Today I spent quite a lot of time skiing alone. Something I don’t do very often, but it was quite delightful. Cold, bright, great snow….and what I wasn’t expecting, lots of peaceful thinking time on long drag lifts on my own in the sunshine. I have to say it was a bit of a revelation. I felt a sense of freedom and possibility that I haven’t felt for ages. And sitting and doing nothing but waiting for lifts to take me back up the mountain several things became clear.

Firstly I realized – this one wasn’t very hard – that two of the elements of my blog title have been all but missing for the last few months. There’s been loads of knitting and tons of quilting going on, but not a whole lot of running due to injuries and sickness and more to the point, no writing whatsoever, if I don’t count writing the blog.

And yet those are two things that I really want to do – and could do without all that much effort. They’re both things that I think are part of me, that at the moment have fallen by the wayside a bit, but which I actually think should be quite important in my life.

My second revelation was that I never have any thinking time. I’m very good at cutting down on things to create more time to do the things I want to do, but I’m also a real pro at filling up that time again. I actually have a fair bit of time to myself during the day when the kids are out at school, but I’d hesitate a guess that no more than 5 nanoseconds of that is thinking time. I fill it: I knit, I sew, I clean the house, do the laundry, listen to a lot of audio books, work, read…the list goes on. I am always, always busy doing something.

Sitting alone on a lift today I realized that my head is brim full of ideas, for books, projects, all sorts of things, but at the moment there is really  no space or time for them to come out. If I’m always cramming in more things, then nothing that’s inside will ever be able to come out.

So…what’s the plan?

I haven’t run alone in years – I have great running buddies and never need to run alone, but I think I’m going to start, just once or twice a week. All by myself with my thoughts. And maybe then, they’ll come out and I can make something of them. There’s a part of my life that isn’t being lived right now and I’d like to create some space and see what happens. Maybe there’ll be nothing at the end of it, but I won’t know until I give it a go.

Helen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.