Category: procrastination

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Mind Full of…

The question I posed was: ‘Do I control my thoughts or do my thoughts control me?’ and the answer is fairly obvious – my thoughts define me, determine my experiences and control my life: I am my own story. How could it be otherwise? I think, therefore I am – how could I know I was alive if I didn’t think it? Although, of course, I only think that was the question – I may have misremembered it. I could go back and check, but I’m choosing to trust my memory on this occasion.

The ‘I’ who is typing this and the ‘me’ I’m describing are the same person, that goes without saying, indicated by use of the first person singular pronouns. Why did I say that? I have no idea. My thoughts are the outcome of genetic predispositions, my life experiences and external conditions, and they feed back on themselves and go round and round and make me who I am.

But can I control them? To some extent, I suppose I do – I can decide to concentrate on one particular subject or activity – like cooking a meal, for example, which involves performing a set of tasks. But even as I’m performing them, my thoughts don’t necessarily stay in one place –while I’m chopping an onion or stirring a pan, my thoughts can be anywhere – possibly planning the next task, but in my case, more likely thinking of something completely different.

Consider what my thoughts have been doing since I started writing this – reading the titles of a pile of DVDs which I found in the study yesterday and put on my desk; considering watching Gosford Park because I haven’t seen it in years and can’t remember anything about it except that I enjoyed it and it has an exceptional cast; trying to remember the surname of the actor named Tim who was in The Shawshank Redemption, knowing it’s not Burton (he’s a director) although I always get confused between them, wondering whether they’ve ever worked together, reading on the back of the box that it’s Tim Robbins and thinking ‘oh yes, of course!’, noticing how young he looks in the picture, and also how young Morgan Freeman looks, and wondering what Tim Robbins has done since. Then picking up a book of Victorian needlepoint patterns based on William Morris designs, and thinking how lovely they are, wondering if I could somehow incorporate them into my knitting, or if I should take up needlepoint again, and whether I should try to visit William Morris’s house at Kelmscott when things open up again, because I’ve never been there…

A gull flies right to left across a grey patch of cloud outside my window and catches my eye, leading it towards a plane crossing the other way, much higher, across the distant blue.

There’s a much misused and misunderstood concept called ‘mindfulness’, which derives from Zen Buddhism, and means focussing completely in the present moment. I’ve been trying to learn it for sixteen years.

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More About the Madwoman

When I left my husband and both cats, I didn’t exactly walk out with just the clothes I was wearing – that might have been more dramatic and romantic, but it’s not what happened (not that time at least – but that’s another story).

I found a flat in the nearest town, I had enough money saved up to pay for six months rent in advance, and I moved out in February 2009 (actually collected the keys on 14th February, also another story – or several). I hired a van, took some basic furniture from the house (agreed with Hubby): desk and chair, bed, small sofa, wardrobe, dressing table etc, and with help from my daughter, her boyfriend and his parents (and Hubby), moved in for good on the 22nd.  It was a Sunday. I remember us all sitting round the big kitchen table in the old house drinking tea, then I drove back into town to find the chippy wasn’t open (I found another one that was).

I also bought some things – a coffee table, various kitchen items (mostly from charity shops or Wilkinson’s, which was a handy 5 minute walk from the flat), and a laptop and pay-as-you-go dongle. I gradually transferred various bits and pieces from the house over the next few months, as I went back and forth quite a lot – my main computer was still there, in the attic. In April, when my daughter and her boyfriend hired another van to move into their own flat, they brought some more stuff for me, including the office furniture and computer, which I set-up in my ‘study’, (the larger of the two bedrooms in the flat).

But an awful lot of stuff got left behind. I always intended to ‘sort it all out’ one day. I did purge some things, but mainly it was to be done in the future, when everything was resolved, when the divorce was settled, when the house was sold… After three years I left the flat to go travelling, and the things I’d taken with me – and acquired over the intervening time – got packed up and taken back, stacked in the spare room and attic. Six months later I came back to England, moved in with my daughter and granddaughter for a few weeks till we drove one another to distraction, then found another flat, which was all attic, fluffy carpeted and pointed ceilinged like a prism, with three windows looking out over the Fens and a flashing star in the top window at Christmas. I intended to sort out the Stuff in the house, and made a few attempts, including throwing out my mother’s and grandmother’s knitting needles and paraphernalia (which I hadn’t used for years, but was to start replacing only a couple of years later).

