So, life sort of goes back to normal today. Hubby is on holiday for the rest of the week, but me? I think I’ll at least try and get one of those sets of minutes done, and answer some emails, and see what the post brings, and send off an abstract, and maybe start thinking about the talk I have to give next month. The boundary between ‘work’ and ‘life’ is pretty fluid. I know that’s not good, I always said I wouldn’t let it get like that, that I would keep them distinct, but as I have taken on more, it has become harder to make that distinction. Of course, it works both ways, in that I don’t have a problem with taking a few hours mid week to go to the hairdresser’s, or an afternoon to go to the theatre in Cambridge (well, depending on how things are going). Although hubby also mostly works from home, he is much better at keeping the boundaries fixed. It used to be, when I wasn’t doing so much, that when he was on holiday, I would make sure I took time off as well, but these days, it’s not as if we would be doing anything together.
I sent off three of my poems to a magazine yesterday. This is part of my decision to submit something every month. I don’t have much hope, but I set myself the challenge and I will stick with it. I went through the last couple of issues of Writers’ News and set up a database on Access with competitions/magazines and their submission dates. Then in the afternoon I was playing about with the website for the meditation group, putting up photos from the meditation days we had recently. So, I wasn’t ‘working’ as in paid work, but I was still sitting at the computer doing the usual sorts of things.
When I was doing the Hoovering, I was thinking about what somebody said to me when I came back from Cyprus, that the good times are never really as good as we think they are, and the bad times are never really that bad either. And I thought, although I have some wonderful memories of that time – and some painful ones, too – I have to just accept it for what it was, and say, it’s good to have times like that, but life can’t be like that all the time, and we have to be glad for the good moments and just deal with the rest. Because I was feeling quite sad yesterday, and things seemed rather bleak. But each morning is a new start, and we get up and go through the old rituals, and face another day. Because we never know what the day may bring, it could be sadness, it could be joy.
The year is not even a quarter of the way through yet, and so far I have oscillated between hope and despair – well, nothing new there. Hanging on to hope is the hardest thing to do, though I started the year thinking about hope. It’s too easy to give in to despair, to think that everything is going down from now on, that some kind of threshold has been crossed and we are tipping over into darkness. Which is ridiculous, because the sun always rises, and the spring always comes back (eventually!) Why should it be so hard to hang on to that?