Roads to Joy

It’s been a busy week. Productive, on the whole, but busy, and scarce time to look out for joy.

But with rather more jobs accomplished yesterday than I’d thought likely, it was time at just around 4:30 in the afternoon to sit back and relax a little. I confess I don’t drink much tea, but sometimes a proper brew is precisely what’s needed. Ahh. These days of busyness don’t come around that often, anymore, now that the move is finished, the domestic goods are pretty much sorted, and life’s routine is more and more established. You forget what the workaday life is like, when there’s no real employment urgency to the daily rigmarole.

But the funny thing is, it’s not as much fun to take a relaxing break when you haven’t actually been bustling around. It’s the bustle that conspires to make the snatched rest all that more significant.

But that doesn’t mean that I shall pile yet more little jobs into today’s schedule with a view ahead to the joy of the moment of restfulness. No, I shall resume the regular dilatory progress, punctuated by appointments and appropriate small errands, and think of the tea break as a kind of metaphor. Perhaps not tea itself, today, but maybe just a moment of contemplation, a running through of a mental checklist in repose to ensure that the weekend’s arrangements are sorted.

Because the weekend, a dramatic change in routine, beckons, and we are getting ready for it. I remember weekends, which are, of course, another whole thing from the constant pressure of employment.

Bring it on, we think, and the clock marches forward.