Slow down and enjoy the journey

Just before I got married last year I caught myself wishing that my wedding day would hurry up and come round so that it would be over. I was shocked (even though it was at myself!) and disappointed that rather than being unable to wait for it to come round and savouring every moment, I wanted all the organisation elements over and done with and the sooner it got to the day and everything went to plan, the better!

If I am honest, that’s how my entire life is run. Everything has a ‘sell-by-date’ at which point my life will be easier because of XYZ. Of course, no sooner has that deadline come and gone and the next ones are looming large. Everything done on a daily basis is a means to an end, rather than me actually enjoying it at the time, for the sake of it and with abandon. Maybe it’s to do with my protestant background, as ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’ was drummed in to me as a child. Recreation was a dirty word as it was associated with doing nothing. If my brother kicked a football he was ‘practising’, if my mother made a cake she was ‘making the tea’ and if my father was in the garden he was ‘doing the vegetable patch’. It probably explains why reading was so frowned upon. Unless it was a school book it was basically doing nothing; the thought that I might actually be lying on my bed enjoying a Jilly Cooper novel (yup, appalling, I know but I was a teenager) was enough to enrage my mother to provoke me. I’d be immediately assigned something to ‘do’ if she caught me, such as dusting or hoovering or basically being busy. Her house was spotless. I didn’t realise at the time as she was never satisfied with the state of it and instilled in me a sense of dissatisfaction at even the most perfectly executed thing. Now when I go to other people’s homes and see things lying around, a slightly sticky table or a curtain that needs rehung, I don’t think ‘dirty, filthy bastards’ but instead accept that a family home will never be pristine. Equally, I can see that ‘lived in’ means ‘loved in’ though I struggle every day with my thoughts to accept that.

On my way home last night I was thinking about going on a run when I got in, but my plans were thwarted when my train was diverted and I had to get off at a station about 40mins walk from my house instead. I canned the run idea and decided to speedwalk home instead, then started thinking of things I could do on the walk to make the most of the time (get money for cleaner from cashpoint in case you don’t have any – I did – pick up some groceries from M&S – even though you have tonight’s dinner in the fridge). Basically, I couldn’t settle until I had made something of that impromptu walk, instead of just going with the flow. On my walk I got a text from my cleaner asking to swap her weekly shift to a different time. That was the final straw for me, and I decided she’d given me the perfect excuse to get rid of her permanently. I did it nicely – I didn’t say yes or no but told her I’d think about it and leave a note, which I did saying thanks but K will be working from home now (a white lie) and can’t have the disruption.

This left me with a dilemma. What next? Return to the situation we were in beforehand (me ‘blitz’ cleaning the flat periodically to within an inch of its life, letting it fester for weeks then doing it again, refusing to let K get involved as he’d never get it right) or employing a new cleaner who, let’s face it would be as unlikely to live up to my standards as the poor girl who has just got the chop. K proposed we split the cleaning when I mentioned it later and we decided to stop discussing it in case it led to a row after I made it clear he too would give me more grief with his ‘ways’ than doing it myself.

I torment myself with the smallest things and create the ‘work’ that I (and often only I!) consider needs done. If someone else is doing something for me, guaranteed I will feel disappointment at the end, having discovered a minor flaw or imperfection, always with a sense of ‘I’d have been better off doing it myself’.

Basically, it’s time I learnt to let go. I can’t bear chaos and I loathe slovenliness, yet aspiring to perfection and order creates a never-ending to do list. In my head I have a ‘one day’ scenario, when all these things that need done are done and then I can relax. Obviously that day will never come – partly because I keep generating things that need done and partly because when one thing is complete I start looking for the problems with it. Take, for example, my flat. I made a decision when my parents and I fell out to tackle all the DIY jobs needing done. I worked out pretty early on that I had neither the time nor the ability to do them myself. I also wished that my childhood weekends had not revolved around my mother’s DIY projects. My dad worked an extremely long week and then, come the weekend, her jobs list came out and he was hard at it again before he had time to swap his suit for an old t-shirt. So I opted to pay someone to do it. The first was a disaster and I handed him money to finish it off and not come back! The second has been a relative success in that the work was done to an adequate standard. However, all the little niggly things that I see remind me every day that I didn’t get the level of service I expected and it irritates. I know it shouldn’t, but it does.

I have to learn to let go, live and let live and accept that everything in life is imperfect. Blimey – just a tiny little thing then :-)