Tag Archives: a plan

A Plan and an Early Start

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When the going gets tough, it’s best to have a plan and get at it early. That’s what I did. Knowing that the day gets away on me if I dawdle, I planned to have my morning cup of tea and head off to the community garden before breakfast. It was 8 o’clock when I left. It was a good thing. I was early enough to have a parking spot. There’s a baseball field across the street. A baseball game was starting up. Cars were lining up.

Our little plot is doing quite well after a poor start. I harvested a good number of snowpeas and can now harvest every 2nd day till they give out. The patching Swedish bean patch is filling out. The carrots are looking good. The 2 bottle gourds and purple beans are doing well, climbing up the towers. Hope they will create a show. That’s my main purpose for them. They are also edible. I weeded our plot and my brother’s before watering. When you have the right tool from Lee Valley, weeding is almost effortless.

I was home in an hour. It was only 9 am. I had a leisurely breakfast. It felt like a treat. I felt good enough to wander out to the garden and water my tomato and squash patch. The cherry tree was close at hand so I picked some sour cherries. They’re washed and in the freezer. There’s a never ending list of things to do. The best thing is to do them if I can and not think about it. After I filled all the greenhouse pails with water from the rain catchment tbehind he garage, the sky clouded over. It was eery. It was dark in the house. I felt my heart catch in my throat. I tell myself I’m ok. There is nothing to be scare of. The world is not ending – yet.

I am happy I had a plan today and made an early start. Tomorrow I shall head out to our city allotment garden early to check on the potato beetles and see if there’s peas to harvest. If I do that, I will really enjoy my tea and breakfast after. The clouds have passed. We had a few drops of rain and the sun came out. This is our new norm now almost every day.

WORKING IT!

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November 23. Another new day, another blank page. I’m starting today with my gratitude list.

  • I’m grateful I had a good night’s sleep.
  • I’m grateful for another day.
  • I’m grateful I have a plan

My plan going into 2023 is keeping things simple and practicing good housekeeping in everything. I will borrow some of Marie Kondo’s ideas. Not that I know a lot about her method, but I do love this part of her philosophy. 

The KonMari Method is a simple but effective tidying method, ensuring you will never again relapse to clutter. It uses a unique selection criterion – choosing what sparks joy! You are not choosing what to discard but rather choosing to keep only the items that speak to your heart. Through tidying, you can reset your life and spend the rest of your life surrounded by the people and things that you love the most. 

I love the idea of sparkling joy. Who wouldn’t? It takes work and thought. It doesn’t just happen. I had it for a long spell, then lost it. That’s how life is. Now I’m working on how to get it back. It will be better now that I am conscious of what I’ve lost. In this moment of not so many sparkles, I remember going to bed looking forward to the morning. I like working on stuff. Working on myself is loving and pampering myself.

I will be a detective, examining and assessing everything to see if they will help or deter, build or wreck. In that light, I will not update this MacBook just now. i’m keeping things simple. Everything is working good enough. Pages is working pretty slick with a word count. It is bringing me joy. Keeping it simple, this is enough for today. Onward with life. 

BEING LOST, BEING AT HOME WITH MYSELF

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Some dreary November days, I feel a pang of depression passing through me. It’s akin to someone walking over my grave. I paid it due attention. I don’t like it. I feel my lips curling up with contempt. How dare it come to disturb me? I let it register itself in my body for a moment. I hate it. I will not let it take residence in me. It has to leave. I show it the door.

Some days I am the master of my mansion. There have been days when I have not. I have not always been the captain of my life. I have been adrift upon the open sea without an anchor. It’s taken me this long to see it but it IS better late than never. Now I can invest in some anchors, a compass to find the true north, a GPS to show me routes to my desired destination. It’s not too late. It’s not over till it’s over.

Getting lost is not the worse thing, the end of the world. I have learned many lessons in my years of floundering in the wilderness. For one thing, I would get lost less often if I had a map and a plan of how I was to get to point A or B. For another, letting lost was exactly the thing for me to do. There was a pot of gold waiting for me along the wrong round about. Maybe all roads do lead to Rome.

To tell the truth, I’ve never been bothered much being lost. I was comfortable and at home with it because I am lost all the time. In the same way, I am not bothered much by regrets. For sure, I moan alot like everybody else, that I wish I had done things differently. But now, here, in this moment, I know that if I could have done something else, I WOULD have. I have done the best I could in every moment of my life. I know that. I am happy with myself and my life. It doesn’t get any better than this.