Time

Sometimes I feel like I never have enough TIME. It seems to be slipping away from me (like in Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory painting) despite my most valiant efforts to "manage" it.

But time management is just an illusion -- it marches on, no matter what I do. I certainly cannot control the march of time itself -- all I can hope to do is to wisely use the time that I do have. My problem is that I expect to do way too much...

I'm a fairly hard-working person, keeping busy with many projects at home and at work. After a hectic day of teaching, running errands, cooking, etc., I'm either exhausted enough to just go to sleep, or else I sit down with some knitting, sewing, or laundry-folding. Working with my hands does relax me -- it may seem like nervous energy to an outsider (can't she just have her hands still for a change?), but it actually helps me unwind...

For some reason, I go thru periods where I'm super critical of myself (I feel I can't get my work done -- the household is going to pieces...), when I feel like a failure. Not only am I falling short of being a good german "Hausfrau", I'm not even managing to be a loving mom and wife! Suddenly the messes in the kitchen, the shoes & boots strewn over the entryway, the piles in the garage are just driving me NUTS. In a way, during those (PMS?) moments, I lose all perspective over what really matters in life. Time, or the lack thereof, looms very large.

Here I am at the end of busy week with 2 birthdays, and at work I'm organizing the children's Halloween events -- there's lots to do, and I've got to keep on top of a lot of stuff. But I'll get thru it -- I always do! What will I do when I get to the other side of this task? Relax? How?

This reminds me of a passage in Antoine St.Exupery's The Little Prince.
He meets an inventor with a pill that replaces the need to drink water. He says, "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week."
The little prince asks him, "What would I do with those fifty-three minutes?"
"Anything you like..."
"As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."