Spending time alone

I have just spent the better part of the week by myself. Well, I did go for coffee at my neighbour’s on Monday, and I went cherry picking on Tuesday with a group of friends, but other than that it’s just been me and an itinerant hummingbird. 

Greg is off at a workshop; I could have gone too, but I thought it would be restorative to be by myself.

I like it. In some ways, it’s like being 10 or 11 years old and on summer vacation. It’s an odd feeling that I can get up when I feel like, have breakfast when it suits me – or not – and get dressed once I get round to it, actually even more freedom than when I was young!

Am I shiftless and lazy? Gosh, it is hard to relinquish the “shoulds.” I am put off by being so self-conscious about observing what I do all day. When I was a child, I wasn’t constantly judging the worthiness of my activities. 

I find I am slow in the mornings and gradually wake up over the day. I go out for my bicycle ride after dinner, not in the early morning. Greg has the car, so being alone in a village means my bicycle is my only means of getting around, aside from walking. This is fun, but also a bit unsettling. What if I had to have a car to deal with an emergency! 

Also, I can feel guilty that I spend a bit too much time reading newspapers on line and keeping up with Facebook, and I neglected to put out the garbage.  

Nevertheless, yesterday, I planned the route for our upcoming trip down East — via New England this year to avoid the bridges and traffic tie-ups in Montreal. It was challenging, as there is not much in the way of east/west freeways in that neck of the woods. I used Google Earth to take a look at the intersections of some of the secondary roads we'll be taking. As navigator, I am now familiar with what they look like. How amazing it is that I can look at the actual roadway to see what to expect. 

I also spent quite a while with a dream I had back in January which I’ve been mulling over since. How helpful to look at it more closely without any interruptions or the self-imposed sense that I should be doing something else.  

And it is odd to reflect on the word “spending” in reference to time. As if it is a quantifiable amount in a budget — which of course it is when you are an adult and know you have only so much allotted to you. However, I’ve been reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and am taken by his comments on saintliness. I am most assuredly not a saint, but his comments on what he terms “religious imperturbability,” common to many religion and philosophies, have stayed with me:

“The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility and worry to equanimity, receptivity and peace is the most wonderful of all of those shiftings of inner equilibrium.”

So I am entertaining this new point of view; I am enjoying the freedom to play with time, to live in the moment at hand and not to judge how I am “spending” it.