routine – Page 4 – Linda Rushby

27 September 2020

Log Cabin

Very late this morning – although I’ve been awake for two and a half hours already. I decided to start doing my half hour yoga etc in the mornings again, and had a shower and washed my hair, and just generally time passed as it so often does.

Routines, as I’m sure I’ve said before, are both constraining and liberating. I half thought last week that I wouldn’t restart these two morning routines – exercise and blogging – but that’s because I was in a pretty shitty mood after returning from Cyprus. It’s so easy to slip down into chaos – especially for someone like me. Spontaneity can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying. Sometimes the chaos reaches a point where the only way I can deal with it is by ignoring it, and so it grows exponentially until it reaches a crisis and I fall apart emotionally. I was getting close to that point last week. But yesterday I wrote my blog; tidied the kitchen; loaded, ran and emptied the dishwasher; hoovered the stairs and landing – never really know what brings me back from the brink. I might say: ‘a decent night’s sleep’ but that wasn’t the case. Taking the van out on Friday? Doing that one, big(ish) stressful thing and then putting it to one side? Putting everything else into perspective? Maybe.

When I was learning to drive, the instructor told me that the greatest pleasure in life comes from doing something you really don’t want to do, and then afterwards, knowing that you’ve done it. Over forty years later, I think that’s still one of the wisest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard.

I’ve started a new crochet project – while still finishing off the previous one (both cardigans). I started following a pattern for what’s called a ‘log cabin’ design, starting with a small square, then every few rows rotating the work and picking up stitches along the edge of the existing work so that you have a rectangle that keeps growing – like a spiral growing out from the centre, but with straight edges. I’m using a ‘cake’ type yarn with large blocks of colour, and it looks pretty good. But I don’t like the shape of the pattern in the book – which makes a sleeveless waistcoat, which I’m not that keen on. So I’m trying to think of a way of adapting it to make a cardi with sleeves. This is the sort of thing I like to do – trying out something new and seeing how it works out.

Every so often I think I’ll give up on crochet, because it’s too repetitive and I feel like I’ve exhausted the possibilities. Then I get an idea like this and get interested again. Admittedly, I have cupboards full of projects that I’ve never finished, and garments that I’ve never worn. But I keep going back to it. And today I’m looking forward to sitting in the sunshine and trying again.

Maybe there’s a metaphor for life in there somewhere.

3 September 2020

Not Writing About the New Forest

I said yesterday that today I’d write about going to the New Forest, but when I try to start there are so many other things I’m thinking about, like I got up at 6.00 because that’s what I decided I should do, although that’s still not ‘first thing’ because I’ve been awake since 4.00, reading and listening to the radio. And at 6.00 it’s still dark, so that’s how it’s going to be from now, probably till March or maybe April, I’m not sure.

I thought I’d come straight to the computer and start writing, but I fed the cat and let her out, then wondered whether to make coffee, because usually I do my exercise first, and then should I use my espresso pot or the Tassimo, which is quicker but only makes a small cup? And thinking about how I should start, where I should start, about moving here and what it is about the south coast for me, and when did I first go to the New Forest, what is the attraction? And issues around the van, because it’s brought me so much stress and expense down the years, but I have to not think about that, and that’s a split infinitive, but apart from the fact that it’s quite passé to care about split infinitives, it’s important because what I was trying to say there is subtly different from how else it could be said: ‘can’t think’ or ‘mustn’t think’ is different from a choice to ‘not think’ about something, so arguably that two word phrase is a verb in itself, and ‘to not think’ is the infinitive form of that compound verb.

Speaking about ‘choice’, the choice about coffee is a decision in itself, with the factors of speed, flavour and quantity of coffee all having to be taken into account and balanced, and the outcome of that decision (to prioritise speed and use the Tassimo) is that the coffee has already gone and I haven’t finished writing.

Which reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday with the garage man about keeping UHT milk in the van (his suggestion), but once it’s been opened, it only keeps as well as normal milk, so I might as well just take a small bottle of fresh milk with me each time, which is what I do.

