WORK/LIFE BALANCE

I’ve not written anything here for five days now, not that you’d notice of course, such is the beauty of having the “buffer” to fall back on. Of course, when I say “you” I’m not referring to the “you” and “you” who are still loyally turning up each day, but the more abstract “you” who isn’t here at all, which, I suppose, makes it rather a redundant observation (“I met a man who wasn’t there, he wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away…”). So here I find myself, directly addressing an absent nobody, and I wonder why folk might think I’m going a bit strange.

Even my imaginary friends seem to leave me in the end, but that’s a thought for another time and place. Suffice it to say that for five days now, the mind has lain fallow, like the city of Carthage when the Romans sacked the city and sowed the ground with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again, the mind has remained bereft of inspiration and thought and I have kicked my metaphorical heels, rested upon my laurels and lounged around on the hammock of destiny strung between the twin palm trees of inactivity, and fretted.

When I say that you’ve not noticed, of course, this is not meant in a derogatory way. After all, there is nothing for you to notice, and you simply cannot prove a negative anyway. How would you notice something that I’m only now making you aware of, especially if the smooth running wheels of the great engine of the state of Lesser Blogfordshire have rolled steadily onwards despite the madness going on behind the scenes due to the rather brilliant planning for all eventualities of our illustrious captain…? Because, happily, with the relative salvation of the aforementioned “buffer”, for you, dear reader, events here have managed to resemble pretty much “business as usual” whatever maelstroms of inactivity have been visiting themselves upon whichever torn shreds remain of my wretched and haggard cerebellum and upon the frantic stokers feeding its mighty boilers.

As ever, as in all things, it pays to plan ahead.

Why didn’t I just say that instead of burbling on so…?

So, anyway… Why, pray, has the activity and stimulation of those “little grey cells” been making itself absent lately? Well, it’s funny you should ask me that… Oh, you didn’t… Well, you would have done given the infinite amount of time I was going to grant you had I not felt the need to run this idea to ground before it disappeared into a vortex of its own bewilderment. Because, the peculiar thing is, that I had already been giving the problem a great deal of thought myself and had come to the rather startling conclusion that I don’t really know either.

Maybe activities here have run their course, or maybe the general air of weariness boring into my soul has finally caught up with me. After all, I have been feeling rather tired lately. Tired and distracted by the small chaotic and cataclysmic events intruding into my little existence and they have, as oftentimes before, started to clog up the free flowing passages that what I laughingly call my thoughts used to whizz so freely along. What with all the to-ing and fro-ing, and the sleepiness and the mundane stuff to think about and the dreary stuff to do, sometimes the thoughts that used to be the very fuel of our little exchanges just seem impossible to mine, and I sit and I stare and I start to believe they’ll never come again and, if the should, maybe I’ll lack the ability to mould them cleverly enough so that they’ll make any sense, and, should enough lucky beans fall my way for that to be even possible, maybe the available time to do the necessary juggling will escape me and I will be left with a brain full of words and nowhere to put them.

You could argue (and I think that I might be about to) that this is because the carefully fabricated equilibrium of my work/life balance has been knocked out of whack by recent events, but then, hasn’t everybody’s? Things, they keep telling us, have rarely been tougher and all of us working stiffs are having to fight longer and harder for our own tiny piece of the pie, so it’s not as if I’m alone in this, but I’m now finding that larger and larger chunks of the day are being consumed in the pursuit of toil (and getting there), and those precious moments of “me” time are evaporating from either the end of the day as fatigue overwhelms me, or vanishing from the wee small hours of the morning as the brain is so clogged up with thoughts of “stuff to do” that it doesn’t seem to have the time (or the inclination) to check-in for any flights of fancy.

It was all supposed to be so very different as we screamed headlong into the era we might yet end up calling the technological age. Life would become simpler as the labour-saving devices took over the menial jobs and left us to evolve into large brained stick people with super-extended index fingers, all floating in our water tanks with nothing to tax us but the workings of our beautiful minds. Instead we are already well on our way to becoming the slaves of the machines we built as we jump and run at their beckoning call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week like the sirens of old luring our individual ships onto the jagged rocks of doom.

Study groups (not that I ever think much of them) are constantly reminding us that we need to get our work/life balance correct, and that we all need to find more time to stop and smell the sunset, or whatever this week’s moribund metaphor might happen to be, but, for most of us, it really is so very hard to do.

It should, of course, be so easy. Pull into that lay-by, loiter under the duvet for a few extra minutes, take some time to grind those beans and brew that coffee instead of grabbing a spoon of instant, but modern life rarely seems to work like that for most of us nowadays. Somehow all the other stuff just keeps on getting in the way of it all, and, despite on average living longer than any other human beings ever have before, none of us ever seem to have any time any more. Not for ourselves, not for each other, and that’s not right.