I love the fatigue that comes with a sense of achievement
I’ve been flat out the last couple of days. This is a rare thing for me — at least in the last few years. And it feels good. I’m going to bed tired but satisfied. I am, to put it bluntly, pleased with myself.
One of the things I am most pleased about is that, even though yesterday was a ten hour day with work, I still posted to Medium. There was a time not long ago when I would have claimed fatigue and missed my daily target — even though it’s self-imposed — and possibly given up on the whole daily post for a year thing.
But I didn’t.
And here I am again today after another day of working at client stuff. I even had someone round to the house tonight who needed help with something and we talked for over an hour.
It’s also worth mentioning — for my own self-esteem — that before I started on all that client work today, I spent an hour working on my novel, too. As I did yesterday.
Ahem. I shall stop blowing my own trumpet now: I can hear the neighbours banging on the wall.
This is a lesson that I have learned many times in my life. And because I’m not quite as smart as I think I am, I need to keep learning these lessons. One day, they may stick. The lesson in question is this: when I’m busy, I get more done.
I don’t even regard that as a paradox any more. In fact, it makes perfect sense. My energy is high and carries over between tasks. I switch from one to another and there is no time to get bored or pick my teeth or browse the web or count carrots in the vegetable basket. (That last isn’t really something I do.) I haven’t checked Facebook more than twice today, either! Give the man a cigar.
And as is the way when things go well and the universe aligns with Jupiter in Mars or some such, I also got a call from an old friend in Beverley Hills. We were at university in Scotland together for a year. It turned out we shared a sense of humour and a birth date. For the last 38 years we have kept in sporadic touch. In fact, the last few years has seen the frequency of contact grow, which is probably a result of age. The upshot of the call was that we may try and arrange a meeting in Edinburgh next June. So that was a great way to end a busy but productive day.
So, the world may be going to hell in a neoliberal handcart but there are still simple pleasures to be found in doing good work and reaching out to friends.
I shall go to bed now and read for a while and feel smug and try to keep the fear that everything will change again tomorrow at bay.
