Tag: weekend

Stepping out and stepping up the courage

As I wrote last week, July is about me moving out of the fearful, home-focussed me – actually it’s been more “home-captive” – into the normal me, who is out and about and seeing life. 

This long weekend (my weekend includes a Friday) has been a great start.  I am still a bit nervous, I have to admit, but I am pushing myself ever so slightly and hopefully I am taking enough precautions to not contract coronavirus, whilst also working on reducing the fear that will only become less helpful as time goes on.  So far the adventures have, as predicted, been small yet memorable, but there have been quite a few.  

I started with a long walk with one of the offspring in Wyre Forest park, which is about 45 minutes drive from home.  I have not been that far away from home since the start of March, never mind about driving there myself. We treated ourselves to coffee and cake from the takeaway café at the end of a good march around the forest in the rain.  The first food I have eaten out of my house/garden since 15th March.

Saturday was a huge step as we decided to go back to our favourite café in the village to give them a bit of support on what they admitted was a nerve-wracking day of reopening.  It was just coffee, we were there as a family, supporting each other.  There was a grand total of 9 other people in the place, including all the staff and everyone was very well spaced out. It was lovely to be back, but it was far from normal.  

I have seen friends and family as well – but all outside, either in our garden or on a walk with our excited dogs happy to be out with more humans and a variety of dog treats – my dog claims everyone else’s treats are better than his own.

Possibly the high point of the weekend was an impromptu coffee and croissant early yesterday morning on our now traditional early Sunday morning walk.  The café was open, and it was a delightful interlude in our usual routine, and empty cafes seem like a good way to build up courage and some mental resilience.  

The fear that I have caught the virus is still there in my mind, but I am soothing the agitation with the knowledge that I was not back to normal contact with people by any stretch of the imagination and that this worry is probably very normal after three months of being safe in my house with very little contact with the outside world.  

Transitions

I am beginning to determine the period in my day that I am finding most difficult and it is the time between 4 and 7 in the afternoons.  For a whole heap of reasons I think.

During the week, having spent all day in my home working, I pack away the work clobber to face an evening still in my home.  I change my clothes and then walk the few steps from the desk to another room and that is the total physical transition, no train journey, no listening to the radio in traffic, no walk back from the station, no brief visit to my Mum on route from work.  All of those mark my usual transitions.  My working from home is too sporadic for me to have a proper routine and I struggle with transition from work to not work in normal times anyway when I work from home.

The weekends are even stranger, I have a long weekend anyway as I do not work on a Friday.  It is especially difficult on a Friday and Saturday.  Those are the evenings we are often out, often with friends.  For three days I am relishing having time at home to potter and sort things out around the home.  I catch up with family and friends, I can surf the internet, catch up with folks on social media, read a book.  I seem to run out of steam by about 4ish in the afternoon at the weekend.  I sort of realise that this is it, whatever the evening holds, and we plan something for each evening, it is a variety of the theme of hanging out at home.  There is nothing to get ready for, there is no moment of leaving one location for another.  There is just more time at home.

On Saturday I remembered I do have some tools to help – and for the past couple of days have had half an hour of movement and stillness, focus on me and focus on everyone.  I do some yoga, gentle movement helps, focussing on my breath and physical movement.  Then a time of meditation and prayer help ground me further in my own faith and also in the wider world and it helps to hand the anxiety at this point of the day back to God for a bit.  This helped a lot this weekend, so I am going to see if it works today on a work day as well.  I am very grateful that these tools were in the toolbox already, and that I have remembered them.

Conversations take time

I am at the end of an annual weekend catch up with two university friends.  In reality we are together for less than 24 hours, but we make the very most of the 24 hours and focus on talking and allowing conversation to go wherever it needs to.  

