Time and sharing
plus seasonal greetings & light
I’ve been thinking a lot about time, sharing, fragmentation and balance. In part, this is related to the rush of the festive seasons towards me with so many things I still feel I have to cram in. But it’s also in my gratitude and thanks to so many people who gave their time to share my Darling Blue stanza launch afternoon. (More on this on my website here.)
Increasingly lately, I find myself asking do I give enough time to friends and family, alongside work and all the many other small commitments that soon add up to many hours, especially while also managing a disability like my type one diabetes?
I’ve always tried to do what I can for other writers in a way that fits my skillsets and is manageable for me. Running a small press and a poetry society stanza are part of this, as well as doing occasional reviews and lots of small things that I hope support others. I also try to social media as much as I can to help other creatives. But each one of those things is a potentially endless task. And what if in doing so, it’s at the cost of neglecting other friends and family?
Both sharing and time come in here again because I don’t face the challenges of work, diabetes or anything else alone, friends and family share and are impacted by them too. Also, when I give time to something it isn’t just my time, it’s time that I might otherwise be giving to different people or projects… A drop in the ocean is still part of the ocean; it’s just these days there are so many different oceans to have to choose between.
Fragmentation comes in here because of the different parts of me that different people get from each small drop in the ocean and also the different parts that I share on different online platforms. I don’t replicate all of anything on all my blogs or social media platforms. This is mostly to avoid those who are friends or followers on multiple platforms having to read the same things too many times. But, at the same time, it also means that no one gets the whole me or everything that’s going on in my life. Which may not matter but could also potentially feel like being excluded…For example, if you haven’t checked out the latest website blog link I mentioned earlier, you won’t have the biggest – wonderful! – news that I’m ending the year on. And yes, this sharing too has implications in terms of time and needing to find a new working balance to what I devote to who, where and when!
Nothing I’ve said here is groundbreaking; some would say it doesn’t even need stating, it’s simply what life is. And yes, it does also all come together under a different word ‘prioritising’. But the difficulty I find with prioritising is that, outside of instant life or death situations, it often isn’t clear-cut what or who most needs my attention and prioritisation. This is before I even add in the factor that we all have different priorities and place different weights on different things, so that what any one individual in my life feels is the best priority, and right amount of time or sharing, may in fact be/look very different to me when I’m assessing it!
I have no black and white conclusion or answer to this, only that I can only do my best with the body, mind and awareness that I live in at this current point in time. And that what I do do, I love. Also, that I don’t want people to stop asking me to part of things and share experiences with them because they’re scared I don’t have enough time.
Within all this too, the acknowledgement that giving all of everything to everyone is, of course, an impossible task anyway, as well as being undesirable – I can’t imagine anyone would actually enjoy all of my everything!
I came on here wanting to write a joyful festive greetings post for you all. Instead, I find I’ve created something with a reflective edge that reads more like an end of year summing up. I hope as my subscribers that you’ll forgive me if my time and priorities have taken this post somewhere different to what you’d expected or hoped for.
What I am going to share with you now is still the very warmest of seasonal greetings: seasonal in a festive way for those that celebrate but also in an end of one year and start of another sense, with all the wonder and possibility of new beginnings!
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Thank you!