Time on my hands

This was my first Monday of not working due to doing a four day week, my new regime. I say that but we all work, even if all we do is worry or dream of things we’ve left undone; our unconscious self is always fretting and never resting, like the obsessive compulsive housecleaning partner in a marriage where the other party just wants to sit out front and watch the world go by. You can’t do nothing, humans are always in motion. Even when they are dying they twitch and breath; even after they’re dead they still let out little gasps as the soul is released.

In the morning I had My List, my constant shape shifting companion with whom I start each day and who likes to amuse me by changing body, clothes, and even gender. Sometimes My List is stereotypically masculine and powerful and made up of tasks like "going to the dump" or "cleaning the workshop’. Other times it is full of those things that have traditionally been in the feminine domain such as cleaning or putting away clothes, although when I look back down my life my activities have tended to the latter. You should see me putting out clothes on a washing line, I’m a ninja, a master with pegs and senses constantly alert to the shifting of the sun and the varying caress of the wind.

I had planned to finish by ten thirty but had to force myself to stop at twelve. This was my bargain with myself; in the morning you are a human doing, in the afternoon a human being. Never that simple of course, even when sitting in a deckchair reading The Blind Assassin I had to break off to make tea, put more washing out, and eat ginger biscuits. I may make Monday afternoon tea a ritual now that it is a non working day, a time when I make offering to the gods of age for allowing me release from full time work. I shall sacrifice vegan cucumber sandwiches on the altar of Chronos (not that he was a god, more a concept in pre-Socratic times, and not to be confused with Aion); I am arguably an apprentice to Chronos as he is old and wise with a long grey beard. My beard is short but we are otherwise alike, or so I tell myself.

I did lunch with Strider; that was my trip out for the day. We had Lebanese wraps and chips in Jetta, where they make the most delicious home made lemonade, and which I decided to try and copy, so I called at Boz’s next door and came out with eight huge, unwaxed lemons and a bunch of fresh Moroccan mint; then I went to Waterstones and got seduced by Margate Atwood’s genius and came home to a seat in the shade and started to work my way through nearly six hundred pages of sheer and undiluted literary pleasure.

I grow old but I do not wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled (but only because I am in shorts). There is a world out there beyond work and I intend to seize it, incrementally for now and one day fully. It is a world of people and books and cats sleeping on summer chairs, of butterflies, of falling asleep in the shade and just listening. There is much to listen to; the soft rain of a neighbour’s automatic sprinkler, the sound of the woman next door rapping a wooden spoon on the side of a bowl as she prepares food for her children, the beat of pigeon’ s wings, the scattering of dirt from the action of a defecating cat’s paws, the inevitable sirens in the streets nearby.

I have time on my hands, and it is like dipping my arms into a beautiful spring stream and letting the water trickle down my wrists in unexpected courses. It is the joy of being.