On Away Time

 Being away from home this weekend is a rather unusual experience.  

My training time with The Berserker, while good, is limited - a four hour session today, a three hour session tomorrow.  As a result, I have a great deal of time to myself - removed, of course, from all of the normal aspects and distractions of my life.  

It makes for a curious sensation.

For the first time in what seems like forever, I have no chores to look to, no things to take care of, no animals to feed or shoo off of furniture, no conversations running in the background.  No meals to worry about, because there no place to cook.  Just, myself, the computer, some pre-selected books, and time alone.

One of the hardest things in such a situation is simply giving myself the permission to not feel like I have to be doing anything.

This is a challenge that I am not sure if I am specifically prone to, or one that modern civilization heaps upon us.  To living in the modern world, or at least the modern urban world, is to always feel like one has to actively be doing something.

Lay aside the common things of living, like washing clothes and dishes and cleaning and the base mechanics of life that all of us, to one extent or another, have to do.  Beyond that, modern society seems to demand that we always be about something.  "Idle work are the devil's hands" as the saying went, but we have taken it to the extreme.  We fill our lives with work and if not work, then hobbies.  Technology is no friend to us in this aspect either - after all, with the advent of the InterWeb and computers and smart phones, it is almost assumed that we should be doing something even if we are not actually doing something, because we have the ability to literally wander the world ever live second of the the day.

And in a lot of meaningful ways, that has been placed to the side of me this weekend.

Having the luxury to read a book (or three) without the demands of "I should be about something else" because there is nothing else to do seems exactly like that - a luxury.  And that idea strikes me as a somewhat unhealthy thing.

Mind you, the pressure for all of this is coming from one person:  Myself.  I am the one that feels I need to be about things almost constantly. I am the one that subdivides my day into small portions for this and that, like a buffet plate with little bits of everything on it.  

I wonder if part of rediscovering an actual life, instead of the life that that the modern world demands we create for ourselves, partial lies in a path where we allocate for ourselves larger and larger chunks of time not otherwise subdivided into smaller tasks?  Yes, it might mean that we do less things overall and yes, it might mean that some of those larger chunks are of less desirable tasks (yay sorting laundry and cleaning toilets).  But without the time to spend, we do not have the time to think and ponder.  And without the time to think and ponder, how can we really think on and act on the really important things in life?