Aldous Huxley’s concept in Brave New World – where feelings are transmitted through the arms of movie chairs?

Is Soma already available by some other name?

Will all world religions one day realize they are all basically saying the same thing and meld into a single world religion in the interest of peace?

Would that single-world religion eliminate religious wars?

Will men and women ever fully appreciate their value to each other and act accordingly?

Will people ever be judged first for what is inside of them and not for what they project on the outside?

Why are people judged more favorably for the amount of money they accumulate instead of the good they do with the money they have?

Will movies ever revert back to producing captivating stories instead of just blowing things up?

Will humanitarianism one day be regarded as a strength and not a weakness?

Why do humans seem to prefer living on the brink of disaster instead of changing how they live to avoid disaster in the first place?

Why are there so many preventable tragedies in the world? What would it take to stop them?

Dream Scenario

Busy! Only natural from time to time but busy still needs to be managed. The last month has been super busy and I’m feeling it. Physically and psychologically. We’ve all been there.

A daughter’s recent ten-day visit (VERY busy, but great in every other way). A pending house purchase. Medical maintenance to attend to. Writing a book. Daily dealing with both the necessaries and nice-to-haves in life. This blog.

When someone else had agency over my daily schedule, daily life was somehow easier. Easier as the priorities were clear. Nothing else got done while the demands of the job had dibs on my time.

I eventually came to realize there was a frustrating paradox. When I had time, I had no money. And when I had money, I had no time. Now, at least, I have sufficient time and money to cover my needs without stressing over the lack of one or the other.

So, now what do I do? The dilemma of spending time is actually no less intense. The shift in priorities has moved away from what I need and must do every day. Now I get to decide what I want to do after I have done what I still need to do. Life is tricky like that. It doesn’t ease up the “to-do” list significantly until and unless we decide it does. I actually like keeping busy.

Retirement from a paid job must be a total buzzkill for workaholics. I am sure they could find other ways to use their time and energy. I have seen many people who derived their entire identity and sense of self from their work. It is their entire raison d’etre. Too many times I saw situations where the work went away and, shortly afterward, so did they. Post-retirement deaths seemed endemic for a while.

I often think slowing down for workaholics is similar to having a toxic tsunami overtake them when they cannot distract their minds from busy work any longer. Workaholism is an addiction for many, they are trying to fill an unfillable hole inside themselves. They can’t seem to face the void or heal the pain and start to break down. Sometimes fatally.

So I deliberately wove in pleasurable activities and pursued other interests even while I was working. Now that I am out from behind the paywall, other activities feed my mind and my soul. One day it might be cracking open a new book. It could also be a bike ride around the neighborhood just to get out to get fresh air and sunshine. I have always enjoyed remodeling and interior decoration.

On days when I am feeling committed and energetic, I go to the gym. I am aiming for that sweet spot where “working out” is more a rewarding activity than a chore. That said, my approach to physical exercise can be all wrong. I jump in with great enthusiasm. I take on every machine by creating an intense series of reps and sets – all of which is highly illogical for a self-described couch potato.

I then kvetch as my muscles hurl obscenities at me for the next three to four days. I swear I actually hear them laughing at me as I toy with the idea of visiting the machines again any time soon. I don’t blame them. I collapse in defeat not long afterward and have to ramp myself up again psychologically to go anywhere near the gym at all. I believe the situation I am describing is called “self-defeating.”

I strive daily for that elusive sweet spot of balance. Not too much of anything. Everything in moderation. Honing my vision and energy in on a few important tasks a day instead of a baker’s dozen. I do better some days than others. It has helped that my definition of success and happiness has evolved.

I derive more pleasure some days by just sitting. Or staring at a lovely landscape off in the distance. Maybe thinking about stuff. Maybe not.

When I contrast these halcyon days with the mad days of busy work fuelled by endless ambition, I breathe a deep sigh of relief. I am happy I do not have to choose not to live like that anymore.

It is a gift I realize is not automatically afforded to everyone. I luxuriate these days in having a hot cup of tea, a new book, and sitting in a comfy chair by a picture window with nothing urgent to do. That is my very definition of living a dream scenario.