I’m not really one for New Year Resolutions.
Actually, I’m a bit of a sceptic about to-do lists in general. Not that this stops me occasionally creating one, when I come across some new computer tool with an indispensable feature to create all-singing, all-dancing lists that promise to make me so much more efficient, but end up merely providing a few minutes interest some months later when I come across the never-updated fragments of good intentions.
I said to Val yesterday that I had a huge list of jobs to do. Actually, there is no list, not even in my head, but I can easily bring to mind enough tasks around the house and farm to fill every waking moment for the coming year. In the past, this would have been the source of stress and worry. How can I make sure that I get them all done in time? Which should be prioritised?
Now I am much more relaxed about to-do pressures. I tend to ‘waste’ quite a lot of time, and it seems OK. Some jobs just seem to bring themselves to the top of the list, and get done ‘in time’, whatever that actually means. Others hang around on the fringes of ‘what shall I do today?’ for weeks and months, and the potentially disastrous consequences of inaction don’t actually overwhelm me.
Most of the time I am actually working moderately hard, and I do get a lot of things done. It’s just that, in this new life, I have found relief from the external pressures that so dominated my work persona. I fully realised this only yesterday, through the surprising medium of watching TV.
For Christmas, Val bought me several presents. We say each year that we won’t give each other presents. And each year we do. We’ve given up wrapping paper, and all the ritual trappings, but we still search out presents according to the well-established criterion of “I’ll get him/her something I would like myself”. And it works.
One present this year (Val to me, but it could so easily have been the other way round) was a DVD box set of all seven series of The West Wing. The description of this as “a box set featuring 43 discs and all 159 episodes of the critically acclaimed US political drama” hardly filled me with anticipation. I was attracted by the astonishingly good reviews, like this one from the Guardian
The West Wing has a decent claim to be one of the daddies of the box-set revolution, a show so wonderful you wanted to own it, then lock yourself away for days, gorging on DVDs in a way that had never quite been seemly with video.
After one or two episodes per day from Christmas Day, we spent New Year’s Eve watching four back-to-back. Yes, we’re hooked.
And it was after the third of yesterday’s episodes that I had the insight about work and pressure. I saw that the staff of the White House were exhibiting the manic commitment to a worthwhile job that I had experienced in my much more mundane role in local government. They were consistently putting their jobs before everything else in their lives: health, family, relationships.
I suddenly realised that just watching the episodes was giving me some of that stomach-churning tension that had been such a feature of my everyday working life. That tension had been rather addictive, with rushes of reinforcing relief as difficult tasks were completed, projects launched, and disasters averted. The reality was, I fear, that that addiction was in danger of ruining my life. I really had needed to stop.
And now a TV series was providing me with a vicarious reminder of what I had left behind. I had arrived at the first of my three resolutions for the New Year. Yes, resolutions . . . . not duties, obligations, or tasks to be ticked off.
I resolve to hold on to the present. To push to one side as many as possible of the what-ifs, shoulds and oughts that used to dominate my life. I shall try to concentrate on what is here and now, the task in hand, the wonder of what is about me. I’ve seen a glimpse of the past and I know that I must continue to reject those tempting pressures to let my mind be dominated by ever-changing lists of things that must be done.
More about the remaining two resolutions later. Maybe. It’s not as though I have to complete a to-do list, after all.
