Doggy paddling in the River of Time

I don’t know if any of you have had this experience too. I have mentioned several times recently that I have been trying to take / make some ‘me time’. My first gambit was deciding to stop ‘discretionary’ work activities and expecting this to create space. I wasn’t proactive to talking to clients; I didn’t make any new appointments in the time I had earmarked. That didn’t work. Next I tried actually booking the time into my diary ‘Day Off’. Well as regular readers will know, the first of these days I managed to injure myself and just spent a day laid up and in pain. The next day I had a delivery of some sexy new hardware including two new 22″ monitors. Connecting them should have been a doddle, plug ’em in and turn ’em on. Nope!

I wasn’t able to get the correct maximum resolution and that started another day of wasted time and energy where I downloaded drivers and tried them out, spoke at length to various techies, all to no avail. In the end I contact the graphics card manufacturer who suggested installing latest chipset drivers and bios. This is where it got really nasty! I upgraded the bios and then couldn’t even turn on my machine. Holy Cr@p! More wasted time and lots of unwanted anxiety later, I got some expert help and reset the bios parameters, and I’m back in business.

Today is my second ‘me’ day and I have a daughter who has travelled 300 miles to attend an interview and needs a lift which will consume 3 hours; I have a utility room that apparently needs totally emptying as we have work starting there on Monday…

And I am left doggy paddling in the riptide of time and being swept further and further from the shore. I should mention that I’m pretty organised and good with how I control my time (Though you may now wonder about that!) If this were a rip tide, then the advice is not to fight it, but relax and let it take you in the direction it is going then use your energy to get somewhere safe. I have to say I think this is the right strategy for Time too. I will do what I have to in order to keep things moving. I will keep trying to make some ‘Me space’; in fact, I have just blocked out Monday.

The thing is you have to balance the opposite pulls on you between things you really need to attend to and the need to listen to your body / soul. Failure to do this is probably the major cause of stress in our society.

So if today finds you feeling the need to stop, or just do something different, please do so. If like me you are finding the Universe has other plans for you, then don’t struggle too much, keep your powder dry and use it when you can! I’d love hear your stories and what you do in these situations. Good luck!

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” Douglas Adams

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Annie Dillard

Tags: me time, plans, stress, time, time and tide

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 07:44 and is filed under General, Hints, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.