We rolled into town at nearly midnight on the first of January; Mark got up and went to work in time for a nine o'clock meeting; and here I am, back again, in my bathrobe, at my computer.
Piles of suitcases and boxes, bottles of wine, and new Christmas acquisitions are visible just over my shoulder. The Advent wreath is on the shelf above the monitor, now a Christmas wreath: I swapped the purple and pink candles for honey-colored beeswax, and the purple and pink ribbons for red, on the last day before we left town. I just brought down a few empty laundry baskets. The smaller children, the ones who slept in the car, are wandering about; I made them nachos for breakfast. The bigger ones are sleeping in, and someone will fetch milk from the store as soon as they are awake, so maybe there can be cereal for lunch.
+ + +
The exciting new things that we received as Christmas presents now must be wedged in somewhere in between the other things in our house. I'll hand each of the younger children a garbage bag later, and challenge them to go into their rooms and open up the bins and find broken toys to throw away, older toys to hand down, perhaps some that have lost their shine to be squirreled away in the storage room and brought out later when (if) they are remembered. Time to make room for some of this new stuff. There is a new expansion set for a bulky building toy, so I'll dig in the basement for a larger bin to keep it in. And then there's my own things: I'll have to do the same myself: pull out little-used items in the kitchen, find a place to store new ones. There are many new items for the pantry that must find places. I will have to defrag the bookshelves again.
And there are all the shiny new plans for the new year that must somehow find a home in our everyday lives.
+ + +
Neither Mark nor I are very big on New Year's resolutions exactly; but we often find ourselves, anytime we are on vacation or otherwise removed from our routines, saying "We really should start doing such and such" or "When I get home, I'm going to set up an appointment for this, that, and the other thing" or "I've left this thing for far too long, it's time to do it for real." It's not so much that the New Year is the time to turn over a new leaf, it's just that we are nearly always away from home at the holidays, at the end of all things and the start of the next, and our everyday lives have retreated away into our imaginations, an idealized form of themselves; it's so easy to rearrange one's priorities in one's mind, like a puzzle which fits together effortlessly any way you wish, the picture's outlines soft and indistinct and agreeable in every shape.
I am very tempted to make lists today. Probably I will, at some point. But I have resisted up till now, and I'll keep resisting a little longer. I am starting today by doing, and will make the lists later, working hard to trust that the urgent and important tasks, the urgent and important Such and Such, will rise naturally to the top.
I've already started.
Did you notice?
Yay! Glad to be reading you, as a result!
Either you or Mrs. Darwin posted a link to Lenten practices by Meyers-Briggs type, and I found it very enlightening that the practice suggested for my type - in fact, the mortification that confirmed the type, as it were - was to do NOW instead of gathering yet more info. It opened my eyes to how often I just keep waiting for the perfect time, the extra bit of info, whose identity I don't even know yet (but I'm sure it exists), or the perfect item (the internet makes this even easier to pursue) in order to finish a project that just needs... done already. So I will join you in some DOing today :)
Posted by: mandamum | 02 January 2020 at 11:22 AM
Welcome Back! I missed your posts.
Posted by: Jan | 02 January 2020 at 11:19 PM