Each day of this mid February calendar week holds a different celebration. So, how do we handle the time between social calls to duty on the day?
Today is Lunar New Year with all the gallantry and power of the Year of the Horse. Ramadan begins shortly with shorter fasts as it returns to winter months, Black History Month continues and many more on the Canadian calendar alone.
But in British Columbia we’ve just come off a long weekend with Valentine’s Day on the 14th and Family Day on the 16th. Reflecting on the gift of time a long weekend brings, I spent mine relaxing and joyfully cleaning my nest, then doing some batch cooking in my kitchen. I engaged all of me beyond the usual technology portals by promenading in the same neighbourhood I walk in daily but took different routes to feed our novelty seeking brain. I acknowledged Valentine’s Day though I usually say, Happy Hearts Day so that all are included, who might benefit from basking in love, not just the romantically paired. Most significantly, I took time to hand write messages of the heart and of family history to the people closest to me.
On a forray out I saw that the very next day the stores that carry seasonal cards and confections had marked down everything and had already restocked for Easter…. I am sure St. Patrick’s Day will also feature prominently in colour if not in candy and cards!
Stores that carry both food and flowers, had love already on sale at a 35% discount. From the produce section, I noticed several women walking out with multiple bunches of flowers. I like to think it’s not that they didn’t get any flowers and candy on V-Day, but that they were sharing love – with other sisters in society, family members and maybe even sick bed visits for shut-ins who always benefit from colour to balance the white sheets and starch of their recovery spaces. In any case, each of the buyers were smiling as they left, embracing all their blooms as if they were handed to them on an Olympic podium. (Perhaps they were enacting Miley Cyrus’s song: Flowers)
Yes, the Olympics were also on! While not glued to screens, I was happy to cheer on teams representing the country of my birth, the country of my lifelong citizenship and the country that is my spiritual home.
Valentine’s Day segues into a family memory
My first Valentine themed gift was from my sister. I was about 8 and she being 15 years older gave me a card with hearts on it and folden inside, a white silky acetate scarf with a red border and distinct, medium sized red polka dots. She has no memory of that gift in the 1960s, but I cherish it when it comes to mind and on ‘occasion.’
She excels in selecting just the right message in a card and good at matching a gift to the recipient. Her time and effort are clear when you hold the results of her search for you. I think it started in Elmwood, our first Canadian home behind the grocery store our father rented. It was then a neighbourhood on both the other side of the Red River from most of our cultural community and my future friends and school mates. It was two buses and lots of walking to a school that was safer for me and my brother (who tested the local bullies) and it was also on the wrong side of the “railway tracks” pervasive in Winnipeg.
Time adjustments due to the space of a long weekend
Did you feel like your time was well spent on a long weekend?
Sometimes the slogan from a comedy channel is spot on: Time Well Wasted. Sometimes we don’t need to go go go filling in gaps of time with productivity. Why not leave time to reconnect with being bored or spontaneous and unplanned. On the long weekend, I partook of both guilt free wandering and well spent time.
Listened to online courses I paid for recently or long ago… instead of YouTube or the short form sensory candy of Instagram, Facebook Reels and so on
Not consuming audio visual input at accelerated speeds .. well not more than 1.25x –there will be more on why we speed through things in another post, but for now know that NOT rushing is a good thing. Easier to absorb and implement, and easier on our energy and spirits.
No family nearby to celebrate with. Not the members I’d prefer to hang out with or feel totally safe and energized with. The few sprinkled around the Lower Mainland – were attending a family wedding in the Dominican Republic so that was that.
Other ways to connect
Instead, I reflected on my closest family. The one I was born into and the one I birthed into this world. I jotted things I wanted to say for a long time in one case and something entertaining yet instructive to another. My thoughts put my arms around three generations that I can contact as they are very much alive on the planet with me now.
You might wonder: Why did I have to jot down a kind of draft in advance if writing to family? Because I want to write these letters with intention but also great heart. Those messages will be transmitted with my brain’s guidance of my hand, manually. My handwritten letters will not have spellcheck (or even white out!) so that means being very intentional so that my comments do not roam unbridled across the entire landscape of the paper. Plus, my penmanship has declined so while I wish to be authentic, I must also be efficient and preserve energy and ability to complete my missives legibly. It’s that important.
I also feel once some ideas and their attendant feelings will be processed and perhaps purged, I will regain the bandwidth and motivation to write far more articles of import in my Living to Deadline series.
Clarity comes from action.
Action absorbs anxiety.
Back to time spent in productive mode
I have been high on imput for quite some time, loading more and more information into my head and my archives both paper and digital. Time to pause input and reverse the being low on the application.
Sometimes you need a lot of unstructured, not programmed time we fill with social invitations, daily duties or expectations from any source, to just rest and ‘sit’ in it.
I never understood when therapists hired or simply viewed on line would say: Now, just feel it and sit with that feeling. Many of us are so ‘busy’ we don’t take time to feel, and some don’t recognize true feelings.
As for therapists, some were tuned in… but in my case, most did more harm than offer good insights or implementation advice. Sometimes it is good to simply sit alone on a long break of a weekend and let all the parts find each other.
What do you think about how you spend your elongated breaks?
