My wife’s parents have a cottage in New Brunswick and I love it here. If you’re not sure what a “cottage” is, some people call it a camp. It’s a second home away from the city. It sounds like a real luxury when I put it like that…and it is. It’s on a lake. It’s pretty far off the beaten track and when they bought it back in the 80’s it was just a cabin on a piece of land. It has evolved and grown since then and it has become a much beloved get away.
I have just spent a week here opening up the cottage for the summer season as it is closed up for the winter. I love to come out here on my own and have some time by myself. There’s always a lot to do to clean it up and as my in-laws get older and all this work gets harder I’m really happy to step in to take that off their plate because it gives me this opportunity to just be here and today is my last day.
I came here with a list of things that needed to be done and it felt like I would be able to spend a lot of time writing. Things never seem to work out the way that I plan. I was able to get a lot done, but the bulk of that productivity was dedicated to little projects around the cottage. I’m the kind of person who will sit down to write and see that there is something about the screen door that could be fixed and I spend the next three days trying to figure out how I can fix it. Or the way the clothesline is hung will bug me and I will try to think of how it can be improved. I can perseverate a little bit on these things. It is distracting to say the least.
So, while this week has been good to get some things done and also a disappointment as far as writing goes, it has also been a good learning opportunity. I get irritated sometimes by not having more figured out about life than I do. I’m almost 50. When I was a kid I thought that most people the age I am now had everything in place and were following their well-worn paths. Sometimes I feel like I’m still wandering around like a starry-eyed 20 year-old – except unlike the 20 year-old I also have this sense of panic about the almost 30 years that I have used up since I was 20. It wears me out.
The thing that become very clear to me this week is that I have a very warped sense of time and what I will be able to accomplish in a given period of time. I almost always look at something that I want to get done and underestimate the amount of time it will take me. This is not a terrible thing, but what makes it bad for me is that even though I have this tendency and even though I know that I have this tendency, it still frustrates and discourages me when I don’t get as much done as I would like.
It is this pattern of underestimating my time and then beating myself that I don’t get as much done as I had hoped that has become apparent to me on this trip. It is compounded by my other tendency to procrastinate and on occasion to lose significant chunks of time on pointless and frivolous activities – like playing games on my phone, or watching YouTube shorts debunking the flat earth theory.
Yes, I could do better with my management of time and with my expectations of what is possible, but I think the way that I allow this challenge to get me down puts me in a negative space where it’s almost as if I set myself up to fail. To be honest, I’m ashamed of myself a lot of the time. When I put it in writing it sounds awful, and I think I’ve just gotten used to it. I picked up my journal yesterday to try and start a new habit of regular posting and I was conscious that I dread writing in my journal because it feels like I’m always performing some kind of a post mortem – why I didn’t get this done or spend enough time on this or that. It’s depressing, and it’s really not helpful. I’m always resolving to do better and dissecting the reasons I didn’t do as “better” as I wanted the last time I made that resolution.
So, maybe I didn’t get as much done this week as I planned, but this is my second post since I got here. I’ve started writing in my journal (two days is a start right?) and I’m not going to beat myself up. I’m not going to hold myself to some standard I can’t meet and I’m going to do my best to just keep starting over again when I push things off.
It’s also worth celebrating some of the small stuff I do get done. One of the smallest projects I completed was also one of the ones I felt the most pleased about. My mother-in-law loves barbecuing with charcoal and a few years back she bought a basic unit and we have enjoyed it but I always noticed that it was a bit wobbly. If I wanted to move it, the thing would rock in a way that made it feel like it wasn’t solid. So last year, after some inspection I noticed that two screws were missing. I don’t know if they were missed but they weren’t there. My first thought was to see if I could order some replacements from the company – no luck. So this week I took out one of the screws that was in place and took it to the hardware store to see if I could find a match – and I did. It was easy, and now the barbecue doesn’t rock. It’s a small thing but it’s often the kind of small thing that just never gets done and for some reason I find it so satisfying. I will just go up to the barbecue and give it a little wiggle just to feel the new rigidity. Small things.
Even this one post. It’s a small thing, but it’s good and I want to enjoy it more and to fret the things I don’t do a lot less.
[Just did a last read-through of this post and it’s not perfect. I could spend a few more hours on this post just tweaking and thinking about how to pull it together. I could also spend hours doing that and end up not posting at all. There is definitely a place for excellence and for holding back until something is just right, but for me, at this time in my life, it is time to just get things out, warts and all. It’s worth it.]
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