The decree absolute came through that year (2012), and part of the divorce agreement was that the house would go on the market in the August – when I returned from travelling. That didn’t happen… To be continued.

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Not Thinking of an Elephant

If I start typing, what will come out of my fingers? What have I been thinking about in the two hours since I woke up? I don’t want to remember, and you don’t want to know. I tried to fix the motion-sensitive, darkness sensitive light on my landing by replacing the batteries and it still doesn’t work. Last time this happened, I took it down and left it on my dressing table for a couple of years, then picked it up one day and changed the batteries again, and it miraculously came on, and has been working ever since until yesterday. I don’t know if I can be bothered to leave it on my dressing table again for another couple of years.

I once tried a blog thing (I think it was a group set up by someone else) where you wrote fifty words about something positive and uplifting. I did it a few times, then gave up, and I think everyone else in the group did pretty much the same. If I have to think happy thoughts before I write, I can’t write anything at all. Don’t have that sort of imagination. It’s like the inverse of that thing the pop-psychologists say about ‘…try not to think of an elephant…’ I have heard that so many times that these days, it doesn’t immediately conjure up an image of a pachyderm so much as an infuriatingly chirpy self-help guru whose face needs a good slapping.

Wow, look at that, 250 words, half way already.

The days when I wake up without this dark cloud of gloom over my head are vanishingly rare – I think there might have been one I wrote about a couple of months ago when I’d been reading in bed and actually felt good by the time I started writing? Not sure, it was probably more recently than it feels. I do, admittedly, often feel better by the time I’ve finished writing. I really noticed this in the summer, when most days I could take my breakfast out into the garden and eat in the sunshine. Won’t be doing that today, however.

Bin day today, which means I will get as far as the front gate this evening. I actually can’t remember the last time I left the house (and garden and forecourt) – I think I had a couple of visits to the shops between Christmas and New Year, but don’t think there have been any since. All this is my choice, of course, there isn’t really anything to stop me walking to the sea front except apathy and general can’t-be-arsedness.

Yesterday I had a go at trying on my jumper, and concluded that I had separated the sleeves from the body too soon, as I suspected, so I undid all the work I’d done on it the previous day. I’m happy with that decision.

Just read a tweet which says: ‘Freedom is nothing but only a chance to be better.’ Better in what way? I wonder.

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Ghosts of New Years Past

The last post from ‘Husband or Cat’, posted twelve years ago today. I created a new blog immediately afterwards, under the name Melinda Solo.

I’ll be honest, I’m sharing it as an excuse not to write anything new today. Which, now I’m here, doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Some days it just feels like that.

New Year’s Day is quite a potent day for blogging. I feel as though I’ve left a mark on this day several times. The one for 2009 was obviously highly significant, and I’ve referred back to it a few times since.

The Spare Room

The Buddhist New Year party. An evening of reflection, meditation, poetry reading, sharing, wine, food, laughter, friendship. When Chris tentatively mentioned the idea a month ago, I leapt at it.

‘I’ll come, even if it’s only you me and Clare’ I said. ‘I won’t be doing anything else that night.’

It was a good evening, a positive evening, an unconventional evening. What more could you ask for? Better sober with good friends than drinking here alone… I wasn’t clear whether the invitation extended to sleeping over or not, so I took an overnight bag in case, but at around 1:30 the party broke up…

I got back around 2, the house in darkness. Hubby hadn’t left the light on for me, but at least he hadn’t bolted the door. I took my overnight bag into the second bathroom and unpacked my night things. And then I thought…

I went into the bedroom in the dark, got my dressing gown and hot water bottle. I could hear his breathing, soft and regular. This is it, the voice told me, now is the time. It makes perfect sense. Why bother climbing in beside him, one more night? There’s nothing there for either of you, is there?

