You Are Brave

She said to  me tonight as I straddled my scooter and got myself adjusted.

“Get home safe,” she added, smiled, patted my arm and got into her car.

Yes.

Get home safe so I can do more home work.

Oof.

I got a lot done.

Did I get it all done?

No.

Will I?

Of course.

Will I get it done tonight.

No fucking way.

But.

I did do so much that I haven’t really a leg to stand on as far as complaining goes.

I did not sleep in, that is the one thing that I sort of wanted to do, but it didn’t happen.

I got up at my normal hour but I did not do yoga.

Today is a day when I typically do go to the yoga studio, but I deferred instead to doing all the chores and maintenance and household stuff that I needed to do so that I won’t have to do any of them while in my weekend of classes.

I did a big grocery shopping trip, I did laundry, I swept and vacuumed and swiffered and did the scrubbing in the bathroom.

“Your place is so clean,” my friend said today as he was using the bathroom.

Yeah and it smells hella good.

Broken bottle of $100 Chanel Egoiste Pour Homme makes one hell of a disinfectant and smells just lovely.

I joke that my house is clean because I have papers to write.

And there is some sort of correlation there, I don’t doubt it (can you imagine how clean my house would be if I were getting a PhD?  Don’t mind me, I’m just scrubbing the grout with a toothbrush), some manner of procrastination, but also, I just like having a clean space.

It feels nice to come home to.

I met with a lady, did the deal, cooked meals for the week, and wrote one paper.

I actually wrote the one I was going to save for the last minute since I figured it would be the easiest to write and decided to just get it out of the way since it was the shortest to write.

And granted, yeah, I didn’t get all the writing done I wanted, but I did all the reading, ALL of it.

Which means the time that I would be reading before work this week I can devote to doing the paper writing.

I’m going to do yoga in the morning before work and there’s always a little time for me on Monday’s to do about a half hour of reading before I head to work after I have done a yoga class and showered.

Which is enough time for me to go over my notes and the readings that I have done over the last two weeks and compile the things I need to do the papers.

I will work on one of them Monday and Tuesday and the other one Wednesday and Thursday.

Had I gotten the papers done today I still would have been reading.

I just basically switched up the order in which I am procrastinating.

I’m not even going to call it procrastinating, I know what I can do in the time I have and I am being efficient.

I have a practice that I like to keep outside of school work and work work, and that is for me where the real work is done and that needed to be addressed today.

It needs to be addressed every day.

And there is time.

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

Oh what do I write about, how do I write about it, how will I cite my sources, do I have any idea what the professor wants, all the various indecisive shit that my brain can cook up.

The thing is though, the thing I learned the most, is that it almost, a tiny bit maybe, doesn’t matter if I don’t know exactly what I am going to write about when I sit down to write the paper.  It’s just making the decision to do so, then taking action.

If I don’t take action.

Well.

Nothing happens.

And that’s just sad.

I don’t want to live a sad life.

Granted I could use a little down time, but I am happy that I didn’t stress myself out over trying to figure out how to get all the things into all the day.

I got what I needed to do done and I took good care of myself and my needs.

I took plenty of actions.

It’s not that I rest on my laurels, ever.

In fact, sometimes I feel like it could be a good thing to do just that, for maybe, just a tiny second, before I am off and running onto the next thing, experience, opportunity.

To take a minute.

I noticed that the clerk at Other Avenues had double charged me for the dozen eggs and nobody, at least not I, wants to pay $10.44 for a dozen eggs.

I walked back to the store.

I got my money back.

I walked out.

I sat down on a bench and lay back and let the sun splay out on my body, warm my face, warm my hands, warm my heart, I closed my eyes and reclined, right there, in the public parklet in front of the store without a care in the world and not a thought of papers, books, articles, writing, not for long, mind you, but just for a moment.

Slow down.

Rest.

I had already done so much that I could know in my heart, without reservation or regret that I had done enough.

I will continue to do more work, that is true, but tonight, I can look about my clean, well lit, sweet space and know I am enough.

The efforts made were enough.

And I am allowed rest.

Good sleep.

And a quiet, self-congratulatory pat on the back for a day well done.

And a video.

Heh.

 

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Tags: all the things, doing the deal, grad school, graduate school, grocery shopping, homework, papers, pause, reading, recovery, rest, self-care, slowing down, spiritual principles, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot, writing