Time

A week. It's been over a week since I've blogged. When I started this blog I intended to blog every day. Some days I had more than one great idea to write about. I made it through the holidays. I made it through my January doldrums. Then I paused to reconsider my priorities. I played. And now I see that blogging was left out.

I've thought about it most days, sort of wistfully, but not really in any way that caused me to create time for it either. I enjoy writing and storytelling and thought-exploring. Still, in the fine art of balancing my life I couldn't figure which side of the scale to put it on. So it stayed off to the side, neglected.

The past few days have been very eventful for me internally. I have recognized some very powerful patterns in my thoughts and behavior, connected seemingly disparate facets of my life, sat stunned, absorbing the implications. Awareness is a wonderful thing. Awareness facilitates change. But it's set me back on my heels, no, shoved me backwards onto my rump, left me staring, mouth agape at the vision of this new understanding.

A small piece of this insight concerned my habits around spending resources on myself. I don't. I have great difficulty buying things for myself, dedicating time to myself, anything for myself. Each time I claim some bit of our resources for myself, it is something of a triumph. I make time to exercise most mornings, but I need to justify it's value beyond what it does for me, and minimize it's impact on my family. I make time to blog, and again need to justify it's value and minimize it's impact. When I have bought things for myself, non-essentials, I have needed to justify them to myself. Better yet, I wait long enough that someone else buys them for me. But that's a different piece of this story.

So yesterday I spent some time exploring that. At the end I made a list of some things I really want. Things that I don't need in any way, but that I have wanted for some time. Things that make me happy just to think about having them. Some are big: I would love to go to some sunny warm climate, like Hawaii and learn to surf. I can't explain it. Some are smaller: I have ogled Zen clocks with a chime alarm for months and months, if not years.

Today I decided I would buy myself one. $120 seems like a lot for a clock, but this isn't about strict practicality. It's about valuing myself, valuing my happiness, recognizing that it's OK to spend money on something that, for whatever reason, means so much to me. Maybe it's symbolic.

Last spring, after an agonizing internal struggle, I bought myself a new camera. I had found my photography to be limited by the quality of the lens and technical capabilities of my point-and-shoot, pocket camera. I splurged. And what happened was not just that the technical quality of my photos improved, or even that my creativity was unleashed. In some way, valuing that piece of me opened my awareness to the direction of my soul's work, my vocation, I don't know what to call it. It opened me to possibility. That gesture, that splurge on myself, that valuing of myself was certainly a symbolic signal to some core part of me: It's safe to come out now.

I sat down to write tonight, for the first time in over a week, with the settled feeling that I would do something special for myself and order a Zen clock, and found an email from my husband. It was a link to a Widget for my iMac. A meditation timer. That chimes.

I still want my clock.


(Picture from Now & Zen.)