So I took my things into the spare room. Laid the bag on the floor. Switched the radiator on – the heating was off, but it would be ready for morning. Looked around me.

Checked the wardrobe: full of rubbish, I can sort that out, give myself some storage space in here. I need a bedside cabinet, but for now the clock can sit on the floor.

This is my room now. Why put it off any longer?

Lying in the bed, stretching out, luxuriating. The feather duvet, I will have to swap them over, this is bad for my asthma, but I can survive one night. And I’ll bring my own pillow from the other room tomorrow. But for now, it will be OK.

I woke just after 6, the cat had found her way in and was walking over me and purring. Outside the window, I could hear the fountain in the fish pond. A transit place. I won’t be here forever. But it will do for now.

It was gone 7 before I got up, even though I knew there would be no more sleep. So I did the usual things, fed the cats, put the coffee on. I went back upstairs to meditate, but the mp3 player wouldn’t switch on. Must have left it on all night, I’ll have to recharge it. Then I heard him in the kitchen.

‘I slept in the spare room. Thought that was easier than disturbing you.’

‘OK. I didn’t know what was happening so I didn’t leave the light on.’

‘That’s fine, no problem.’

So polite. We are always so civil with one another. Never any animosity.

The coffee machine gave its sudden final burst of noise and steam. I lifted the lid. Still some filtering through.

He was sitting at the table eating Shredded Wheat.

‘Do you want your coffee pouring now?’

‘Yes please.’

I looked at the chair opposite him. Should I pull it out, sit down?

‘I need to talk to you today’.

‘OK.’ No curiosity, no reaction.

‘Do you want to do it now, or later?’

‘Later.’

OK then. Later it is.

by husbandorcat @ 2009-01-01 – 08:09:45

In the first post of the new blog, I described the actual conversation which I sprung on my husband. It was pointless asking him if he wanted to talk ‘now or later’, I knew that, just procrastination on both our parts. I’d been procrastinating long enough – I suppose we both had, but I couldn’t help but take all the blame onto myself. Also, of course, for me it was exciting, because I was about to embark on a new adventure – running away again. Whatever happened next in my life, I was sure, something good would come out of it.

The spooky thing is that I feel now as though I’m not completely alone, as though there’s someone else in this house who’s still asleep but will get up soon and need to be interacted with. And of course, the same old cat just came and rubbed against my legs.

Ghosts of New Years past. But it’s just an arbitrary mark on the calendar, and I haven’t even got one this year – the last few years I’ve had a Vistaprint one made of my own photos, but didn’t get round to it this time. I’ve honed that old procrastination thing to a fine art, over the years.

Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright

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Shoulds

I can see from my window that it must have been a glorious sunrise, but even though I was awake in time – even though I was up in time – I didn’t go to the sea to watch it, and now I wish I had. Wait, didn’t I say a while back that I didn’t do regret? I think you’ll find I said that the only things I regret are the ones I don’t do, and I didn’t go to see the sunrise.

Yesterday was such a nice sunny day that I thought, I should really have taken my van out – I thought that at about half past eleven, when it was really too late, so I told myself that today I’d plan to go out and take a picnic, because if I tell myself in advance there’s a better chance that I’ll do it. But then yesterday evening and first thing this morning I looked at the weather forecast, and it said it was going to be cloudy, so I more or less convinced myself that that was a good enough excuse not to do anything about it, to stay home again listening to the radio and sorting out my weather blanket. Now I can see sunshine on the roofs opposite and a clear sky behind and I’m not so sure that that excuse is valid.

Taking the van out always feels like it’s going to be a chore, to make sure the battery doesn’t pack up and avoid getting a telling off from the guys at the garage. It’s taking up time that I could be spending sitting in the armchair crocheting. Because yesterday I finished the Christmas jumper – apart from annoying tasks like sewing in the ends, and I’m not seeing my daughter till Friday week, so there’s plenty of time to sort those out.

