Well, I guess I can officially pronounce myself retired. It’s just a few weeks short of a year since I was last in the office in any official capacity, but an even more conclusive sign is that I have absolutely lost track of what day it is.
It’s true.
This morning I got up, made coffee, and began getting ready for out Saturday morning cartoons.
Except it isn’t Saturday. It’s Friday. I somehow lost a day, and I don’t know whether to be happy or appalled. Maybe a bit of both.
I should explain that Saturday morning cartoons actually mean watching videos from several of the creators we follow, many of whom I have mentioned here. Not all of them keep to a schedule, but there are usually several new videos by Saturday morning, and we usually spend the first hour or two of our day eating breakfast in front of the TV, just like so many of us did when we were kids.
It’s one of our little rituals. I am also on a Thursday night trivia team with friends. I know others who have “date night,” or “family game night,” or a regular coffee date with friends – something that gives their week or month a sense of structure.
Over the last few months, as I have finally achieved the “retired” status, I have been looking for some structure on which to hang my days and weeks. I love having unstructured time, love not being tied to someone else’s schedule, but I am finding myself a little too unstructured. I spend entirely too much of my day just “doing nothing.”
Don’t get me wrong. I needed some down time. I needed to uncouple myself from the tightly-scheduled life I led for nearly seventy years of school and work. I needed a summer vacation with every day free, like we had when we were kids and school got out for the year.
Clearly, I have achieved that. I stay up as late as I want, sleep in if I want, and don’t leave the house at all some days. But too much freedom is proving just as enervating as too much structure.
Frankly, I’m getting bored, and I think wanting today to be Saturday, to be my “coffee and cartoons” morning, is a symptom of that boredom.
I’m not looking for a schedule, but I am trying to find some structure. Back in December I talked about the cloud that had been hanging over me, and my seeming inability to make it go away. Since then I have managed to establish a tiny routine each morning – feed the cat, make coffee, clean the litter box, wash any dishes left from the night before – to keep the household functioning. A step in the right direction, and it does feel as though the cloud has lifted somewhat.
Now what I need to do is grow that structure a bit. I have been keeping my beadwork handy, thanks to the new storage chests, which have replaced a table that had become a dumping ground for anything we didn’t have a place for. I have completed several more projects, and it is helping. I’m working on the next book, and fiddling with a short story that’s due next month.
Things are moving in the right direction. I think.
Oh, and I got the taxes finished and filed, so there’s that.
But what about you? Are you having issues with too much unstructured time? Or have you found a way to have both your freedom from schedules and a useful structure? Tell me what worked for you, I’d love to hear it!