Get dressed, put in contacts, brush teeth
Coffee, breakfast
Change, bathe, dress baby
nurse
Read the Bible online
Surf ChristianityToday.com
get distracted
CBE/CBMW: look up all the references? study?
Topical Bible study?
Prayer life?
Exercise? Go to the mall and walk? Situps? Buy an exercise bike? Used? Craisglist? Freecycle? When we have a job again?
Fold the laundry
Pay bills
Make more coffee
Learn to cook- healthy? Cheap? Tasty? Organize recipes? Learn to plan a grocery list on a budget with a menu in mind? Wash dishes. Clean the kitchen.
Catch up on photos. Find an efficient way to upload to Snapfish and get prints. Photo Christmas cards? Christmas newsletter? e-letters save postage, lack charm. Photo gifts for grandparents? 3-month blog post with pictures.
Reading. CS Lewis. Goodreads.com. Set Reading Goals. Write about what you're reading in blog. Abandoned Perelandra entry; entry about Perelandra entry. Resume? Or just keep moving?
Spend some time with Nate. Without the baby?
Call some friends. Make plans to get together.
Ministry? Resume nursery? Or something a little more gutsy. Outreach? Witnessing?
Crafts. Sewing things for the baby. Christmas quilt?
Celtic Christmas music. Fireplaces. Learn to sing better? Learn the words to more hymns.
Figure out some activities with a 3-month-old.
Resume study of maths? Begin where we always begin again: at the end of the Calculus book.
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These, and many more things, are on my mind. These are why I haven't been blogging.
Life overwhelms me with its choices sometimes. And because I cannot engage in 5 activities all at once, at time I become paralysed, doing little or nothing.
I am like a five year old, released in a giant room with 1,000,000 toys. There are so many to play with that I just stand there, unable to choose.
I'm not unhappy; on the contrary, I am joyful and peaceful and thankful for everything that I have. My brain just seems to me fundamentally wired in such a way that I struggle with deciding what to do on a daily basis. And because I cannot seem to make decisions about what is most important- because I cannot prioritize- I often have the sensation of living my life randomly, of filling my time randomly instead of purposefully and intentionally. I give myself an F for time management skills. I crave more structure, an ability to make decisions about time in some capacity beyond Randomness.
Today I feel like the main character in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," so overwhelmed by the millions of possibilities of life that I cannot function like a normal person.
I have so many options for what to do that I have nothing to do.
Don't worry. Again, I'm not unhappy. The sensation has come before and it will, no doubt, pass.
Neb
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3 comments:
I frequently have this sensation at work. So many things I could be doing, and some days I just don't know where to start.
Sometimes I think it's not bad to live serendipitously. To take what comes and enjoy it, and not worry if it's necessarily The Very Best Thing I Could Be Doing With My Time Right Now. Then if you find that something important is getting neglected, you set aside some time to focus on just that. I suspect that most things, even important things, aren't as urgent as we make them out to be. You get around to the important stuff sooner or later, and the unimportant stuff... is unimportant.
~Vivian
I suggest not worrying about the "find recipes and plan a menu and a food budget" thing. Recipe loving and pre-planned-meal people get all caught up in the fact that they are satisfying the virtue of being organized. They usually they miss that they aren't using the best system to save money and time. What you need to do is learn to cook flexibly and use what you have around. This is harder, but it is the way that people cooked before supermarkets came along, after all. Tomatoes out of season? No fresh tomatoes for you. We pay for having things we whenever we want them rather than waiting for when it is best to get them.
Common wisdom says to know what you want before you shop, not just look for good deals and buy them. That advice is good for keeping us from buying durable goods and kitsch we don't need, but it is wrong for necessary consumable goods not purchased in excess. If you're not using more just because you have more and you're not wasting due to spoilage, shopping for deals on food rather than to fill a meal plan actually saves money, because you use everything you buy and you've gotten it all cheaply. The food can't be budgeted weekly in this kind of system, obviously, but over a couple of months you'll see that the aggregate prices are pretty stable.
Our kitchen always has a stockpile of raw ingredients that I buy when I see that they are cheap. I cook partially based just on what's in the kitchen from day to day. On a good week, besides replenishing the supply I come home with what we need to make two to four specific meals. Sometimes I do want to cook something and my supplies can't do it, so I go shopping. If I can't replenish the necessary supplies cheaply enough, I will wait weeks, eating other perfectly good food, rather than spend the extra money to make what I want right now. I cook on general principles rather than specific recipes, but you can do this with recipes, too, by just getting an encyclopedia of them into your head over time.
Maybe I could give you a lesson in stockpiling and spontaneous meal planning? Those people on Iron Chef aren't geniuses, they just have big piles of ingredients, expert knowledge of general cooking principles and recipes, and a lot of practice.
Or you could do it the Nanowrimo way: toss everything out the window and write a novel.
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