British Summer Time…. and the rain beats incessantly on the window.
I should be labouring in the garden, sawing, building, (happily now done with the digging- for the time being), but my resolve dissipates in the face of the unending wet, and anyway the timber I need to use up (a slowly diminishing pile) is better worked dry(er).
I’m off today, and myriad tasks now compete for my attention, but the focus and plan of “garden” has been spoiled, so, I indecisively contemplate my third cup of coffee, never quite starting any one thing, and desperately trying to avoid being sucked into the endlessly diverting but unproductive black hole of Google/Facebook.
I am always a better man with a plan, or a list, or even a list of plans…
A colleague returned to work yesterday after an enforced six week absence. Happy to be back, he cited his boredom at home, and wondered if retirement might be as bad.
I have always considered that “being bored” was just a lack of imagination, and looked forward to the freedom of retirement with relish. But, I suspect it brings it’s own challenges, and when I find I cannot achieve a focus for a single (albeit disrupted) day, I briefly glimpse that an endless sea of them would probably require a strict personal discipline to avoid, if not boredom, at least a desperate unfulfilling lack of productiveness, which is what I suspect Mick (my colleague) was actually driving at.
Whether it’s the garden, the house, my music, or my games, it serves me better to have some kind of goal and plan to get there. If I don’t have a plan, it’s just a dream, and as in so much else, it’s the plan, or the journey, and the people along for the trip, that’s the important bit.
If you’ll excuse me, I have an item to check off as “done”.
Next week: Nightshift…”is this New York? or…..”
Dalmallyfest the Asylum 