Being In The Present

It seems like a long time since I've been here . . . again. As you know I am working on a Lenten Project that requres me to learn ways to put discipline into my life. I'm finding it tiring and harder to work in a straight line going forward than I had believed possible. I thot it meant getting up and putting one foot in front of the other and getting things done. Well, its much different than that, it takes a lot of effort to recreate routines after so many years of not having any and whining about it. Harp is still important to me and still the hardest thing to schedule into a routine. Maybe that is what I need to really focus on is just that, make a space in each day for a good harp session for the coming week and assess it later. I've been orgnizing files and found all my old music that was missing. Next time ~ don't put things away so well, Meg. I had one day that I did a 2 hour session and it was so exhausting, from using that part of my brain that gets no exercise in any other way, that I seem to have let it go since then. Man, I'm such a coward! At this point I have no music selections or updates on previously chosen ones. What I do have is a ton of paper and ideas on how to store them. So, lets get at it.

Lately I've been busy putting many small projects together for the season of discipline of Lent. I am going to work in ways that will put routine in my life and get back into the daily schedule I used to work towards each day. Not always having been the malingerer that I see myself to be now, I want to do some of the same ordinary things that used to be so obvious to me.

Getting dressed each day should not have to go on a list, but if it does for a while, then so be it. Dressed to Earrings. That means that I have to be dressed beyond dog-walkig clothes. These are the sorts of things I need to put back in my life. The fun of life that has gone missing.

As I look back on my adult life, that started when I was sixteen and got married for the first time. There wasn't any time or money for fun, once a pair of kids decided to set up housekeeping, to go out and have any fun, even a movie occasionally was hard on our income. Then there was having a baby and becoming a single working mom by age eighteen, and finally marriage again at twenty. Work was all I was able to think about. If I just get all the work done first, then I can go out and have some fun. But, being the A-type personality that others told me I was, I never had a good idea of what I'd like to do now that I was a grown-up, it seemed lke all they did was sit and watch while the kids went and did stuff.

At one time I became quite interested in gardening and the roses bloomed, the vegetables grew, the vines got tall. I seem to have lost all interest in that. One day I read an article that asked the question: What did you like when you were ten? Wow! that was a long time ago. Thinking, thinking, thinking . . . there was skipping, Jax, puzzles, scrabble, reading, writing stories, organizing my desk and papers. Making up stories out of the math problems was great fun. Not being allowed to keep a diary, I used to write out my entries in my notebooks so they would not be found. Looking words up in the dictionary was fun.

That is a list that says I really like eveything about language and creating stories and spending more time with all my writing now. I could probly do something with words for a living. I also have harp things that I like to do. I seem to have a few things that are play for me, but I don't let me do much of it, or very often

The daily list of things that I do will include work tasks and play time. Hopefully, I will do both ensuring a balance. My reward will be TV and computer going on at 1 PM in the afternoons, Sundays not included.