This is how my mind works all the time – bouncing from one apparently trivial and meaningless thought to another. I used to assume that it was the same for everybody, but that other people were better than me at cutting through the crap and dealing with it. Now I’m beginning to understand that it goes deeper than that. That’s why the idea of ‘thinking visually’ blew my mind, though I’m now coming to think that that’s probably not as prevalent as I’ve been led to believe – I honestly don’t see how it could be. Thinking is thinking and it’s made up of words and depends on words, and that’s that.

2 September 2020

Another Morning

Been thinking that maybe I should reorganise my morning routine. If I did the writing before the exercise, that would be more in keeping with Dorothea Brande’s original instructions. I could get up an hour earlier and write, instead of lying in bed trying/hoping to get back to sleep. I resolve to do it, and then, when the time comes… I could move the ‘gentle alarm’ on the Sleep Cycle app forward from 7-7.30 to 6.30-7.00 – the half hour is because it’s supposed to detect whereabouts your sleep is, and go off when you’re in the most appropriate sleep phase for waking (until it comes to the end of the period, when it goes off anyway). It’s fairly immaterial, given that I almost never hear it because I’ve already stopped the app before then – except for the extremely rare occasions when I HAVE managed to get back to sleep.

Whatever, it’s only going to get harder as we move inexorably from the light half of the year into the dark.

Had a day out yesterday, with my camper van, which only got back on the road after lockdown last week. Another new battery, another stern warning from the garage that I need to use it regularly. The new (refurbished) battery they fitted last year was so tightly connected that I couldn’t disconnect it over winter, so when I tried it in March they said they would come and recharge it, but it wasn’t a priority either for them or for me in the following months, so although they’ve had the keys all that time, I hadn’t been chasing them about it.

Well, it’s going now, and last week I took it out for a picnic in the Queen Elizabeth Country Park, off the A3 heading for London, and my favourite go-to place for a significant non-overnight jaunt. Yesterday I went in the other direction, to the New Forest, which I’ve never done as a day out before, always camped, even though it’s only an hour’s drive. I had a vision of a memory from the last time I was there, this time last year, of the empty moors covered with purple flowering heather, seen from the open-top tour bus. I had another memory too, from a few years earlier, when I drove my old Micra back from Dorset to Bedford over two days with an overnight stop in Salisbury, of walking on the same moors in early summer.

I should write more about this. Why am I reluctant to write about happy things? Perhaps because I’m afraid I can’t do them justice? Or because, when you try to describe something like that, you – I – never feel I can capture the essence of what made it special? Like trying to take photographs and then being disappointed with all of them. Writing words and being disappointed with all of them. I got lost, I found somewhere to stop, sat on a tree stump and looked at the view.

Maybe I’ll try tomorrow.

1 September 2020

Spontaneity vs Inspiration

I was talking yesterday about why I write in the morning, following the advice from Dorothea Brande’s book ‘Becoming a Writer’, but how that’s also usually my unhappiest time, as I try to sort out in my head what I need to do for the day.

When I first tried to follow the advice, in the late 1970s early 80s, I was trying to write a fantasy novel, of the then conventional swords-and-sorcery genre, which was hopeless, because it inevitably had to involve a certain amount of fighting and war craft, which I couldn’t get my head round at all. In fact, I didn’t even like reading about that stuff, even though I loved the Tolkien books, I would skip all the fighting parts and just read the adventuring. This was in the days before the genre had opened up with more female characters and writers, such as Ursula le Guin, Julian May, Anne McCaffrey and Marian Zimmer Bradley. I didn’t see how it was possible to have fantasy books outside that patriarchal paradigm, or how I could write within it, so I really was on a hiding to nothing.

Be that as it may, I tried, and I tried in the mornings, and then I discovered that if I sat down to write for a specific purpose – such as to continue my novel – I was paralysed. All I could write was what was in my head – such as what I’m writing now, and write most mornings, about my life, my thoughts and feelings. I was going to say ‘write spontaneously’ but that seems odd, in that the daily writing is quite regimented – but there again, it is spontaneous in the sense that I don’t always know what I’m going to say until I start saying it.

