Reset

 

Yesterday I had a 'reset' day.

The past few years have been...I don't even know how to describe what my life has been like.  Busy?  (Indeed.)  Frantic ? (at times)  Stressful?  (Oh my yes)   Challenging?  (Boy howdy.)

During my life as a production weaver/teacher/author/event organizer there has been little time to rest as I shoved the roller coaster laboriously to the top of whatever peak it was challenging, then gravity taking over and swooshing down to the valley, only to begin again. Or Sisyphus as a weaver.

My life has never been 'routine' or 'smooth' or anything but a slog.

But!  It was MY slog.  My choice to take on what I did.  My choice to keep scrambling.  My choice to stay self-employed and dig hard and deep for the energy to keep pushing myself to meet my goals and pay my bills.

But.  But.  The past few years?  Yeah.  Big transition time.

A bunch of things have been ignored as being 'not important enough at this time to spend my energy on' and therefore I have a basket full of stuff that is beginning to weigh heavily on me.

A friend offered to help with one of those long languishing things but she, too, had a busy life until this summer she had a block of time where she needed to push reset on her life at about the same time I did.

Yesterday she came over and spent four hours(!) helping me with 21st century technology issues.

Because I needed to be available to answer her questions I never went to the loom and by the time she left I was wrung out - mentally.

I pressed pause and had a wee think.

I'm looking at a stack of 'mental' work (writing), class prep (thinking/writing), I'm guild chair again (more thinking/planning) and a stash that seemingly has no end.

Add to that I am needing to take heavy duty painkillers due to chronic pain and the brain fog from the pain/painkillers and I realized that I need to re-order my day.  Instead of getting my weaving done as a priority, I need to start doing my mental 'work' in the morning instead of messing about reading on the internet.

Begin as you mean to go on, so this morning I opened a Word document and generated the descriptions for the Zoom lectures and emailed that with the promise of photos for each to come.  She is already inundated with other things, so hopefully she can just add that info to her already bulging file 'folder' and then add the photos once I've sorted through them.  But I need to scroll through my photo files, then write a short description and tag them with the appropriate lecture title.  And that's more than I can manage now after doing the write ups.

On one hand, I'm disappointed I didn't get to the loom yesterday, but on the other, I needed to start dealing with these other things.  My weaving 'deadlines' are my own, to meet or adjust according to need.  And it also showed me that whether or not I weave does not affect the level of pain I experience.  On Friday I wove and had low pain.  Yesterday I didn't but I had higher pain levels.  Chronic nerve pain is a bugger - it's invisible and it's inconsistent.  Some days are better than others.  And you never know what is going to trigger a bad day.  You just need to ride it and manage it the best you can.

So today I can cross one job off my to-do list.  I'm learning to break my 'jobs' down into smaller, more manageable bites.  Part of me rebels against the slowness of my progress, but another part reminds me that the longest journey begins with a single step.  Yesterday I got help with some issues I couldn't manage on my own and today I took a single step towards getting that long languishing task on the way to completion.

And now I think I can reward myself with some loom time.