Free Time
There are fluid properties to free time, whether vacations or their lesser cousins, weekends. You would think it would stay put in its own neat little pile. Here is the time that's mine, you could say. I've carved this piece from the block I share with the world, and it's my time to relax and be free to do what I want to do. It would seem to be the definition: Free Time.
But instead, it seeps out of the corral you've designed. It leaks or ebbs from where you had intended to keep it, and you end up filling that free time with responsibilities and mundane tasks rather than the things you say you'd do if only you had the free time.
This is my twentieth year at my workplace, so I've been allotted more vacation time than ever before. It's so much that I had to plot most of the days at the start of the year, spread out across every month, just so I won't run the risk of realizing I have a whole pile left at the end of the year. Theoretically, I'll have more free time this year than I have had in any of the last twenty. Still, in the first significant block of that vacation time, I find myself running around on errands that do nothing to feed my soul or replenish my spirit like a vacation is supposed to do. Collecting financial data for taxes, attacking endless piles of clutter and trying to reconstruct and reassemble files after a computer's demise are hardly as fulfilling as the week of creative writing I had imagined.
So, why do it? Others might say, it's your free time, do what you want. The answer is , because it needs to be done, and it's not going to happen when I'm at work. It's true I'll never be able to accomplish all the 'have to's in my life. As soon as I finish one job, another gets added to the pile. But I can't just ignore them all in favour of the 'want to's. It's just not how I'm wired. I can't sit down to play with the characters and stories in my head while a pile of dirty laundry lurks in the corner.
My husband once got a speeding ticket at the end of a long road trip when he turned off the highway and didn't notice he was still going 55mph. More than once, he's said I suffer from the same tendency. When I'm focused on a job, I do it wholeheartedly, top-speed, as efficiently as I'm able. When I switch to free time, it's hard to decelerate. I let myself get trapped in obligations and overwhelmed by projects I have little chance of completing before the time slips away. At the same time, I'm sacrificing the relaxation I need to be able to kick into turbo when the situation really requires it.
So, like everything else, it's a balancing game. I lose some chunks of free time I've been granted in the mundane obligations and accomplishments that would otherwise nag at me. But I have to plant my foot in this puddle of free time as well, and consciously "waste" some of it on selfish things like writing a story, walking in the park, or just sitting on the couch and watching a movie.
Free time will still flow past me quicker than I'd expect. It will still drain away and leave me wondering what I've accomplished on the evening before I have to return to work, but those few splashes of true relaxation can make all the rest seem worthwhile.
But instead, it seeps out of the corral you've designed. It leaks or ebbs from where you had intended to keep it, and you end up filling that free time with responsibilities and mundane tasks rather than the things you say you'd do if only you had the free time.
This is my twentieth year at my workplace, so I've been allotted more vacation time than ever before. It's so much that I had to plot most of the days at the start of the year, spread out across every month, just so I won't run the risk of realizing I have a whole pile left at the end of the year. Theoretically, I'll have more free time this year than I have had in any of the last twenty. Still, in the first significant block of that vacation time, I find myself running around on errands that do nothing to feed my soul or replenish my spirit like a vacation is supposed to do. Collecting financial data for taxes, attacking endless piles of clutter and trying to reconstruct and reassemble files after a computer's demise are hardly as fulfilling as the week of creative writing I had imagined.
So, why do it? Others might say, it's your free time, do what you want. The answer is , because it needs to be done, and it's not going to happen when I'm at work. It's true I'll never be able to accomplish all the 'have to's in my life. As soon as I finish one job, another gets added to the pile. But I can't just ignore them all in favour of the 'want to's. It's just not how I'm wired. I can't sit down to play with the characters and stories in my head while a pile of dirty laundry lurks in the corner.
My husband once got a speeding ticket at the end of a long road trip when he turned off the highway and didn't notice he was still going 55mph. More than once, he's said I suffer from the same tendency. When I'm focused on a job, I do it wholeheartedly, top-speed, as efficiently as I'm able. When I switch to free time, it's hard to decelerate. I let myself get trapped in obligations and overwhelmed by projects I have little chance of completing before the time slips away. At the same time, I'm sacrificing the relaxation I need to be able to kick into turbo when the situation really requires it.
So, like everything else, it's a balancing game. I lose some chunks of free time I've been granted in the mundane obligations and accomplishments that would otherwise nag at me. But I have to plant my foot in this puddle of free time as well, and consciously "waste" some of it on selfish things like writing a story, walking in the park, or just sitting on the couch and watching a movie.
Free time will still flow past me quicker than I'd expect. It will still drain away and leave me wondering what I've accomplished on the evening before I have to return to work, but those few splashes of true relaxation can make all the rest seem worthwhile.
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