Now I’m confusing myself. Because the other kind of writing – the way I write most of my poems – is the stuff that comes into my head at any time of day, and I need to capture it – so that by the time I sit down at the computer, it’s already there, and I’m just ‘taking dictation’ – so is that spontaneous or is it the other? Because that is what I think of as being ‘inspired’ writing, and I have no idea where that comes from or how to make it happen – it’s outside my control except… for the times when it isn’t. What about all those poems I wrote in April, for NaPoWriMo? They were ‘inspired’ somehow, so how did I make that happen?

There was also a period in 2005-6, immediately before and around the time when I started both a creative writing course and blogging, when I WAS extending my novel (not the original one from twenty years earlier, but a more feminist one) by writing 500 words daily, developing the plot in classic ‘seat of the pants’ fashion. Why did that come to an end? Because my writing energy was diverted into assignments for the course and blogging, perhaps?

31 August 2020

Mornings

As you probably know, I wake most days around five o’clock, and very rarely go back to sleep again after that, although I usually lie in bed for a couple of hours brooding (or reading, listening to podcasts, looking at stuff on my phone – you know how it goes) before getting up – usually around seven – and doing a half hour routine of yoga/tai chi/meditation. So over the last few months I’ve been able to notice the changes in the timing of sunrise. It always comes as a bit of a shock how much the length of daylight has reduced by the end of August, but it’s hardly surprising when you remember we’re only three weeks away from the Autumn Equinox.

Every morning I have this sense of wishing the day would go away and just leave me alone, even though I haven’t had a regular get-up-and-out-of-the-house job (even a part-time one) for over eight years. Life is still there to be dealt with, whether you have somewhere to be by a certain time or not.

I used to have this idea that one day I would find my ‘place’ in the world and when that happened I would wake every morning looking forward to the day ahead. Although I now feel that I am in the best ‘place’ I’ve ever been (or am likely to be), I’ve had to accept that (along with many other things) starting each day full of enthusiasm and positivity is just not in my power.

Why have I started writing like this today? I don’t know, except that maybe I’m not quite so deep in the usual existential despair (or ‘gloom and doom’ as some would colloquially call it) that I can’t step back a little and consider it analytically for once. Is it down to lack of sleep? Probably to some extent, but that begs the more fundamental question of how I can get my body (or rather brain) to sleep any more than it always has, a question for which I’ve never found an answer. A more interesting thought is that this probably explains why so many of these posts tend to be so dark, and the question begged by that is: why try and write at this time of day, when I’m nearly always in a bad mood?

That goes back to advice I read – probably 40 years ago now – in ‘Becoming a Writer’, by Dorothea Brande, a classic from the days before the world became swamped by books of writing advice. The one thing I still remember from this book was to write first thing in the morning, before your conscious brain has a chance to elbow out the subconscious completely. Over the years, I’ve striven to follow that rule, although it’s sometimes led me down some strange alleyways.

And I think it might lead me somewhere now… but I’m nearly at the end of my quota. So I’m going to leave that for now and let it stew till tomorrow.

18 August 2020

Going Through the Motions

Going Through the Motions
Get up and do what you always do,
even though your head is full
of all the times it hasn’t worked before;
of all the reasons why it doesn’t work;
of all the many ways it might go wrong;
of all the problems you can’t imagine
until they happen.
You want to run away and hide,
but you’ve tried that before,
and it never worked
so why should it now?
This is life,
this is how it works.
Stumble on,
from one day to the next
and maybe you’ll
get away with it
for one more day.
Linda Rushby 18 August 2020

There was a post on the FB dyspraxia group asking how many members write, and what we write. I started thinking about poems I’ve written down the years which relate to my dyspraxia (even when I didn’t know that’s what it was). They tend to be the ones I don’t share much, because I don’t expect people I know to understand them or like the fact that I’ve written them about myself. The two I first thought of were ‘Cahos’, from 2005 (oh, look at that typo again – I may make that the actual title of the poem from now on) and ‘The Awkward One’ (2017, I think).

