I am drinking a very strong mug of much needed coffee as I write this. My multiple personalities and parallel lives are catching up with me, making sleep a noun and not an action these days.
The fact that it is still dark at 7:00AM bothers me tremendously, and my body clock is out of sync, and to top it all off, we switch back to winter time tonight. Sigh, which means I will definitely be leaving and coming home in darkness again. When I ran into my neighbour last night as we both alighted from the bus, we both agreed that our favourite shortcut through the fields is no longer a viable option from Monday onwards, especially since wild boars like to prowl the area unsupervised! At least the buffalos remain within their designated (fenced) areas. The badgers and racoons I don’t mind, and I have yet to encounter the beavers away from their ponds. Sounds like I live in the middle of the forest doesn’t it? Or at least a scene from The Wind in the Willows! Well, close enough, because we certainly have the frogs, swans, ducks, coots, egrets to complete the neighbourhood. Have I forgotten anything? Well, the usual cats and dogs go without saying!
In any case, I stood in line at the supermarket the other day and stared at a pile of chocolate Advent calendars while wondering why the world makes fun of Filipinos celebrating Christmas in September already, when all the German supermarkets put out the Christmas cookies out about the same times and by mid October the Advent calendars came out! What is the rush? Christmas isn’t going to arrive any sooner by buying everything two months before. One of my favourite couriers who handed me a package the other day complained that he can barely cope with all the packages these days. October was never this hectic before. People are doing their Christmas shopping already, and I find myself delivering only half the packages scheduled for that day because they don’t all fit in the van! he wailed.
So again, I ask myself, why are we in such a rush all the time now? Some people don’t want to stay home over the weekends anymore, always have to be on the go. If not, the weekdays are packed so full that there is barely any time left in the evenings for quality time, either with yourself or the loved ones. We have forgotten how to slow down and smell the flowers.
The ones benefitting from all this rush are the delivery companies, and of course all the online shops that play tricks on our minds and havoc on our credit cards! Not to mention restaurants and food delivery services, but I have learned in the last months that I can live without both of them, and am happy to slowly cook at home, not just for budgetary reasons.
No matter how tired I am when I get home from work, there are three cats waiting for their attention and dinner (in that order), and I make it a point to cook my dinner while preparing theirs as well so we all sit down together. This may bizarre to some of you, but hey, these three cats are all I have at the end of the day and they are my family. If I had human company I would happily cook for them! As it is, I had to learn how to cook just for myself and eat alone.
We have to stop trying to pack everything into one day, one week or one year. I do not advocate procrastination, believe me, I do enough of that already, but it is all about striking a healthy emotional and mental balance, and doing nothing is an essential component of that. I remind you of the brilliant book by Tom Hodgkinson, How To Be Idle…
FrogDiva Thoughts 