There was once a popular song by the Eagles, with the lyric “Life in the Fast Lane, surely make you lose your mind.” That is what my life has felt like these past few weeks. I finish a day or a weekend and wonder how it went by so fast. I never get as much completed as I want.
Sometimes when life is making you feel compressed you need to take a step back and relax. Trying to paddle faster when you feel as if you are sinking just wears out your energy and you drown. Taking a break can restore energy and prepare you for the next round of chaos.
I have had a whirlwind going around me due to a series of events in my life….a friend who has been staying with me for the past eight months is getting ready to leave on a new adventure of full-time RV life. My son, who was in prison for six years, came home on the 20th of March and is staying with me. I have come to the conclusion that I need to downsize and have to go through all of my belongings and determine what I am going to keep and what must go.
Each of these things in and of itself are good changes. Compiled into one they are overwhelming. I look around my house and the massive amount of things I must sort through and am not sure where to start. My son is helping, he has started working on the side of the basement that was my husband’s workshop. I have set a deadline for getting all of this completed, which in some ways increases the panic of how much must be done.
Even though my daughter and her children live in a separate house, the adjustment for all of us to my son coming home after so long has not been easy. My daughter is living in a home that my son once lived in. When he went to prison the belongings he had in that home had to be boxed up. Both my daughter and son have items in my house that have to be cleaned out. The sorting, cleaning, and relationship adjustments can be stressful.
Even though I am trying to slow down, I continue to live life in the fast lane. This week I ate dinner out four of the five work nights because of my schedule…writers meeting, shutterbug meeting, haircut, and shopping all done after work created the preference to dine out rather than in. Saturday I am on the road around the time I normally step out of the shower so I can attend a writer’s conference an hour from home. Sunday I’ll need to tackle household chores, and of course Monday it all starts again. Life in the fast lane, will surely make me lose my mind!
--- LIFE IS A MELTING POT --- Grace Grogan...Writer, Photographer 