I saw the post at bedtime, and started going through my Google drive from my phone looking for the two I’ve mentioned and to see how many more I could find (a very bad idea when I was supposed to be going to sleep). And then when I got up and was doing my morning routine, I came up with the one above.

I could probably fill a whole book, but I doubt it would be very popular. From one point of view, these poems are seething with self-pity, self-loathing and shame – which is why I often keep them to myself. On the other hand, they are also searingly honest, full of pain, sadness, regret, frustration and barely suppressed anger. Both of those descriptions sum up my underlying emotional landscape a lot of the time.

The anger in particular WAS COMING OUT A LOT IN MY THERAPY SESSIONS towards the end of last year (oops, must’ve hit the caps lock without noticing, but that also seems quite appropriate!) I suppose my current task is to learn how to deal with it without turning it onto myself – incredibly hard and stressful, but I am trying.

One way of doing that is to have routines and stick to them even when I really don’t feel like it. Yesterday I skipped my weekly yoga-in-the-park session because I convinced myself it would rain – but then it didn’t. And I felt bad for making that an excuse for my lack of commitment. So I’m trying to deal with that.

I heard a podcast of the TED Radio Show on BBC R4Extra yesterday, about choice and making decisions. I need to listen to it again, then maybe I’ll have something to say about it.

14 August 2020

Bother

Why do I bother? God knows. I haven’t got a clue.

I did another of the five items on the list yesterday – and a bit of another (sorting out my accounts, which is going to be a long job), and had a stab at another (renewing the insurance on my van) but got stymied by the technology, because I thought I could renew it online, but couldn’t see how, so now I don’t know if it will renew automatically or if I have to call them – which reminds me that the van itself is a can of worms, because I need to call the garage – but I don’t want to use it at present anyway.

You’ll notice there are still five items – I haven’t added any more, although I keep thinking of them, but I never remember to write them on the list. However, I did do last night’s washing up when I got up, and tidied and wiped the kitchen counters and sink (again). We’ll see how long that lasts.

I made a plan yesterday evening that if I was awake early enough this morning I would walk to the beach and watch the sunrise, but I slept in till 5.20, so there wasn’t time to get myself sorted and to the beach before the actual sunrise at 5.37. And although I don’t really like lying in bed when I know I won’t get back to sleep, I still don’t want to get up either, even now, when it’s warm.

This is why I’ve decided that routine is so important, because if I know what I ‘should’ be doing, maybe that will push me (‘motivate’ is too strong a word) into doing things even when I really don’t feel like it (which is about 23 hours and 55 minutes of every day). Given that I’ve got quite good about doing my half hour of exercise and meditation, and writing my 500 words of drivel, over the last few months, I’m hoping that maybe I can squeeze some more useful and positive habits into my days.

I’ve given some thought in the past to how to get over the problem I was talking about yesterday, of never knowing where I’ve left things. One solution would be to constantly scan every room for anything which isn’t in its ‘specific place’ and return it so I can find it when I need it again – the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I guess that’s what most non-cahotic (I like that typo, I think I’ll leave it) people do automatically – but the idea fills me with horror and deadens my soul. There wouldn’t be time for anything else, would there? But then if it actually worked, wouldn’t it save the time and stress of constantly searching for things? I think of my spirit animal, Mole from The Wind in the Willows, throwing down his paintbrush and running out into the springtime to cries of ‘Bother!’ and ‘Oh blow!’ and ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’

3 August 2020

Monday Morning

Back here again. Why? Because half the time I swear I’ve given up for good and then one morning I think I might try again. Just this once. On the understanding that it’s the same old nonsense and, basically, a complete waste of my time writing and yours (whoever you are) for reading it.

But we both still have a chance. You can stop right here – or I could, in which case you wouldn’t have the chance either way, because obviously I wouldn’t bother to post this. But I probably won’t – stop, that is. Though with another potential 400 words… Who knows?

