Categories: uncategorized
Date: 15 September 2006 14:20:21
I distilled the essence of mid-life crisis.
It's quite simple really, but rather than tell you it straightway I'll have to bore you first by explaining how I found it. And before I do that I'll tell you how I didn't find it. I didn't find it out by reading Dith's blog. If I had done (which would have required me reading something a month or so before it was written) then I'd have found this all out a lot quicker. But I didn't. Instead I found it out this way.
Most of my spare time I spend feeling guilty. For a long while I had no spare time (if there wasn't a baby needing entertained then there was washing-up to do, sleep to be slept, or a thousand other things needing thunged) and so when I have spare time I feel obliged to use it wisely. I know this is folly, because years ago when doing a summer job with long (eleven hour) shifts and short (half-hour) breaks I discovered that if I tried to do a lot in the breaks then I'd end up exhausted and hate the work, whereas if I tried to do nothing during the break (and I really mean "tried to do nothing", not "didn't try to do something" - my usual strategy was to sit on a bench staring at the sea) then I'd get bored and would be enthusiastic about getting back to work. And that made the next hour of work really quite bearable or even pleasant. So I know that trying to make the best use of time is something that's guaranteed to make me miserable. But I do it all the same - I feel I must read that book that everybody seems to have read and which I haven't got around to yet, or I must watch that DVD that I borrowed, or I ....
I've at least alluded to this before and to the fact that I know this is not how I should spend my time but am not sure what to do instead. I've mostly realized that what I need to do is throw off all obligations and just spend my time doing what I will most enjoy doing and not worry about anything else. (If you've been inside my house then you'll know how seriously I pursue this strategy from the perpetual piles of washing-up, unbelievable untidiness, complete lack of cleanliness, mountains of ironing, etc). Unfortunately I'm not very good at working out what I would enjoy doing. So I tend to resort to things that I used to like doing. Things that, in days gone by, I couldn't do either for lack of money or for lack of time. And the problem is that they don't work. Most of the things I used to like doing simply aren't a lot of fun any more. I don't enjoy the same things any more. I'm not the person I used to be. And it was when I reached this conclusion that I understood that I'm not who I was, but I don't know who I am. Which, I think, is really the essence of a mid-life crisis.