April’s on its way out of the door, and we finally had an unambiguously spring-y weekend in Malmö, all clear bright skies and two-figure temperatures.
I’m always drawing lines in the figurative calendar, and perhaps one day I’ll do the work to find out just what sort of possibly pathological origins that habit might have. But for now, I’m just gonna draw the line and step over it: we’re into the middle third of the year, which is always my favourite part. I am drawn to the warmth and the light. I used to think this was a contradiction of my basically gloomy character, but now I see it more as a clarification. I have always been trying to step out of the shadows.
I took down L____’s picture from the wallpaper of my phone this morning. I guess the old equivalent of this would be taking the creased and dog-eared little picture from a passport-photo booth out of your wallet? Or maybe that was always just the cinematic shorthand for something more complex—the drawing of a line, if you like. Or the acceptance of a line drawn by someone else. Some lines are to be stepped over, others to be stepped away from, however reluctantly. Perhaps this much-discussed adulthood thing is all about knowing which is which, eh?
(I’ll let you know, just as soon as I feel like an actual adult.)
This is the first week since the start of the year that actually has space for non-urgent work. Unless anything else pops up at short notice—and, hey, if you’ve got work that urgently needs doing, our operators are waiting for your call!—then there should be a few more weeks like that to come, too. Time, then, to do some self-strategy; time to advance the totally sidelined extra stuff that I meant to start back in January.
Time to reassess the ol’ project-management framework, too. Jay noticed this week just gone that he returns repeatedly to the problem of having too many things started and none finished—a problem, if I parse it right, of prioritisation. That hasn’t been a problem so far this year for me, as the necessities of paying the bills have acted as a fairly ruthless prioritisation filter. My problem is more having dozens of side-projects I desperately want to start, but then finding that I lack the energy and motivation for them when I finally find the time.
Well, the time is never found, quoth Ms Cameron; it can only be made. But it is also the case that habits must be broken or (re)built one at a time… and I’ve done pretty well on both of those fronts in the first third of the year, just gone. Perhaps there’s bandwidth for new patternings now? One way to find out, I guess.
Right: a few scrag-ends of client projects still need finishing and filing before I can switch to navel-gazing, and to the pondering of new projects. Wednesday is May Day, which is a big day here in Red Malmö, and as good a marker of a new phase as one could ask for.
So it’s head down to clear the desk, to earn the space and time to think, to draw a line and step across it, into—
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