Tomorrow or Today » Month of Freedom

Some Thoughts

Sarah — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:00:43 +0000

I found myself feeling overwhelmingly philosophical this morning. More than usual, it would seem. Most of the time I keep my philosophical thoughts to myself. In our “modern” world, it has become something of a faux pas to start up a philosophical discussion. And with the frantic pace of 21st century lives, who really has time to waste on philosophy anyway? So really, I guess I don’t talk about this much, but I am actually an acutely seasonally-minded person. More than any organized religion ever has, the spiritual side of me is awakened by a reverence for nature as it continually renews itself through the turning of the seasons. I see creation in all things from stardust to my pinky toe and I have respect for them all, equally. Call it what you will, this is just how I feel in my heart.

And as you know, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my day-to-day life, what it’s been like for these past few years and how much of it has been lived on autopilot. And part of what bothers me so much is that I don’t live what I feel, partly because I worry about being judged as a weirdo, but more because of this autopilot fallback postioin my life often takes. I guess it’s just another offshoot of the general thoughts I’ve been having about mapping a direction for the rest of my life. Now that I am happily engaged, it seems as though philosophical and practical questions are colliding. I’m questioning what kind of future I want it to be: Where do we want to live and “settle down”? How soon after the wedding do we want to start having kids? How are we even gonna afford this wedding and what kind of lifestyle changes will we have to make to save that kind of money? How do I start living a more seasonally-minded life so that I don’t feel quite so spiritually hollow all the time and can start creating the home and family that our future children will eventually be welcomed into? And where does a career and the need to make money fit into all this? Because I am still struggling with knowing what to do in that aspect of my life, and generally trying to fight back the overwhelming fear that in this recession-ridden world, me and my Celtic Studies degree are completely unhireable.

As usual, I don’t seem to have any of the answers to my questions. Part of it is that I don’t really know where to begin and part of it is that no matter how hard I try, it is increasingly difficult or me to feel at home in our cramped upper floor apartment, living in someone else’s house in the dirty urban core of a major metropolitan city. No money + no car + no job with a future = staying put right here without even being able to change my surroundings even a little bit to spruce it up and make it feel more homey.

There I go, sounding all down and sorry for myself again. I’m not really, I swear. I guess I’m still just floundering, looking for square one of where to being. It’s just hard to feel connected to nature when all you see outside your window is concrete and brick. But take that first step I must, whatever it may be, because I refuse to stay living in this limbo. I need to start being mindful and fully present in my own life, not just coasting through it. I need to create the life and the future and the family I want, not just lie back and wait for it to find me.

Making the Big Choices

Sarah — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:00:37 +0000

Safe or happy? Safe? Or happy?

That was the question that was twirling around my mind on the way home from physio yesterday. Do I choose a play-it-safe life or do I choose one that’s happy and fulfilled? Is there a way to choose both?

And what keeps holding me back from being my authentic self? From leading the life I’ve always wanted to live? From doing what will make me happy rather than continuously falling back into bad old habits. That is one of my biggest fears right now, that after this whole month-long experience is over, I’ll simply go back to work and nothing will have changed.

How do I be that person and live that life that I always dreamed of? What makes it so significantly different from the life I’ve been leading? The answers to these questions are, I think, the next big list that I want to tackle. I like lists. They work for me and often help me pinpoint the swirling thoughts in my head. I just need to do some good, hard thinking about the whole thing.

Because I want to be the one leading my life, making the conscious choices and decisions. I do not want my life to be leading me. Ever.

New Territory

Sarah — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:00:10 +0000

Okay, here it is. I’ve gotten to a point that I’ve been to before but rarely, if ever, moved beyond. The dishes are under control, the laundry done, the apartment clean, tidy and organized. I so rarely get to this point. (Have I mentioned that already?) It is my normal state to be behind, trying desperately to do all the things yelling at me all at once to get done. Where do I go from here?

This feels like new territory and I don’t wanna mess it up. I think the next step is to tackle the kinds of things that I always put off. The things I get excited for when they are new but then they inevitably end up on a shelf because guilt stops me from indulging in such “wastes of time.” I rarely start projects and it’s even rarer that I finish them. I wonder if I’ll be able to introduce this next step successfully without guilting myself into ignoring or avoiding.

I know I sound vague, but my life has always been, “one day I’ll have the time/money/energy to do that.” Maybe that “one day” is now. Maybe I can figure out how to live a normal life…

After One Week

Sarah — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:31:11 +0000

So, at the end of my first week of freedom, where do I stand? I’m all but phlegm-free for one. But has any progress been made? What have I learned about myself and what I want? Well…

I like this slower pace.

I like not having headaches all the time.

I like quiet mornings and quiet evenings and busy in-betweens.

