So CW is now past tense in my life (which does indeed mean that I am no longer working in theatre), UWBA is eating my head in a pretty good way (the two are not entirely unrelated) and I am slowly endeavouring to make my way back into the world of People With Social Lives. Been doing okay with that, actually... Last weekend was Rening it up with friends (no pics, and I'm not sorry), this weekend was getting my Beatle on with more friends and will soon be enjoying quality programming.
What does all this mean? Does removing one large time commitment from my life automatically entail putting other commitments in its place? Perhaps. There's this regular thing in life, where there don't seem to be enough hours in the day to do everything that might be fun or worthwhile. Removing one appointment really does mean that there are a dozen others, more or less, to fill in the gap. And there is a luxury right now, here, of a surplus of interesting happenings anywhere I look. Maybe it just means that I'm still interested in too much.
The book group I've recently joined just read Shoes Outside the Door, which is about the San Francisco Zen Center. It's non-fiction, though I have a feeling it's a similar type of journalism as what used to be really popular in the 1920s: sensationalist, less interested in telling the facts than in selling itself. One of the things we were talking about, in discussing this book, was how all these people were (are) so willing to spend hours daily practicing. Practice is sitting. Not praying, not doing anything but sitting. And were were discussing what else could be done in that hour spent sitting every morning (which, considering it was as something like 5 am, would include sleeping) which all got me thinking.
Each individual is unique. What we value is as unique as how we would solve problems, and how we choose to spend our time is based on what we value. I can't fathom just sitting for two hours, but the three hours I spent just lying outside yesterday, sometimes reading sometimes staring at an infinite sky, I did not consider that time wasted. Perhaps not well-used, but certainly not wasted.
These things are all based on choice, on what we want, on what individual priorities are. Is there actually a way any of these can be wrong? I really don't think there is. Unwise, perhaps. Selfish, certainly. Destructive, probably. But wrong? No more so than preferring daisies to roses can be wrong.
So I'm embracing the opportunities to spend time with work friends outside work, to rekindle friendships left banking, to join new groups and maybe gain new skills (guess who has a drop spindle...). There's a new project on the needles, new tennis shoes in my near future, and lots of books to read and (yes, even) television programmes to watch.
Let's see how this goes, shall we?
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