A small window of opportunity opens up and I’m in the garden at six, burning a stack of old papers faster than Gaddaffi. It’s the usual Rubik’s Cube of Saturday jobs that need doing, addressing one thing to facilitate another, and the first thing in the sequence is to get some of the garden rubbish burnt before anyone hangs out their washing. This presents an unmissable opportunity to simultaneously dispose of a box of personal papers, sifted out our filing by Jane who is keen to prepare the ‘office’ for our new arrival. We will eventually move into this room, which is the biggest, and shift the kids into ours. And so it goes on, sorting one thing to accommodate another.
About midday I lose track of what I’m doing. I’ve picked up the new glass for the shed [NJW 22.08.11] and I’m food shopping when I realise that I’ve left my wallet in the car. It’s a small thing but there’s a funfair in town and the car is parked ways away, so I have to under-shop and make do with whatever cash there is in my pocket. Sometimes I think I tend to make things too complicated, No Journey Wasted is fine, as a concept, but there’s only so much computing power available in real life to allocate to weighing up the odds. If you push it to the limit and something unexpected happens, you risk losing a lot more than a single thread. A whole construct can become compromised, which can really piss you off.
The answer is that you have to remain flexible. I had planned to make a round trip; get money (town), get glass (out of town) and visit a farm shop (out of town) on the way back, instead of the supermarket (town). But I also needed to stop at the lighting shop, which was behind the barriers set up in the town square to accommodate the funfair. This threw me and I shot through town thinking I’d hit the lighting shop on the way back from the glass shop, which was half-day closing.
It’s a dull story, I know, but when ‘me’ time is so hard to come by, rolling all kinds of jobs into one helps. And if time is money, it’s much the same as the save-to-reallocate attitude. It’s not really about being a dweeb or a miser, it’s about being a bit lazy and tight, on time that is. Cutting back on waste, in terms of time and money, should, in theory, leave me with a bit more of both and it's in that pocket of surplus that my teenage wants live on. This is where the bike gets fixed, the guitar comes out, the beer is drunk and my book gets written.
I'm a little uneasy about this, now that I write it, because if a job will soak up as much time as you can give it, it's hard to see how these 'pockets of surplus' (POS) can ever really exist, except in theory. I turn to thinking about a recent fantasy POS indulgence; sitting on a beach with a cold beer, waiting for a plate of BBQ blackened prawns (previous post). Does this person really have to have worked hard, saving time and money, to arrive at this point? Or could this be the result of a lifestyle choice? He could run the bar, or be a beach bum, so he can live his dream.
It's a nice thought, but I'm not sure this kind of life qualifies as a long-term goal. Outside of a holiday scenario, it strikes me as a gap year or retirement thing, so I think I'll stick to my guns, for now, safe in the knowledge that the beach ain't going anywhere.
