Dancing Geek

Oh brother.

I had one of those realisations on Friday night / Saturday morning that makes you go “Oh Bugger, Really?”.  The kind where I go, “Oh yeah! Both Joely and Chas have written about this recently, and I still didn’t get it!”.

You see, I haven’t had a weekend off since I stopped being employed.

Oh the irony!

Yeah, by not having any structure at all, I just mushed all the days into one and never made time to stop unless I *had* to (i.e. illness, fatigue, burn out).  Like, duh, hello?  That’s not good and healthy!  But at that point in time, even enough structure to prevent burnout felt repellant, I was in full on reverse swing mode.  FREEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOM!

But this Friday I started to look at what I need to do to get things moving on my secret, hidden plans.  And I started to *want* a little structure.  So I put a very gentle one together and then gave myself the weekends to goof off (which was good, because the next day was Saturday so I got a good start!)

Well, when Saturday turned up and I made sure that I didn’t do anything goal-oriented but just pootled in the garden and read a book – oh wow!  It was fantastic.  I was relaxed, and happy, and spent some much needed quality time with my little family (bunnies and a boy).

I’m not going to chastise myself for not doing this earlier, I don’t think I could have done it earlier, but wow – it was great to finally be able to switch off for a bit after 18 months!

And people actually think I’ve been dossing around all this time.

Intellectually I understand that to make room for the new I have to let go of some of the old.  It appears however that I quite like the old as well.  This seems to be keeping me stuck where I am, in limbo.

I’m not sure what comes next. I just have a really strong sense that I’m going to have to give up something I like to be able to get the new stuff that I want.  This is not so fun.  It’s like the advice that sometimes you have to stop doing the fun stuff that’s also good for your business in order to do the stuff that’s really going to let it grow.

Like the analogy of the glass jar with the rocks, pebbles, sand (& water).

I think I’ve got quite attached to some of my pebbles.  I’m scared to let them go.  Each pebble represents an opportunity, a door that I’m holding open.  I’ve always had an aversion to closing metaphorical doors out of fear of losing that one magical path to happiness.

The way forward?

I think it would be to spend some time being honest with myself about what are rocks, pebbles and sand.  Then be honest about how many pebbles and how much sand I can keep in my jar once I’ve given the rocks their space.  I may have to say goodbye to some pebbles, and reduce the amount of sand I use.

I’m uncertain how I’ll feel about that loss.  In part it’s freeing, but it’s also destabilising, which equals scary.

Today was not such a good day.  I’ve been low all day.  However, I’m determined not to lose all my momentum, so today I let myself do something tiny, something that was so easy it felt like no effort at all, but that still moved me directly toward one of my 3 big goals (yet to be made public).

Then I went and ate yummy food, sat on the floor with a rabbit and read a book.

And somehow, right now, I don’t feel like today has been a total waste.  Which, compared to some days where I’ve pushed and pushed to try and get something ‘big’ done and ended up pootling around and procrastinating till some ungodly hour of the morning, feels like a win.

So yeah, today I gave myself permission to be tiny, so long as I still kept moving forwards, and I feel good about it.