As a gift to myself for my birthday I scheduled the day off from work to go get a massage and facial, using a gift certificate David gave me for Christmas. Since we just moved here in March, it was to a place I’d never been to or heard of before. I was about 2 minutes away from the place this morning when I got a call on my cell from the salon saying my facial had been canceled. The aesthetician had had a family emergency. Could I reschedule?
No, no, I couldn’t reschedule. I have no time. This precious time I had today was a rare day off from work, when I left the boys in daycare to make time for reflection and being extra nice to me.
Really, I’d scheduled the facial because (1) I wanted the extended facial massage because I carry a lot of my stress in the muscles in my face, and (2) I’ve had these deep dark circles and bags under my eyes since New Years morning and was hoping that a facial might help them.
Of course I understand that a family emergency is a family emergency. Still, it did not make me any less disappointed. And I was a little surprised that they didn’t offer me any other services while I was there. (I still had a scheduled massage.) They gave me coupons for a free manicure and pedicure, but they couldn’t give me my time back.
And this lack of time is the crux of my New Years resolution. If you remember last year I set two of them – to nurture my inner Martha Stewart and to nurture my inner Cindi Crawford.
This year it’s all about nurturing my inner Leo Babauta, the author of the Zen Habits blog, among other things. I am among many fans. He just won the best overall blog in the 2007 Performancing awards.
But it’s not his blog success that is what inspired this goal (although it is amazing how he's built such a place in just a year). It’s his message of simplifying. And this is a message that I can take to so many areas of my life to steal time back for myself.
I recently told an old friend that everything is good with me. My life is full and I am living my dreams. Obviously this is an amazing place to be. But today I was thinking about my choice of words. Full. That means there is no room for anything else. And there are other things I want to fit in. For example, reading for pleasure, taking better care of myself, losing the infertility and baby weight, getting back into shape, among other things. All these things take time. And I have no time.
I cannot cut back on my work, and I’m not sure that I want to. And I certainly don’t want to cut back on my family time. And you should see my house now. I sure as hell cannot cut down on the tiny amount of cleaning and maintenance I do now.
So the overarching goal of the year, to nurture my inner Leo Babauta, means decluttering my space, creating systems to improve efficiency with work and home tasks, so that these things take less time than they do now. That way I can squeeze as much extra time as possible from my days for these other things.
Leo recommends having just one New Years goal. So nurturing my inner Leo is my tricky way of squeezing a whole lot into that single goal. And by doing so I plan to change the laws of physics, creating more time than I had before.
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