Well… I guess I slept 12 hours… sort of. I mean, I did call it a night quite early (shortly after 7pm), and I did go to bed and fall asleep early. I got up to face the day shortly after 7am this morning. That would appear to be… 12 hours of sleep. My fitness tracker observes that I didn’t actually get to sleep until somewhat later… 8:27pm, actually. I was up a couple times during the night, although not for very long, but the sleep I got is measured on my tracker as a bit less than 10 hours. Still… lovely restful night, right? Nope. Not even close.

…I was probably looking forward to it too much… maybe?

I sip my coffee and let it go; life has some disappointing moments. Some on a grand scale (we shut down the government, over a grown man having a fucking tantrum about a wall to solve a non-existent problem that can’t be solved with wall-building? for fucks’ sake, really??) and some on a scale so small as to be difficult to describe quite as disappointment – like sleeping somewhat restlessly for 10 hours, when I was so eager to sleep deeply for an undetermined period and simply wake without the alarm. lol It’s not worth being aggravated about, really, considering the scale of so many of life’s other disappointments (we elected what to the office of president? really??)

It’s a new day. My coffee is hot, delicious, and the mug comfortably warm in my hands.

Still getting used to the view; change is a constant in life.

I scrolled through my Facebook feed last night, while the evening wound down, and it was disappointing that it was filled with friends sharing a post that a friend shared, from another friend somewhere else, who also shared it because they were also struck by it in some way (amusing, annoying, familiar, cool, or somehow otherwise seeming shareworthy)… but I don’t know those people, and I don’t much care about their words in my feed… not as much as I want to actually hear from my friends about their own life and experiences, in their own words. Facebook made a big deal about connecting us. Doesn’t seem like it has actually worked out quite that way. We’ve simply become a product, and the application has become a drug. I continue to work at using it differently – and less.

Tl;dr on that one? Fuck “social media”. Let’s be social.

A side remark about Basic Income right here; it’s not a freebie if it is reasonable compensation for our data. I just have to call out that data has come to have significant intrinsic value to both business and government. Basic income, as I see it, could simply be the payment made by government, to individuals, on behalf of business, which (should) pays taxes – in part to cover the value of the data they harvest from individuals – resulting in reasonable compensation for our data (and perhaps making us more willing to share more of it contentedly), over our lifetimes, and basic income to support us in maintaining good quality of life. Why not? Right now… we’re being grossly exploited by both business and government, stealing our data, giving us nothing in return worth having (looking your way Facebook).

Returning to the moment, and the morning, and still enjoying my still hot coffee, I give some thought to the day ahead. I go looking, specifically, for implicit expectations, and lingering assumptions, that could wreck my day (or at least my mood), before I get out in the world where such things have more profound impact. This weekend is about rest. Housework. Painting. Mostly about rest. And housework, too, though. Well… I’d also like to paint… lol. I laugh at myself over the dithering.

Pause. Breathe. Take a moment. It can be simpler.

I feel more rested this morning than I did yesterday evening. No surprise there, in spite of the restless night, I slept enough hours to wake mostly fairly refreshed. Rested enough to really see the housekeeping that needs to be done (I bitch, because it doesn’t fit my own expectations of myself, but it’s not that bad, I literally need to vacuum and do laundry, not much else). The everyday upkeep and maintenance of good quality of life for one adult by one adult isn’t that much to handle, generally; I tidy up as I go, most of the time, and try to spend 1 hour each day doing the needful things around the house. By the time the weekend comes, it’s not all that much to finish off whatever I slacked on during the week – in this case, that appears to be the laundry, which I obviously attempted to pre-sort at some point, resulting in lingering piles of color or fabric-sorted clothes all over my fucking bedroom floor. lol When had I started the process of doing the damned laundry…? Right. I hadn’t quite finished it on Monday, which was a holiday. (I can be reliably counted on to slack on a holiday, I admit it.)

I look around the studio, I’d also left it ready to return to the easel (or tabletop, or drop-cloth on the floor), also on Monday. My brain snaps back a witty retort, “what the fuck did you actually do in the evenings all damned week?” I laughingly acknowledge I just don’t get much done on work nights; there’s little evening left, and I actually have been trying to stay on top of my self-care, first. The basics. Showers. Yoga. Exercise. A healthy meal cooked at home. Meditation. Well. Shit. There’s an entire evening of activity, right there. If I add to that “good sleep hygiene” – which includes a regular “bedtime” generally, I’ve quickly run out of time – there’s really only 4 hours or so of “evening” after work, less if I end up staying late in the office. Still… it’s pretty nice to have a head start on the laundry (I did manage to keep it well sorted lol) and the studio is delightfully ready for me to get back to it, any time I choose to. 😀

I grin at myself and finish my first cup of coffee on a misty Saturday morning. A friend I haven’t sat down with in a fair while invited me to brunch. A nice start to the day, really, even if life itself is not as advertised, and can’t really ever measure up to the fantastical daydreams I wove into my consciousness as a younger woman, this “now”, right here? Pretty fucking nice. (You like it? I built it myself… 😉 ) It’s enough. I’m enough. So are you. Sure, we can probably be more than we are, do a better job at living our lives, make our choices more skillfully – and there’s time to practice and do all those things. You can get started on that, any time. It’s okay to be okay with this, here, now, too. It’s a good place to start from, on a new journey.

“Life Sparkles (with the love we feel)” 11″ x 14″ acrylic on canvas w/glow and glitter 2018 (sorry about my shadow; tough one to photograph)

I’m ready to begin again. 🙂