Time and Energy

I don't know if I've hit on this yet or not, but I'm finding that, for the first time in my life, I truly do not have time for the things that I want to accomplish.

I've certainly used the excuse of not having time for things in the past, but, as a general rule, it almost always actually meant that I didn't the energy. I had time up the wazoo, but if I was too overburdened with other stressors-- and, hint, I always was-- I didn't have the energy to do anything productive with that time.

I'm still a very low-energy person in general. That hasn't changed. I still need a great deal of downtime to just...attempt, in futility, to summon the strength the face the world at large.

But it's not clear to me that, at this point, it would matter if I didn't. In the past month or so, I have, quite ambitiously, added the following daily goals to my routine: exercising, writing, mediation. I also have this clear sense that, if I'm going to live without Zack, I need to be in more regular contact with him, albeit from 3,000 miles away. I care about the job I have now far more than jobs I've cared about in the past, in terms of making it into a career, so this tends to somehow monopolize a lot more of my time than I'd guess, given that it really is just a forty-hour thing: theoretically no more, theoretically no less.

And then there's, you know, a baby.

I don't know. Maybe it is still an energy thing. If I didn't need any down time at all, there would be enough time in the day to work, exercise, write, meditate, and spend at least an hour of quality time with him-- whatever that is. Of course, other things would continue to get totally cut out: cooking, cleaning, upkeep of the very old, very needy dog. I'm sure I wouldn't magically have time to make my relationship somehow work.

But I can't actually pretend that I have no need of down time at all. And I certainly can't continue to sacrifice sleep.

It literally pains me to leave this post in awkward state where it feels like it didn't accomplish anything, but I am so. Goddamn. Tired.

I keep staying up just a little bit later than I mean to to get these posts in. Then my sleep cycle is screwed, I spend the next day tired, and what gets sacrificed is everything else. I did manage to mediate earlier today-- as well grocery shopping, and I got in some actual social time with a real life human being that I don't live with for the first time in months-- but my exercise routines have really started to suffer. Three out of the past four days have been lacking a truly meaningful amount of exercise, and the day I did manage, it was a really long walk, which...it counts, I guess, but I have trouble giving myself props when I don't break a sweat.

So for tonight, I'm going to have to put this on the chopping block: obviously not totally, not officially. But tonight, I'm going to have to settle for an average post that any old person could have written. No moving emotion, no epiphany, perhaps not even a callback to the beginning of the post. At this point in my life, I truly do not have the time.

Day...8, I think. On with it.