Now that shaft of bright sun has disappeared, and I can see that what looked like a ‘clear’ sky is actually a solid sheet of high, light cloud – but it still doesn’t look bad enough to use as an excuse. And it’s a month since I took it out – once a month over winter should be enough to keep it ticking over. Do I have to go all the way to the country park? My parking season ticket is still valid. I can go into Sainsbury’s on the way and buy a picnic, drive there and park under the trees, make a cuppa and sit inside the van if it’s raining.

I know that’s what I should do. Here we go again, about the ‘shoulds’. This is not just what some voice from childhood is muttering into my inner ear. It’s something that I know will make me feel better once I’ve done it, and that I also know won’t be as bad as it seems once I get started – but I still don’t want to do it. Which is the story of my life – so really, I know I have to go.

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Home Decor (Part 1)

In a mad moment yesterday, I ordered a book case from Argos. It’s being delivered this morning.

Actually it wasn’t as spontaneous as that made it sound. I’ve been thinking I needed some shelves in my front room for some time now – more or less since my therapist commented on how little she can see of my room on Skype, while I can see quite a lot of hers – bookshelves, and pictures on the wall, and so on. But that is presumably because she sits at a computer which is against a wall or window and is hence facing into the room, whereas I sit on the sofa with my laptop on a stool in front of me, so that I’m facing the room and the screen is facing the blank wall behind me. In other words it depends on perspective – to me her room is elegant and attractive and mine is full of junk which has been shoved out of the way, but to her, mine looks stark, almost Spartan, and gives away nothing about me.

I still haven’t put up many pictures even though I’ve been here four years – I’ve mentioned this before, about the walls being two hard to knock in nails or hooks, and lots of people have advised me to get Command strips, which I did, although first I got cheap Velcro ones which didn’t work, then I got the Command ones and in the summer my daughter helped me to put up one poster and a mirror which I bought in a closing down sale, but I still haven’t done any of the others, mostly because I just don’t think about it. I have a nice picture to go into my spare bedroom/exercise and meditation room, I’ve chosen the perfect spot for it and written it on my to do list, and copied onto the new list whenever I get round to making a new list, but it’s still there because it hasn’t been done yet.

When I was staying with my daughter at the beginning of October, we went to IKEA and I bought a new frame for one of my Paris pictures, because I’d taken it downstairs (in the summer when I was thinking about putting them up), and left it propped in the hall because I didn’t know where to put it or whether I trusted the Command strips to hold such a heavy frame, and it was propped against the wall for a couple of weeks until one day when both the front and back doors were open at the same time and the wind blew it over and the glass broke. So I bought a new frame in IKEA and then realised it was too big to go in my suitcase, and I was going home by train and didn’t want to carry it with me, so it’s still at my daughter’s house waiting for me to go back again and take the car (or for her to drive here, whichever happens first).

Close-up of sofa and blank wall, as seen on Skype
That end of the room in its full glory

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Dodgy Knee

I think my version of hibernation is waking three hours before sunrise and lying in bed listening to podcasts or reading from my Kindle until about seven then getting up, doing my exercises, making coffee and coming on here to write this blog. Three hours before sunrise is pretty much the same time as sunrise was six months ago, when I was waking around the same time but it wasn’t dark. The advice I had from the insomnia clinic, years ago, was to get up rather than lying in bed, so that my brain would be trained to associate bed with sleep, but that ship has not only sailed, but long ago disappeared below the horizon, and I might as well just listen or read. Sometimes I do drift back to sleep again, and some days, like today, it gets to this time (it’s half past eight) and I think – maybe I could go back to sleep now (except I can’t, because I’ve got wet hair and a towel round my head, and anyway if I lay down on the bed I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep, just waste another half hour or so trying to, and even if I did I’d hate it when I did wake up, because I’d have wasted half the day).

