I had decided that I didn’t have time and energy to write my Blog post today. One of the best and one of the worst things about my job and my lifestyle is that I have no routine. Every week and every day is different. I guess that’s what I always wanted. All those years, even decades, when I couldn’t hold down a job because I found them ALL too mind-numbingly boring, to the point where I would feel ill and sometimes just walk out, or sometimes slowly increase my poor attendance and punctuality, and kind of drizzle out.
Looking back, I’m not surprised at my response to a severely contrived and parsimonious way of seeing and treating time; time that can be so valuable and fluid, mixed, nuanced and changing for all of us and each of us, but which modern economics regards primarily as more or less ‘profitable’. – And that is to say, primarily as quantitative, when we all know that time can equally be measured and valued in terms of qualities.
Having a job and a lifestyle with no routine, and where no week or day is ever the same is, as I say, both good and bad however. Routine can be very useful in allowing us to maximise our ‘use’ of time to create our best work. A lack of routine can also be maddening when, as this weekend, I find myself unexpectedly burdened with what seems like an impossible task and a tight deadline – hence the reason why I thought today I would not be able to write my Blog.
I have had a part-reprieve however. Thankfully we can at least try and consider the chance intervention of a possible reprieve in our calculations, though that is hard to do when our anxious mind tends to do the opposite under stress, i.e. to spider and spiral off into worst case scenarios that link ever-increasing tasks, duties, and ramifications of tasks and duties, until we simply have to stop thinking and start working to reduce the pile in front of us.
‘Stop thinking, start working’, maybe that should be a slogan pasted on my work room door, or on my computer screen. It’s true that we sometimes work best when we are not really thinking any more; when we submit to the robotics of the production line, where my short-lived teenage factory experiences may even come in handy as models.
To be honest, I’m still in two minds as to whether I should be writing a Blog post at all today. The other, huge, hurried, aforementioned task is still on my mind, and thus my mind is not fully focused on this writing here and now. Perhaps I’ve said something, enough, a little, enough at least to say that I posted this week, as usual; enough to say that I’ve maintained THIS routine, and, for the sake of anyone who reads this, your routine too. Sorry there’s not much here to contend with or respond to, but … oh well, back to work … enjoy this sunny Sunday- which, according to a nexus of modern capitalism and un-modern Christianity, is a day of rest after all.
'ONLY YOU' – A few words on Art and Life In London, by Art Writer Paul O'Kane 