You Snooze, You Lose

I am up all right this morning. Sure, I snoozed a bit with the alarm going off. Its that eternal question - which button to press, the right or the left? (The right snoozes it, the left switches it off. I don't remember voluntarily using the left button before waking up, for uhh at least a month now). So anyway, I woke up and did the morning stuff I do. Including, on a whim, dumping in all the nasty foot mats for a much deserved wash.

Then usually its time to walk around the bed and pick up the sports bra & socks, back to the cupboard to get the tshirt and the towel, and zoom out. Except that I am not in the mood today. Half of me is inclined to do the needful, picking up the ipod if necessary. But the other half is inclined to not do the needful, ipod notwithstanding. There is a small section of me that would like to curl back into bed and sleep, but thankfully, that person is ignorable, largely. My husband, who doesn't even open both his eyes till absolutely necessary, would be shocked to see a person awake, brushed, having drunk coffee, and hanging around at 6:30 am, when they don't have a flight to catch or a meeting to sprint to. Over the years, we have come to accept grudgingly, our differences. So, I cannot understand how you can put things off to the last possible minute, or pack without a list (HOW?). We are even.

Its amazing, the quality of time. I am sitting here, staring periodically at the top corner of my laptop, as the minutes follow each other inexorably getting to a time when I will have to get off the chair, wake up the child, and move on to the next phase of the day. I can well imagine myself running, as I normally would have, pounding the stones on the pavement (these stones, I know so well, I said to someone walking on them in the evening, so strange to feel them with my feet encased in sandals). The time (in digital format) in my watch, real time, the other, running time, I switch between these to keep myself moving. And am forever calculating the time I need to hit the U-turn so that I can be back home in time for Phase 2.

Yesterday, I worked from home for a few hours. I decided to divide the chunk of time I had into half hour segments. And to try and work through things, spending not more than half an hour on each. Its a trick I learnt from a friend of mine. For the past year, we both have been working on something, somewhat reluctantly. When we started it off, it sounded like a lot of fun. But after a whole bunch of goings-on, some of which could be blamed on us, and most of it on others in the team we were working on, we lost the enthusiasm. But we still had to plod through and finish it. So we would allot half an hour a day to the task. Especially when we worked together on it, it was easy to indulge in a complaint-session and not achieve anything. We set an alarm and cut out the goss till it rang.

I have written so many posts over the past couple of months. A paragraph at a time. Then something happens. Someone knocks on the door. Time slides on and while I would like to complete the post and publish it, it seems more sensible to postpone it to later, when I can at least allot 80% of mind space to it. So it wallows in drafts. When I come back to it, I don't feel like thinking along those lines again. Like I often say, things, ideas, crosswords, rot and go bad when you leave them open for a while.

Even now the time is moving on. I know there is the other blog I should be updating, and that people are waiting anxiously for that (its for work). I can reel off at least three other things I could be doing now that would, probably, be a more valuable use of my time than this. But one thing is for sure. I am nowhere as near closure on those things, as I am with this post. On that count, this one wins out...