It’s nine o’clock now (I went to the Co-op before starting) and it’s Monday. Does that mean I can play music without worrying about disturbing the neighbours? There again, they might work shifts, for all I know.

Okay, now I’m playing Roxy Music’s ‘Flesh and Blood’, that being the first cassette I pulled out of the shoebox at random that I haven’t already transferred to the PC. Still haven’t done anything about replacing the stylus on my turntable.

Reached the second track, ‘Oh Yeah’, and the sound quality is pretty awful. I have the original album somewhere, so if I get my finger out and do something about that stylus, I can play that. But I still feel a bit wary about playing these old albums – they’ve been kept for all these years and moved from place to place, and maybe it’s all been a waste of time because they’re ruined anyway.

Next track, ‘Same Old Scene’, isn’t much better.

How do I manage to do anything? Repetition, routine, and constant self-bullying. I bullied myself into going to the Co-op this morning. I bullied myself into putting the shopping away when I got back, and starting a ‘to-do’ list. The weight of the things I don’t do is always in my head, because I’m always thinking about them, except the times when I let myself off and sit in the sun or listen to the radio and/or crochet. Or else I’m thinking about other things, worse things, that I’ve read or heard or people have said or done to me that make me angry or sad or hopeless.

I think constantly about these things, but never do anything – worse, the thinking itself is completely aimless and futile, it’s not even as if by thinking I ever produce a coherent plan of action which I then proceed to complete. Except – well, I did start making that to-do list. If I completed some of those things, I suppose I’d be happier. But a more reliable way of becoming happier is by quietening the thinking – and the way to do that is by doing things that make me happy directly – like sitting in the sun, listening to the radio, and/or crocheting – all of which I may do later after I’ve had breakfast.

The second side of the album sounds better than the first one did.

Think it’s time for breakfast.

23 June 2020

Socially-Distanced Yoga

After I finished blogging yesterday, I got a text from my yoga teacher to say that she was holding a socially-distanced class in the park in the evening and would I be interested? So I answered yes, and then spent the whole day stressing over the fact that I’d committed myself to going out and interacting with other people.

I went early, thinking I could go to the seafront to take pictures or take something in the park, because I’m rapidly running out of anything photogenic in my garden for my daily Facebook photo post, but I saw them all sitting around when I got there and couldn’t think of a way to avoid joining the group. We sat around for quite a while chatting because we were waiting for the last two people – as it turned out they hadn’t been able to find places to park. I was surprised at how busy the park was, and I presume the beach (two minutes walk further on) must have been the same. There were seven of us in the end: the teacher, her daughter, me and four others, two of whom I knew by sight, but I wasn’t sure about the last two, though presumably I’ve met them before. I don’t know any of them very well, and I didn’t say very much.

I thought it might just be a short session, but no, it was the full hour and a half, including lying down at the end. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – though I felt a bit awkward during the chanting (given that there were other people around, although we were in quite a secluded part of the park). I’d dressed in my usual leggings, tee shirt and sweatshirt, thinking it would be colder later when I had to walk home, I felt a bit overdressed at first by comparison with some of the others, but it did cool down before the end so I was grateful for that.

I went telling myself that I always come back from the sessions in normal times with a smile on my face, the five-minutes-just-round-the-corner community centre sessions. I didn’t feeling exactly elated walking back from the park, but thinking about it now, I’m glad I did it and I guess I’ll go again.

I was very unsettled all day yesterday, I suppose partly in anticipation. Today all I have to anticipate is taking the bins out and Zoom meditation for an hour at seven. I need to go to the health food shop to see if they have whole wheat flour – my last loaf had to be all white because that’s all I could get in Tesco. And I thought I’d go and check if the florist is open, as they sell garden plants too – in normal times – and my sad garden needs something to brighten it up. But who knows how many of those small shops will be opening again?

So maybe I’ll go out today – or maybe not.

Category: routine