Americans are busy people. One of the things I dislike saying is “I’m too busy” because I know my busy is relative to your busy. Sure, for me, I have more than usual going on right now. More tasks to complete on a daily basis. At first this worried me and upset me. I miss my friends on Twitter. I miss reading my favorite blogs. I miss WRITING my own blog. But I’ve had to cut corners, so I do what I need to do for now.
Except. This morning I got up at three a.m. to work on my novel. Five days a week, for the last week or so, I have been faithfully writing a chapter or scene every day I don’t have to get up and physically get myself to school. I move forward. I do this first; I do this for myself because I’m convinced that it is even more important to do things for yourself when other forces pull at your time. After a non-stop day yesterday, I fell asleep about 8 p.m. so even getting up really early, I’m not losing sleep. I got 7 solid hours. Good enough. Especially when today is again a day full of activities, some fun, some not so much, but not horrible either.
For busy people who think they have to give up all their pleasures and time with their loved ones, I gotta say, it’s just not true. What is true is we make ourselves as busy as we want to be. We choose what we want to do. Yes, sometimes things start to stack up a little faster and louder than we’d like, but maintaining a soft response and a slow flow is the best way to make it through, at least for me.
I have one more assignment to complete this week for my online class. It’s a blog post reflecting on the webinar I watched yesterday while outlining a speech I was giving in a few hours. As I gathered my notes for the assignment, something in my rebelled. I have not posted a blog to my own site in a week. I took a few breaths and settled it. I’d write my own post first, then the one for class. It made me happy to free up my ingrained habit of work, work, work, and just play a little bit. Play and work are interchangeable to me, because I enjoy my work, most of the time. If you can find things to love in your work and slowly start to turn your life and career toward those parts of the job, you’ll find play at work. And it will make you better at your profession.
Then there’s the play outside work. Relationships. I continue, even in the whirlwind, to nurture my most important friendships and family ties. Later this morning, I’ll be baking a cake for my dad. In my “busybusybusy” mode, autopilot says “buy one” and I almost did, but my dad loves yellow cake with chocolate frosting and they don’t have those in the bakeries anymore. It’s all carrots and ganache and red velvet. So … dad gets his homemade cake and I get to bake, something I love to do.
My day job is important to me. I always do my best, never skimp on any part of my work. So I have lots of papers to check today before dinner with Dad. I’ll continue to check them into the night after I return from dinner with the family. As long as it takes.
And, as mentioned, just now I have another blog to write to complete my own class assignments for the first week of being a student again, but that will be a piece of cake.
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