I don’t like downtown Toronto, would rather live in the country but will settle for someplace far enough away from the core as soon as I can afford a car. Because while a car is crazy expensive, my time is worth too much to commute from the fringes by transit.

I really dislike not having a private yard, so I’m still toying with the idea of moving. We’ll stay here until October and see where we stand at that point. Maybe I’ll wait till spring if the new jobs are within commuting distance from here.

Because I do need a different job. I don’t think that, in general, I will mind working hard enough and long enough at a job to get the things I want, but I hate my current job with its harsh deadlines, zero respect and the inability to ever get a raise or promotion. I think a lot of my unhappiness has been coming from feeling trapped in that job and the stagnating version of my life that is the direct result. I just have to keep applying. It doesn’t matter if I’ve applied for a million jobs and heard from none, all that matters is that I keep trying and keep applying. I mean, someone’s gonna have to hire me eventually. I just need to keep trying and not let myself get discouraged when I don’t hear anything.

Because I can’t control everything in the universe. Shocking, I know. But I actually have very little say about what inevitably happens, so I need to start trying to let go of my stranglehold on events and trust instead that things will work out.

And part two of that is to stop holding on to so much stuff, all in the chance that I might need it one day. Holding onto things just in case or for sentimental value never leaves room in your life for wonderful new things to come in! So I’m thinking of doing some reorganizing and purging while I have the time. It may be slow goings though, since I’m trying to really think about the purpose and the function of everything.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for this week. It seems like a lot of good stuff to have figured out already, considering I’ve been so sick. Here’s hoping that the rest of my time off is equally productive.

Once the late evening comes…

Sarah — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:00:14 +0000

Once the late evening comes, everything remains in shadow, except for the tops of the tallest trees, whose leaves glitter in the last of the fading sunlight. The air in the evening smells deeper, richer. It carries the smell of grass and berries and pollen. Nearby, I hear the shrill screams of children playing. Everything seems so different during childhood. The summer days seem so long and twilight is a magical time. Cicadas chirp in the trees during the day and crickets chirp in the grass at night.

I remember the summers of my childhood. All day, every day, running around outside with friends, building tree houses, playing make believe. And then at night, when the heat would break and the thunder and lightening would come, I’d huddle in my bed excitedly waiting for the next earsplitting crack.

I remember being really happy during those summers. I never even remember being bothered by the humidity. I think it was the freedom of living on a quiet suburban street, able to spend unstructured hour upon unstructured hour finding ways to entertain myself. I was never bored but I do remember always wishing to be grown up. I couldn’t wait to be 18. That was the age when you were an adult and your parents couldn’t tell you to come in for dinner right at the best part of the game.

Now that I am a grown up, I wish that summers were still like that, where you had all the unstructured free time you could want to pursue your every fancy. I’ve been thinking about that a lot as I try to reclaim a little bit of it this summer. All I’m missing is having a yard and a chance to have grass between my toes.

On an unrelated note, I’m thinking that I would also like to ween myself off of evenings full of TV. Instead, maybe I’ll go for evening walks or read a book or do some knitting. Something quiet. I like TV, I do, I just think I’ve had too much of it in my life for a while and maybe summer is a good time to take a break from that. I’m just sayin’.

The Best Laid Plans

Sarah — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:00:03 +0000

Sigh. Still sick over here. This morning I was getting so fed up with this cold that I actually took some cold medicine, something I view as a last resort. It wasn’t a miracle cure but it did enable me to breathe through my nose for a while. And it was better than nothing, so I though I’d take the opportunity to return some books to the library and pick up some others that I had on hold. Plus, it killed two birds with one stone since Daisy was getting antsy for that late-morning walk she’s developed quite the ardent taste for.

I briefly toyed with the idea of also picking up some things we need from the grocery store and the drugstore and maybe swinging by the bank, but I changed my mind on that pretty quickly after another excellent sneezefest hit. Besides, leaving Daisy outside the library for a couple minutes while I pop in is one thing. Leaving her outside the grocery store for the better part of a half-hour would never fly.

So I got dressed and ready, books in hand, dog in tow. But, ladies and gents, what do you suppose should be the case when I finally get up said library? The damn thing is closed! That’s right. Apparently, for some unknown and completely stupid reason, the library doesn’t open until 12:30 on Thursdays. I was pissed and confused. I looked at my watch: 11:45. That was 45 minutes until it finally opened. Well, going to the store and the bank to kill time were still out of the question, especially since I’d left what I needed for those trips at home. And the thought of walking all the way home and back again felt like more than my dwindling energy levels could bare. What to do? What to do?

Well, I thought, I do have a bag full of books with me, and I did just pass a park…

So back I went to the park and found a sunny spot in the grass to sit and read. Daisy was confused. When we go for walks we generally, you know, walk. She was not used to this whole staying-in-one-spot thing, not when in foreign territory anyway. After a few whimpers and much sniffing around she got over it and settled in. The grass was damp and cool and the sun was nice and warm. I pulled out a book I hadn’t gotten around to reading before it was due and dove in.

