Musings: A Day Off – Sort Of!

Today I didn’t have to be anywhere.  I had no appointments with anyone, nothing specific I had to do.  Days like today are few and far between.  Days like today are a gift, yet even as I draw a huge sigh of relief there is a part of me that dreads them.

The day slowly unfolds as I sit surrounded by nature and enjoy my morning quiet time and breakfast in the screen room.  It is wonderful not to have any pressure to pick up the pace, get showered and ready, and be out the door.  And yet I am vaguely aware of a sense of apprehension as the empty space of hours stretches in front of me. 

Perhaps it is the Ying and Yang of me, that part of my personality that sits happily in contradiction with itself.  I want to be free of any claims on my time and, at the same time, I need some form of structure to keep me going.  When I am blessed with a day like today I usually find one of two things happening. 

I will either start “meandering” from one room to another, never quite sure why I am there.  Then something will catch my eye and I will be drawn to be involved.  A short time later I will be reminded of something that needs to be done, or I will remember something that I wanted to do, and off I go to do it.  However, on the way there, something else will catch my attention and I will be distracted into that activity.  At the end of such a day I usually feel as though I have accomplished nothing even though I have been busy and on the go all day long!

Or I will feel quite guilty about the fact that I “have nothing to do” (that’s a joke in and of itself!!).  I will think of my husband who “goes to work everyday”, as though the fact that I don’t have an outside job means I don’t  do anything!  This is old thinking and fortunately doesn’t plague me too often these days.  But, the fact of the matter is that I then subconsciously start “organizing” myself and setting goals to accomplish by the end of the day (read, by the time my husband gets home!). And, bang, there goes my lovely “day for myself.

Today I determined was going to be different.  I didn’t have a plan, although I kind of expected to spend a fair amount of time in the garden.  I took my breakfast things from the patio to the kitchen half expecting to see something “catch my eye” on the way there.  I didn’t notice anything in particular tugging at me, but as I put things away I had a clear thought: the craft room. 

This is one of my special places to be, where I feed my artistic Muse by making cards.  It has been “messy and disordered” (and therefore uninviting) since Christmas, and this state of affairs was not helped by a minor change in the layout of the computer room that my husband and I made a week ago, that involved removing a desk from the craft room.  And so in that moment I decided that my gift to myself today would be to return my craft room to the inviting place that it should be.

It has been a great day.  I cleared out a lot of boxes and made room for the new.  I organized my work areas so that I actually had the space to work.  By the end of the day not only did I feel like sitting down to make some cards, but I had also unearthed some memories.  In fact, this piece of writing was originally titled “Musings: Sabbath with Georgina”.  But I guess my mind had to do a little bit of “meandering” this evening, and I will write the Sabbath story tomorrow – maybe.  This has truly been a day for me.