Geoff Dyer’s book ‘Out of Sheer Rage’ makes me alternately laugh out loud and cringe, because of his rambly stream-of-consciousness style, and because I relate to so much of what he writes about himself – and it’s all the worst bits – maybe not the worst bits of him, but the worst bits of me. One that struck a chord with me this morning was when he was complaining about his dodgy knee – the right one, whereas mine is the left. He had terrible problems with it when he was in Italy (I think – or maybe Mexico) and he saw a doctor who showed him two exercises that would help if he did them regularly, except of course he didn’t, so it got worse, then when he was back in England he went to his GP who sent him to a knee specialist, who sent him to a physiotherapist, who showed him the same exercises, which he still didn’t do. Four years ago (nearly five now), I started to notice pains in my leg, so I went to the GP and was referred to the physio, and I saw her monthly for a while, but didn’t like to admit I wasn’t doing the exercises in between, but by the end of the year I had cancer anyway which kind of trumped the leg thing, except that a couple of weeks ago I woke up one morning with so much pain in my left knee I could barely stand – I put it down to spending the previous day in a low armchair doing stuff on my laptop on a stool in front of me – it gradually eased and now it comes and goes but is bearable.

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Knitting News (Not the Meaning of Life)

The good news is – the Christmas jumper is now almost long enough, so I can leave out those other design items I had in mind, and move on to doing the bottom rib. The right sleeve – which I’ve been picking at on and off over the last couple of weeks – is also nearly long enough, although I’ve hardly started the left one. On straight needles, I would do both sleeves at the same time next to one another on the needles, to make sure they’re the same, but that wouldn’t really work with circular needles so I’ll just have to keep checking it matches the right one. This doesn’t mean I can get it finished in a couple of days, but the end is in sight, it should be done by mid-December at the latest. Then I’ll have to concentrate on catching up on the weather blanket, which is way behind.

Enough of knitting and crochet news, and the poem which I still haven’t found, because I didn’t look for it on the laptop, didn’t get round to it. I’m not sure what’s on there anyway, but maybe that’s where all the missing blog posts from 2016 are, it makes sense. Which reminds me that I need to convert all the Word files on my new(ish) laptop to Open Office or Word 2007 before Thursday, when my year’s free trial of Office 365 (or whatever it’s called) expires, and Microsoft start demanding money with menaces. I’m quite content with my legitimate copy of Office 2007, bought in good faith ten years ago and still perfectly adequate for my needs, except I can’t install it on the new laptop because there isn’t a CD player to load the software from. This time last year I wasn’t bothered because I knew I had a full year to work out how to install it on the laptop, or adapt to using Open Office, but somehow I slipped into the bad habit of using Office 365 because it was there. But a decision has been made, and I’m sticking to it.  

Well, none of that is very deep, although I do need to sort it out. I’ve not been putting it off because I particularly don’t want to do it or am nervous about it – in fact I started earlier in the week on some of my files, to confirm it was quite straightforward and wouldn’t take long – it’s just that other things seem more important and/or interesting.

And I will get back to Destiny and the Meaning of Life at some point (no, I haven’t finished with that, even though I’ve stated categorically that I don’t think there’s anything mystical behind it all). Come to that, a Destiny which was predetermined and inevitable really wouldn’t be worth talking about, would it?

I’m just going to throw out this thought for now: all the wisdom life teaches us seems quite banal when you think about it – maybe that’s why it’s so hard to live by.

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#notwriting Thursday

Late today for a complex of reasons. But I’m here nevertheless.

Thinking about – oh, what have I been thinking about already this morning? The weather? Light persistent drizzle. Motivation? For writing, extremely low; for housework even lower; though I could spend the morning listening to the radio and knitting or sorting out my accounts– either of those seems quite appealing at the moment. Two lines from Bob Marley’s Redemption Song: ‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds’

I’ve done my morning exercises, had a shower and washed my hair, cooked and eaten a bowl of porridge – although usually I do my writing before breakfast, it felt as though time was running late, so had breakfast deciding whether to write or not. Seems bizarre, the amount of effort that goes into writing about how I can’t write – except, that it isn’t any effort, not usually. Writing that requires effort is something that I stay well clear of. Writing just what comes into my head is easy – and, arguably, pointless – but I will keep doing it anyway. Sometimes it leads my mind down interesting new paths, though I’ve long given up the idea that it will lead me into writing a novel.

