Remembering to Dream
Now that I’m in this new position I have to take a lunch break. In my old position my boss let me leave early instead of taking lunch, which was really awesome (and very useful for the retrieving of small children from far flung locations), and now it’s hard to break that habit. I see that it’s noon and I think, “Sigh. I guess I should take lunch,” and then I start working on something until the next time I look at the clock and see that it’s now 1:30. Then I think, “Jeez, I should really take lunch, it’s getting kind of late,” and then I keep working on whatever I was working on until the next time I look at the clock and see that it’s now 2:30. Then I think, “Well, it’s kind of late to take lunch now and my butt is so well planted in my chair! Maybe I’ll just leave early,” even though I know I can’t. And so it goes, and so I don’t take lunch, and so I feel annoyed because that means I’m working an extra half hour every day for nothing, and damnit, I already make little enough as it is!
So today I made myself take lunch. I don’t actually eat lunch on my lunch break, because that would mean either heating up my leftover turkey soup and wasting time sitting in our grimy breakroom while I shovel it down, or heating up my leftover turkey soup and then wasting time trying to find some pleasant spot where I can sit outside and shovel it down, so instead I heat up my leftover turkey soup and return to my desk and shovel it down while reading email. That way I get my full half hour (and no one’s watching or timing me, so I really just take however long I want) to engage in whatever relatively close escapist efforts for which I am currently in the mood.
Today’s lunch brought a visit to the gallery I visit every month to check out their latest exhibit (and this month’s was particularly cool) and then I headed to a nearby bookstore to browse (and inevitably buy). I decided that if I found something that I wanted I would let myself buy it and not think too hard about it as long as I could come up with a quick initial justification as to why buying it made better sense than just checking it out from the library. And indeed, I bought two books* and mentally added several others to my “To Read (and therefor to be checked out from the library) List.”
I spent a long time touching the blank journals and trying to come up with a good excuse to buy one, but in the end I couldn’t. I have no specific purpose in mind for a blank journal (and I tried to tell myself that the fact that I wanted one so badly was excuse enough even if I had no specific use for it, but apparently I did not concur) and the one purpose I could come up with, the idea of turning it into a “dream journal” (as in, “these are the dreams I have for my life,” not, “these are the dreams I had last night” seemed like it would only lead to anxiety every time I reread the journal and realized how much how much of a hassle my current dreams are without even having to consider all the dreams I had a month ago, or a year ago, etc….although now that I think about it, it might be kind of interesting to see what I was dreaming about a year ago, because I’m pretty sure my priorities have shifted.
But anyway, if I want to keep a dream journal I have another journal at home that, while not nearly as pretty, is a hell of a lot more free. And the conversation about where to track my dreams is really a distraction from the real point, which is that I need to get back to having some dreams, and, even more importantly, I need to start doing some things to get those dreams going.
I blogged about this a while back (although I don’t think I posted it), about how my process of pursuing my dreams and interests and whatnot is a lot like breathing, in that I breathe in all my new interests and all the energetic effort to pursue them, but I can only breathe in so deeply before I need to breathe out again, which is where my energetic effort pauses until I breathe in again. I used to berate myself for this cycle because I never recognized it as a cycle, and instead I just got angry because I saw myself as quitting or failing or stopping in some way, not just pausing. Now I realize that this is just the way I work, this is probably how everybody works, and I can accept the ebbs and flows.
I’ve been breathing out a while now and I definitely feel ready to breathe in. I thought I was going to breathe in when I started kung fu, but my surgery and the resulting recovery time forced me to postpone that effort until the next beginner cycle comes around, so I guess, I don’t know, that I’ve been holding my breath until distractions cleared up and suddenly I find that my lungs are about to burst. Or maybe “burst” isn’t the right word since that implies that I have all this pent up energy that I’m dying to focus toward my latest projects and interests, when really it’s more that I’m recognizing that my coffers are looking a bit empty, and so it’s time to restock.
*And now that I’ve looked those books up on Amazon so that I could link to them I feel mildly annoyed with myself for not just waiting and ordering them used off Amazon (which is how I usually buy books) because I could have saved so much money and because I would have discovered the Fast Food book, which would have been of far greater interest to my four year old, the target audience for whom I bought the Food Play book. SIGH. Oh well, at least I supported an independent bookstore.)