September 13, 2022
Big Flex
September is a new season, a new year, in many ways (and this September marks three years since I started Blog School!). For me, it’s always been a time for reflection and renewal, especially having come off such a restorative, restful summer with the goal of bringing that some of that softness with me as I go back to the “grind.” (I also would like to aim to not ground down to dust, less grind in my grind, please!)
“I think this fall,” I said to my husband, “I would like to have a kind of structure for my days, but one where you can move things around, everything not rigidly fixed in place.”
“You mean, like a calendar,” he said patiently.
“OMG, yes!” (Or maybe I finally need a bullet journal after all?)
But what I’m really saying is that I want a framework with a bit of slack, where my days have different shapes and things can be moved around to accommodate whatever else might be going on. My tendency is to be so unyielding in my approach to my days, partly because you have to be protective when you are self-employed and work from home, because everybody always things you’re just sitting around waiting to have coffee all the time, and also because I’m worried that if I’m not disciplined, the whole structure will fall apart.
But the thing is that sometimes I actually do want to go and have coffee, and also that often I actually can!
And I know that for some people, none of this is complicated, and also that adaptable calendars might not even be a revelation, but it’s too easy for me to become inflexible in my approach to my schedule, to do the same thing every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, for one to be this day, and one to be another. I keep envisioning a structure that’s less a grid than a hammock, one of those knotted ones that are full of holes, but not so large that everything just falls through. Just that there’s give, and it’s easy, it stretches wide and low when it has to.
Is this the beginning of me FINALLY becoming laid back?
Don’t bet on it.
But maybe I can be me with more room to breathe.