The disconnect between mind and fingers continues: I just caught myself typing ‘so they’ when my mind was thinking ‘though I’ve’… It’s quite disturbing when you think about it. Normal typoes caused by pressing the wrong keys are to be expected, but this is something else, like ‘typoes’ created in my brain outside of conscious control. ‘So’ rhymes with ‘though’, and ‘they’ starts with the same sound as ‘though’… it sounds bizarre, but I can kind of see who it could happen – even more bizarre, I’ve just noticed I typed ‘who’ instead of ‘how’ (though of course that is an anagram, so not so bizarre, except for the coincidence that I did it while thinking about how I do that).

I need to train myself out of looking at the keyboard and into looking at the screen when I’m typing – I’ve never been a ‘proper’ touch typist, I taught myself from a book forty years ago, though I’ve certainly had a lot of practice in that time. At least it’s usually possible to interpret my typing, which is more than can be said for my handwriting.

Just had a text from my yoga teacher to say that she’s cancelling classes for the foreseeable future, not due to Covid, but because she has had to move out of her flat and can’t get transport from her temporary place. Although in some ways it’s a relief because I don’t always feel like I want to go, I feel bad for her, and will miss her. However grim I feel, her classes always lift my spirits. Even when I’m thinking that some of the things she gets us to do are just daft, somehow, for her, I can suspend my disbelief and chant along with the rest of them.

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Thresholds

After I’d finished writing yesterday, I looked up the dictionary definition of ‘liminal’ and found that it refers not just to borders, but specifically to thresholds, which pleases me, because of the ambiguity between the two – what I described yesterday as the ‘hazy, scary…’ nature of boundaries, their combination of both limiting aspects but also potential for discovery, change and new experiences.

It also made me think of a picture by William Blake, the frontispiece for his epic poem ‘Jerusalem’, which shows Los (his name for the embodiment of the poetic imagination) about to step through an archway, carrying a lantern into darkness.

About six this morning, as I was lying in bed and thinking, the word ‘edgy’ popped into my head, and I started to think about its implications – that combination of nervousness and excitement. When applied to people, it can imply a kind of fearfulness, a risk of tipping over into a chaotic and destructive state – most likely self-destructive, but not necessarily just that (does self-destruction ever not have repercussions for others beside the self?) But when ‘edgy’ is applied to actions, ideas, art, it implies courage, and is more likely to be complimentary, or at least ambivalent.

This whole idea of edges, boundaries, borders, liminality, the relationships between risk, fear, courage, change, uncertainty, danger, transformation , creativity, loss, immobility (in no particular order) has been haunting me recently as I try to deal with my ‘stuckness’ and lack of motivation and inspiration, not to mention my fear of not being able to find ways of dealing with the obstacles I keep coming up against.

Speaking of which, I think (only think) I may have got round the large ones with the website project, and that it shouldn’t (‘shouldn’t’) require too much more work. Having said that, I went out yesterday morning to walk on the beach and have breakfast out (instead of putting in the work) and realised how much that improved my mood. And then when I got home my broadband was down, so I abandoned websiting and spent the afternoon trying to sort out the design for the jumper, filling in the design on squared paper and then realising it would be far too big, so having to produce a smaller pattern which I think is going to work, but anyway it will all require a lot of time and effort (knitting doesn’t count as ‘work’) to put into practice.

Tai chi this morning, and I’ve just had a phone call from the GP’s surgery offering me a flu jab appointment at 2:15. I had to cancel the last one because I had a cold, so don’t want to miss it. And afterwards I might go and do some café-sitting and reading, or walking if the weather stays nice (which it looks as though it might).  Those things are important and I need to do more of them. But I’ll have a couple of hours between tai chi and lunch to do some website work.