Sinking

Pin It Sometimes I feel a little as though I'm sinking. The ocean is named Everyday, and I am beset with seaweedy tendrils of Tasks that cling to my calves and tug. My life preserver is Time, but it's pocked with nibbles and missing chunks. More often than not, I find it floating an absurd distance away, and must hasten to catch up. Sometimes I sleep when I reach it, only to awaken and find another missing piece.

As I type, I look over the top of my laptop and see a floor covered with neatly folded laundry. It's been sitting there for three days, waiting for the last load to finish being washed, dried, and folded so everything can be put away at once, instead of in fitful spurts.

Laundry doesn't end. It doesn't go away.

I have homework to do for this stinking class that I only signed up for to get a discount on software.

I have breakfast dishes to wash.

Supper to cook.

Children to chauffeur to practice and home again, home again.

Jiggity jig.

I would actually enjoy mopping my floors, since that hasn't been done in a week or maybe two...I forget.

I am adrift in a sea of "need to," hampered and held down by waves of "want to." I want to sit and wallow, for just a little while, in a book or a nap. I want to order some vegetables and plant a garden. I want to decorate my house for spring, go scout out some stories with my camera, and eat bananas foster until I puke.

I think what I really want is to need to do nothing.

A life driven by necessity is no fun. This is why yesterday Autumn and I went to see Alice in Wonderland, Tasks be hanged. Could there be any better reminder of what it is to live freely, outside of the stupor of "must" and "have to"? Alice learned a magical lesson in suspending reality, embracing her own alternative desires, and doing for herself instead of the one-hundred other people that surrounded her.

It was a good reminder, well-worth a missing chunk of Time.

Speaking of which...I have forty-five minutes before I need to leave to pick the kids up from school. (Yes...another "need to"...one I think I'd get in trouble for abandoning.) I'm thinking dishes and laundry can wait.