It's been a minute

My friends at wordpress.com send an email once a week, per the original goals I set, reminding me that it's been a minute since I last wrote.  The email is one in a long string that serve to remind me I'm not getting it all done.  Some weeks I see the email, delete the email, and move on.  Some weeks I  keep the email in my inbox, type "write today" in my task list, and come back to that same task list time and again to add but hardly to subtract.  There is it again - irony - rearing its head.  I began my blog to have a space to clear my head, but darn it if sometimes it isn't another pressure point. On the bright side when I do finally get to "write" even just opening the web page to allyoucandoblog.com calms me.  I made it here and the next few minutes are mine alone.  I'm reading a book at the moment all about our overly scheduled lives, and within the pages I found an aha moment.  Research shows that mothers with part time work outside the home (the best way to describe my actual 9-5 breakdown) denote more stress than mothers who work full time either within or outside the home.  And then the author roughly described my days showing such a broken work pattern that it is difficult to finish any one thing leaving a constant nature of undoneness.  Now I did fall asleep shortly after reading that section and haven't found time in the past four days to return to my book, but somehow simply reading that passage made me feel better.  Like hey you aren't alone.  There are enough people with my wacky work pattern that someone had actually taken the time to research and report findings on us.

The way I create solutions is to make the problem very black and white.  So my problem is my work schedule is too broken up leaving me with a constant level of stress and anxiety for what is not being done.  There is no magic bullet, but I'm taking some positive steps to change.  First I made a difficult decision to let go of my yoga teaching schedule on Tuesday mornings.  I also redefined my marathon training schedule by joining a Wednesday evening track work group and commiting to running no more than 3 hours weekly during Stella's school days.  So two shorter runs or one long run per week between 9am-3pm, but everything else must happen early morning or late evening.

I'm the queen of feeling guilty for breaking into my family time with personal pursuits be it teaching yoga, working out, doing studio work, investing in myself, etc. but when I do it most always pays off.  Balance. balance. balance.