I’ve become detached from the strict flow of a business day and a work week.
I am fulling rested, regularly, I think for the first time in my life. I stay up late, I wake without an alarm, work and chores get done at various times. It matters less and less what particular day it is. It’s colder or warmer, the sun is up early or late. Most days are good – filled with music and books and shows and work.
I’m trying to lean into that rhythm, to make choices based on what impulses arise, not to let the clock dictate the activity whenever it can be avoided. Eat when hungry, sleep when tired. If you must work, take a break for food and a walk and even chores, if it breaks up the drudgery or resets the mental focus. Watch the birds, water the plants, walk the neighborhood, then back to the tasks that earn the roof over my head and food in my kitchen. The work is not unpleasant, the numbers line up clean and true, the cycle predictable and mastered and returning again to be conquered, coworkers to share the work and the perspective, mutual support in face of all else.
I can almost see what it would be, to have a life that was dictated by the needs of the body and the mind, not by the machine of industry. A tiny glimpse, since the work always comes back around to interrupt the flow of time, imposing the fiction of calendars and economies on an existence that requires neither to be getting on with. The web of thoughts and desires and inclinations overwritten by the requirements of deadlines and meetings and the unspoken threat of the loss of all that is necessary to support the body, while stripping the mind and soul of pieces of itself. Losses I wasn’t even aware of for most of my life and now resented mightily – now that it’s a smaller loss than ever before.