I’ve got me a week and a half of working from home, and generally relaxed time. My boss is out of town, I having dropped him off at the airport for a work trip, and there being no reason for me to be at the office as a result. I’ll have work to do, for sure, but it will be intermittent at best, and here and there. Check an email, write an email, do-a-thing kind of shuffle.
Perfect time for me to hustle and get things accomplished. I wrote about all I want to do in the post previous to this one. I even bought me two new books yesterday that arrived today, in case I really get ambitious with the reading. Both have been on my list for a long time: The Soul of an Octopus and The Odyssey of Star Wars. More on them later if I get around to reading them. I’ve come to understand that I am not piling books up for no reason, I am, in fact, building a library, a trust, for the future. I can look into the collection of words on a whim whenever I want to. Hard to do if you don’t have the collection to begin with.
I’ve made right by already re-arranging the living room, and am considering decor for the recently excavated fireplace and mantle. The mantle still has a few things I set there when we moved in, and I want to make sure that’s what I want to live there more or less permanently. Speaking of permanence, I can’t wait for the holidays and decorating this year! I didn’t have the opportunity last year on account of my wife and me moving and not being somewhere, well, permanent, but that shouldn’t be the case this year. This year it is going to be autumn, and then Yuletide, decorations for quite a while.
Anyway, between then and now, we’ve got summer and it’s the perfect time to explore what can be.
Into the plans the monkey wrench has been thrown, and in addition to all else, I am thinking about starting a morning routine for before my morning routine. I explain thusly: I have been waking up earlier than I plan to lately, and generally spend time scrolling on my phone. It ain’t exactly a good habit, and I’ve been considering replacing it with some healthy habits. What habits? Perhaps a meditation practice, writing, reading: being mindful. I usually have about an hour, and I think that would be perfect for a few minutes meditating, twenty minutes reading, and twenty minutes writing. It don’t sound like much, but it would be a start. Timers would help, but it is quiet while my wife and dogs sleep in, with generally just the bird song out the window and the gentle whirring of the ceiling fan o’erhead. I wouldn’t constrain myself to needing to do this every morning, at least to start, but only those days when I wake up early.
I’ve been thinking again about a podcast. Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to podcasts again as I build and sort LEGO, but I am continually drawn to the art form. I tried producing a podcast back in the good old pandemic days, but it never got off the runway. I think what I need is a partner-in-mics, someone to talk to, rather than me rambling away like so much chattering. I want to explore themes of family, memory, and life in many facets, and that is best done with someone else. Hard to be introspective when I’ve thought all these thoughts before, without the welcome intrusion of another’s ideas and perspectives. I even have a few co-hosts in mind that I may approach, but for now it’s all “mums-the-word” and working on building it out before I put it out there for consideration.
In all, the summer is going well. I’m positive, despite the utter horror show that is *gestures at everything*, and that’s not nothing. I still can spiral down into the darkness below, but that isn’t forever, and is becoming less and less intense. I pull out of the tailspin almost as quickly as I dip into it, and that is a major win for my psyche. I’ve long wrestled with depression and anxiety, and it feels great to be be-boppin’ along for the most part. I raise a glass of sugar-free soda to the summer ahead, and look forward to what comes next.
a simple man 