Seize The Day

Crafting, sunburn and carpe-ing that diem

Our two-day Craft Sale is now over - we called time on it early today as things were so slow, and our catalogue of crafted goodies are back in their boxes for future craft sales. Barbara could easily open her own craft store with what we still have in hand, so she’ll be looking to participate in other craft sales and/or be selling stuff online. There wasn’t a great turnout, despite advertising online and putting up flyers locally, but honestly, it was seriously hot yesterday and threatened rain regularly today, so we had the worst of both worlds in that respect.

The view from behind the craft tables on the first day. (Please excuse my interloping flask of cold water, but I can’t move 10 feet in these temperatures without drinking my body weight in fluids.)

Steen crewing the craft tables this morning.

Of course, I managed to injure myself again - well, not injure as such, but I’m clearly having a problem with my knees this year, as I’ve now managed to sunburn them (despite sitting in the shade on a cloudy day - hey, I’m English, and only have two skin settings: beet red and cave-dweller white)…

Oopsie. Making a mental note to get some sunscreen on if I do that again! (Note the vast improvement to my war wound from day two of our break, though.)

Otherwise, it’s been a fairly chill time over the weekend. There was a certain amount of trucking around the nearby stores, but also plenty of time to sit back, relax, read, listen to some music (really enjoying the new Epica album (Aspiral) now that I’ve had some time to digest it) and, er, plan out three terms worth of team training for work (I can sense J— rolling her eyes as she reads this, haha). Well, it’ll save me some time and typing when I get home!

As predicted, after a couple of weeks that seem to have passed pretty slowly, time seems to be speeding up: we’ve already got four days of the next five mapped out, and then it’ll be time to set off down to Pennsylvania, where we’re staying for a week with Charlie and Barbara, and two of our oldest ‘online friends’, R— and his wife L—. Honestly, it blows my mind how long we’ve been friends with some of the people we originally met online. We’ve known R— and L— for nearly 30 years now; R— was Best Man at our wedding… Don’t listen to anyone who says that people you initially meet online can’t be every bit as much ‘real friends’ as the people you meet ‘IRL’ - it’s nonsense. Your vibe attracts your tribe, even online - in fact, perhaps especially online, where geography and social convention do not apply - and clearly our vibe is not lacking, judging from our particular tribe.

Then, with our Pennsylvanian excursion over, it’ll be time to drive back to New York state… at which point we’ll have just two days left here, most of which will be spent packing and travelling back to the city. So our time definitely feels like it’s running low, now. Which I realize sounds preposterous, really - we’ll have been here a month, after all; a whole twelfth of a year. But this is something that I’m noticing more and more as I get older: time feels like it’s running through your fingers like sand because it is. Maybe this is at least part of the personal transformation I was talking about before. I’ve reached an age now (OK, not a considerable age by any means, I’m not an old fart just yet, but…) where there are clearly less days ahead than there are behind, and the idea of putting anything off until tomorrow seems utterly ridiculous. Why put anything off, good or bad? Sooner now, than later. So a slowly growing list of things I’ve always wanted to do has become a list of things I’m no longer willing to put off. I don’t want to be thinking about missed opportunities later, I want to jump in there now, when I have more time to enjoy them.

Not for the first time, I’m reminded of Pink Floyd’s Time, surely one of the best songs about growing older ever penned:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

It’s such a simple observation, but it’s as devastating as it is because it’s so true. When the years stretch out before us it’s easy to fall into that pattern of thinking where you say to yourself “Ah, it’s OK, I have all the time in the world to do <x>”. But you can put things off and put things off, and suddenly you don’t have all the time in the world to do that thing after all. How many missed opportunities stack up for us all because we’ve fallen into that trap? I know I have more than my fair share. I still have time - not all the time in the world, but time enough - and more than ever, I feel done with “ah, I can always do that tomorrow.” Because tomorrow often just never arrives. Or, as one of my work colleagues would have it, "Just do it. You could be dead tomorrow!”

Cheery stuff, eh? I don’t say these things to be depressing; far from it. Recognizing this tendency gives me some power over that inertia. There’s a lot to be said for seizing the day. Carpe diem, people. If a world-class procrastinator like me can learn to seize the day, so can you.