Playing

Is playing permissible whilst jobs remain to be done? Must I, as an adult, always be "responsible"? My mother tells us so. I wonder why since she loved her job as creative and fulfilling, if demanding, and a salvation from an unhappy marriage. She loved dancing and went there at least once a week. Later, when retired, she developed a beautiful garden. Should I look at her actions not the words?

I played as a young child, post offices, paint by numbers, tents and trolleys, marbles, fag-cards, football, train sets, stamps, chemistry sets, Meccano, soliders, drawing.

Then, at some stage, I lost the desire, the freedom. Was I consumed by other needs these child hood pleasures couldn't meet? It didn't help that there could be no communication because there was no sense of being acceptable. I could cite, too, that reading was considered rude for excluding others. It was only acceptable as a means to an educational necessity. Magazines were "books". And there were no books in the house save a few my father kept in his bedside cabinet and I was warned not to read. So obviously I did and I could not find anything in them, disappointingly, that would render them "unsuitable". My father's mother read and that was looked down upon as neglectful of her duties. And yet.

Even now, writing this, I feel guilty. But this blog has taken my mind off work worries, worries I could not stop intruding, tentacles spread into my mind without welcome. The other day I decided I had to stop them. So I decided to count every time they entered my mind and put them outwith the walls. Ten times in two hours is bad. They burst in, consciously unwelcome, to my night hours, upon waking and hypnotised me such I would suddenly awake to the realisation that I was laying in a bath, now turned cold or had driven x miles without knowing.

I say, consciously unwelcome, because, at some level, my mind was choosing to create them, let them in.

Perhaps because there is not much of a life, or greater worries so that work has become number one thought. In contrast, when younger, I never thought of work once I'd left it and could not understand why others did. Of course I was more driven to achieve a "relationship" and friends. And now I have more responsibility at work and the world is more demanding, less easy. Less rewarding too as bureaucratic obstacles constantly prevent achievement, with frustration, stress and lack of creative reward.And yet in my heart I know this is only part of the story.

Maybe too there's a greater truth in the slick saying "get a life"...a wider one. Do work demands not allow or do I?

So whilst I am again, thinking about work now it feels more "out there". Perhaps, because I'm out there. To recover I know I must build myself interests, play, to save my sanity and expand my world. I will get a life.