And part of the delight of these weekends is having the time and the space to allow conversations to meander and develop, to lull and to rise.  Our friendship was formed in the days before smart phones, in fact in the days before mobile phones of any description.  Our communications with each other were face to face in rooms and sitting rooms of university residences, in student bars and trips into London together.  Our communications with others outside the university bubble were very limited: letters, infrequent trips home and one pay phone shared between 30 people and a message system of scribbled notes pinned to a noticeboard if anyone called when you were out – or if the person answering the phone just could not be bothered to out the effort in to find you.  I know – that sounds like we were rude – but for those of you not as old as me, can you imagine the hassle of having to answer a phone on behalf of 29 other people which required you to stop whatever you were doing and run along a corridor and then spend time running around to try and find whoever was being called.  Understandably there were times when one could not be bothered. 

There was a conversation this weekend about how lovely those times were, we still did loads and felt stressed, but no doubt that communications were simple by dint of being very limited.

And this weekend has been a lovely recreation of those days of time and space for conversation, away from the distractions of a million WhatsApp/emails/texts/Facebook messages etc vying for attention.  Instead, it was just us and our focus on each other and hearing a lot of news, plans, thoughts and worries and joys in a short space of time.  Delicious.

To the person’s whose calls I did not answer – sorry, I will check the noticeboard once I am back home and queue up for the phone to call you back.

Last weekend of summer

It’s our traditional last weekend of summer this weekend.  Moseley Folk Festival always happens the weekend after the bank holiday weekend and usually the weekend before school starts again, so for the last several years, we have seen this as the end of the summer period.  

Am I a huge folk music fan? No, not really, but I do really enjoy live music.  The location in Moseley Park is lovely, a weekend surrounded by trees and water.  This year the festival promises to be bigger, not a positive in my eyes, as I have relished the tininess of the festival – from one spot on a picnic blank, you can see pretty much all the site.  There is a familiarity for us – we know which food we like to indulge in, we know roughly where we want to put that picnic blanket, we feel soothed by the routine.

This year I decided that we would not go, we would try and change the tradition, maybe just go for a day instead of a whole weekend.  Then reality hit, I am not one that likes to feel I am in a rut, but you know what – I love this tradition, it’s a lovely way to mark the transition into a new season. I will spend the weekend not doing much, just thinking thoughts, sharing time with family, listening to good music and eating good food.  A good way to gather energy for the full season ahead. So off we head for the weekend again.

What do I call today?

No, not Friday. Although, it is Friday, I will call today Friday. But it is also a day where I am not working for an employer. In the coming months I will have some more of those, as a contract comes to an end.

A short discussion with friends last night has led me to ponder. “Day off” doesn’t quite cut it. One of the friends in the discussion has a side hustle, she is paid for activity on some days off and sees that activity as work. We are keen (as a group, its one of our discussion topics) to keep work – either formal or side hustles – in a work space and carve proper space between work and rest.

Obviously all days include both – or they jolly well should do anyway. Cliches often have a root in truth and all work and no play making a person dull seems like truth to me. I am focussing very strongly on putting aside the work when my time there is done. It is not easy, I am criticised for not doing enough work, not answering enough emails or calls. As a part-time worker, I think I am an easy target for those who think I should be working in my non-paid hours. To my colleagues, there seem to be a lot of non-paid hours which others cannot imagine are filled with anything as useful as my job.

Being able to describe them to other people seems to be behind my need to title the days. I feel a sense of fear that people think I am wasting my time on my days off. I know that some are surprised I do not spend time cleaning or cooking.

There is also a ritual that seems to be needed, I will not have that Friday feeling soon – my week in my paid job will end on a Thursday. So what do I call a Thursday evening? The start of a new phase of the week for sure, but I oddly feel the need for a title. It may just be me though, the discussion last night included those who felt that days are days and do not need a specific work/non-work delineation, although we were all clear that “day off” becomes a misnomer when the paid work creeps into it, which does indeed happen.

An insignificant thing to be pondering this morning, but lovely to have a day in which I know I have time to ponder the insignificant alongside the significant.