February Thoughts...
I know it's not the end of the month yet, but we're going to be away, so I thought I would post them now.....February is a short month anyway.....
In practical terms, February has been rather busy, what with the roof coming off BWH and all....February sometimes seems to slip away anyway.
So far my book quest has been moving along quite steadily, with a trip to the library most weeks. I have tried a couple of things I just can't get into, but you can't win every time. I have read a couple of things I really liked as well, so............. I am ploughing on with a few things and must update goodreads to reflect what I've been reading lately.
Organisation and stuff has taken a few turns. I have noted Cynthia Townley Ewers book and I liked many of the concepts it contains, but it is slightly more family oriented than we are quite ready for. I did like some of her suggestions about various kinds of organisation though - they back up some of the other stuff I've picked up over time and in my mind, things feel like they are slowly gelling together into a more organised whole. I like this. I hope it's a book I'll remember and pick up again in a year or two. Yesterday I saw a tv segment that made me sit up and think about this whole thing though. It was about people who hoard. I mean, really hoard, like you can't move in their homes. It made me realise a few things about myself.
1) I have hoarding tendencies, but I do not have a serious problem. I know how to evaluate.
2) I am actually relatively organised.
This is not a comment of extremes - by seeing bad things I felt better about my things - it just gave me some perspective. I do know what i'm doing, and even if sometimes I am not so good at doing it for a week or two, I do basically know what to do and how to do it well. Secretarial training clearly pays off eventually!!
3) The biggest problem isn't always me.
Sometimes it's something I can't change and rather than beating myself up about this I should be able to recognise it and then figure out what I'm going to do about it. This is a very small house. I can't change that. I have hobbies that take up space, I can't change that either - these are just the things I like doing.
I realised also that I have done a very good job (and so have a couple of my lifes occasional detractors, frankly) of berating myself about not managing in this house, and it just isn't the truth. Sometimes in my mind I think of all the piles of things that are in our loft and garage. But you know what, I know they are there, I know what they are and most importantly, I know WHY they are there. Some of them are things we will need when we move to a larger place (like the rest of our dining chairs, which are quality and getting rid of them would be stupid, or linens I have put away in the loft. I have a lot of pictures stored in this house because here, we need the walls for shelving and storage - but those pictures are still important, and the time will come when we have places to put them. I have faith in that. On the other hand there are some things out there that need getting rid of. Fine, ok. But it's ok to keep some things, it's keeping useless things, things you really don't need or use, things that would be better off used by someone else that cause a problem. Right now as long as i know why I'm keeping something and I don't think I'm being ridiculous, I'm ok with that. Some stuff is going through a "look at me again in six months" thing, but that's ok too.
I realised that we haven't had the normal kinds of transition - where you might go from a flat to a small house to a bigger family home or whatever. We've gone from flat to flat to flat, to a smallish house to a much smaller house, and life does expand (and will expand more in the coming months) - sometimes whether you truly have physical space for that or not.
So, we will continue to make the best of what we have - hopefully without the subsuming of our selves and souls - in this place. But I will try to learn not to blame myself for the things about this problem which I cannot change but which are not my "fault". Somewhere in here I am still myself - in between everything else. And it's ok.
Still, we are thinking at least tentatively about where might be next. It's far too soon to be making applications and things, but soon enough to be thinking and talking about it. These things need a run-in period anyway. Who knows where we will end up?