And it was nice, if a little odd for me. See, I never just randomly sit in the park, or anywhere for that matter. I never have that kind of time. Usually if I’m gonna take a break, I take it in the comfort of my own home where, once the break is done, I can quickly move on to the next task on the never-ending to-do list. But this forced impromptu park visit made me remember how nice it is to do things outside by yourself. Not because you’re going somewhere, but just because it’s nice to be outside. It’s something I don’t do nearly as much as I used to since I don’t have my own private yard or anything anymore.

But it was fun and it was relaxing, and maybe during my time off I’ll try out a planned park excursion. Who knows, I may even get a tan! Though I think, in future, I’ll make sure to bring a blanket to save my butt from the damp (tee-hee!)

The Rhythm

Sarah — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:00:44 +0000

So I thought about it, and here’s what I came up with as a template for my days:

On most mornings, when I’m not fighting off illness, I tend to wake up naturally around 7:00. I’ll do the tea/coffee and email/blog thing for a half hour or so. Just enough to keep the email landslide at bay. While I like and enjoy technology, I’m trying to make sure I’m not a slave to it. I was starting to feel that way for a while there, but I think that recently, I’ve found some balance on that front and no longer need to read every twitter or respond to every blog post. There just would never be enough hours in the day.

After that is the usual shower/breakfast/get dressed trio, and Daisy often needs a mid-morning walk as soon as I’m presentable. Perhaps I’ll take the camera along on some of these and see where we go.

An early afternoon snack, say around 1ish, with a magazine and a cup of tea may be a nice way to break up my day. I’m thinking it also may be enough of a break to shake me out of any possible morning brain-stuck I feel setting in. Because the plan is to not waste away entire days uselessly.

Tuesday afternoons are the Farmer’s Market/CSA pickup, and taking some time to peruse fresh veggies is always a real treat. And the bonus of being off this month is that I can get there early and swoop up the good stuff before it’s gone. You know, instead of being the one at 5:45 in the afternoon, moaning, “Darn! The peas and spinach are all gone again?!”

And I hate late dinners (one of the blights of my current existence) so if I start cooking promptly at 4 p.m. every afternoon, I’ll never have to worry about feeling bloated at 10 p.m. and may even have enough space for the occasional dessert!

And finally, since I generally tend to run myself into the ground every evening before plunking down into bed too tired to even wash the makeup off my face, 8 p.m. will now be my Gettin’ Ready for Bed Time. I’ll still probably end up doing all sorts of things in the evenings before falling into bed exhausted, but at least I’ll be doing them fresh-faced and already safely in the PJs.

Now you’ll probably notice that there are a lot of things that I didn’t book into this schedule, and that was on purpose. There are things I wanna do when I’m ready, when the mood strikes. Not when my schedule says I must do it. Stuff like writing, trips to the gym and the library, more walks with Daisy, visiting with friends, chores, chats with my mom, etc. I want each individual day to have its own feeling. To be memorable in some different way, instead of each being exactly the same, stamped out by a cookie cutter. I get enough of that during my workdays. This time isn’t about that, it’s about discovering me.

Feeling (somewhat) Better

Sarah — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:00:16 +0000

Well, my chest cold has broken into a lovely cough with stuffy/runny nose to match. But I do seem to be getting my energy back, albeit in small spurts. It was enough for me to take Daisy on a walk around the block this morning. And I really should’ve taken the camera with me when I did. New summer flowers have been popping up everywhere while I’ve been cooped up inside. Roses and tiger lilies, especially. They’re everywhere and they look gorgeous. Note to self: Remember to take the camera next time we go out.

And because I’ve had more energy, this morning actually resembled something closer to a real morning, rather than me just getting up and moving directly to the couch. Which reminds me. I did have “plans” to settle on a rhythm to my days, something that everything else will free-flow around as I see fit. So I’ll be posting my shot at putting virtual pen to paper and thinking up a routine that works tomorrow.

PS – What the HECK was the name of that show from when we were kids where two teams of two children had to do ridiculous things, including making some disgusting concoction that the other had to eat the most of before the time was over. I seem to recall flour and M&M’s and peanut butter but…. What the heck was the name of that show?!

On Writing

Sarah — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:00:41 +0000

When I was young, I used to dream of being a writer. I had all sorts of fairytale-esque story outlines tucked in notebooks all over the place. I remember during my babysitting years, telling two of my charges a bedtime story based on one of these story scraps I had. Inevitably, their parents returned home before we came to the end of the story and I left for home. The next day, their mother called me. Apparently both girls were desperate to know how the story ended. I had to tell them that I didn’t know how it ended because what I’d told them was all I’d made up.

I used to be a voracious reader as well, inhaling anything with even somewhat intriguing cover copy. As I got older, school readings became more important than anything else and my love of reading dwindled under the weight of being told what to read. But my love of writing never really faded. It did, however, quickly move away from the fictional towards the introspective and autobiographical. As I grew up, and there was less of a chance that my siblings would sneaking a peek, my journal entries became much more self-reflexive, without the fear of reprisals. When I write today, it continues to be self-reflexive, and I am buoyed by all the like-minded blogs I read out there from equally introspective women. (Peruse the blogroll at the side or email me for recomendations if you’re interested.) Even my reading has turned from the fictional to the non-fictional, even so far as the autobiographical. I’m picking up The Gentle Art of Domesticity again. It’s a book I’ve owned for a while but didn’t have the energy to devote to the kind of digestion that it deserved. During this month, I think I’ll have the clarity to take it all in, especially since my own goals in life so closely reflect those pages.

My mother still thinks that I should write children’s books. It’s true that I do have a vivid imagination. But I’d much rather write about this life as I experience it. The joy and pain, the ups and downs. There’s a whole section in the library for autobiographies, mostly those of famous people who have done wonderful or terrible things. But what about the autobiographies of simple people, doing simple things? To me, those are the more important. They are the true reflections of a society, of a life, of a time. So that’s why I write, to preserve my memories as they happen. To write my own autobiography as a testament to the simple and to the good.

The Long Slog

Sarah — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:16:22 +0000

So yesterday was something, that’s for sure. After that last post, I started looking up all sorts of stuff about the countryside. Then my mind turned towards farming and how cool it would be to have an organic micro-ecofarm. I even asked Dave what he though about it. But like the level-headed half of this partnership that he is, he stayed typically reserved and noncommittal.

Well, I went back to my research, looking all sorts of things up. But the more I researched, the less sure I became. What if this was me grasping at anything again? How could one buy and start a farm with a negative amount of money in the bank, anyway? And that inevitably led to another meltdown. I ended up crying, feeling trapped by my lack of choices in life, worrying about the future, and upset with myself that I’d tried to grasp onto another harebrained scheme again when I promised myself I’d stop doing that.

Seeing my distress once again, Dave sat me down. He said, “Look, I think you’re trying to jump from Step 1 to Step 3 without going through Step 2. Getting to where we wanna be in life is gonna take a lot of hard work and sacrifice, more than we’ve had to do in the past. But you need to be prepared. It’s like that old equation says, any project can only be two of these three things: done with high quality, done on time or done on budget. If you want something of high quality done on time, it’s gonna cost you. If you want something done fast and cheap, you forgo quality, and if you opt for high quality done on the cheap (which is probably a good analogy for what we want from life) it’s gonna take a long time to get there.” Longer than, oh, the five minutes I generally have been giving myself. What can I say, patience has never been one of my virtues.

We continued talking, Dave trying to make me feel better, and me trying to be okay with our current lot in life. I eventually came around to the realization that I end up so easily grasping onto all these random career paths because none of my life goals actually have anything to do with a career. My dreams for a self-sufficient life of gardening, baking and child-rearing has zero to do with working for the man or climbing the corporate ladder. “So,” Dave said, “maybe what you need is some crap job to help you get from here to there. Maybe that’s what we both need.” But we already have crap jobs that pay more than a lot of crap jobs and we barely scrape enough money together every month. “Ah, yes,” he said, “but we currently have dead-end crap jobs. What we need are crap jobs with some growth potential.” So that’s the point we’re at now, thinking about looking for crap jobs with growth potential so that we can scrimp our way from here to a home we can fix up, with a huge yard and/or a little bit of land. So that one day I can feel like something of a suburban homesteader: growing things, making things, raising children and being happy. That’s the real goal. And the real detriment to our current jobs, since it is unlikely that we well ever get another raise or promotion there. We instead just remain in a holding pattern, able to pay most of the monthly bills but forever hounded by the thousands of dollars of impenetrable school debt I have. (Hard to believe, huh, that we both have respected university degrees and we’ve come to the conclusion that all we can hope for in life is getting a crap job?)

Maybe we’ll have to move to a basement in Scarborough, cancel the phones and the cable TV. There are some debts that can’t be reduced, that we’ll just have to keep paying till they’re gone, like our gym debt. It was a good idea, and I’m happy we did it, but getting a trainer at the gym was, in all honesty, way beyond what we could afford and I shouldn’t have made us do it. We all live with the consequences of our actions, I guess.

So I have a month to figure out how to live the next five years on the cheap. Somewhere in there getting rid of my $40,000 school debt, saving a down payment for a home and perhaps even starting a family. Cloth diapers are still nouveau-chic, right?