Looking back at the first draft of this post, I can’t help but notice how hard I was on myself.
That’s one of the reasons why I’ve struggled with the basics. I can imagine myself a whole heap; I can write blog posts, play games, draw comics, record podcasts.
Heck, look at my category stats. It’s gratifying to see that I’ve published around thirty-six lots of stuff (not including web comics), and I tend to talk about feeling things (working life out, which I reckon needs to start with the emotions before you apply the reason) and making things just as much as the fun things. But there’s one category I’ve only touched on five times: The Basic Things.
Tht’s because, when it comes to the day-to-day survival stuff – the feeding, the maintenance, the self-care – I’ve always felt like a loss.
I can’t be the only one, right? In this first world society where life survives by going to the supermarket and homes are ever more increasingly places where we store our stuff between work and weekends out, there must be others who feel like they’re missing some essential skills in their lives.
What are the Basic Things I want to get better at?
It’s tricky to write further whilst avoiding gunnas. It’s the dreaded About page syndrome – where you start telling folks about what something will be when you don’t yet have a handle on what it is right now.
Still, I can say with some certainty that I want to do more of the basic Things and post about them. And thankfully, I can write to you about some things that I’ve actually done recently:
- After letting the vege bed grow into a weed jungle (again) over Christmas, I re-weeded it over the last week, doing it in chunks every evening after work, but I still need to get into the habit of checking and maintaining it.
- I’m keeping up my habit of meditating daily and I’ve added one of doing push-ups on the small set of steps to the living room (hey, I still have a dodgy, post-scooter-crash arm to mind).
- I’ve been more willing to vacuum and clean up around the house when Vickie asks me to.
There are, of course, things I want to improve:
- Learning how to cook beyond toast, baked beans and omelettes (or anything more complex than nachos).
- Making sure that I have places for everything (and put the damned things back in their places when I’m done with them).
- Getting the larger projects – like washing the sides of the house and fixing the yard fence – done when they need doing.
But what about the most basic thing?
The biggest struggle is going to be getting rid of the mental noise that always accompanies my consideration of doing something basic:
- It’s too hard.
- I have creative things I need to be doing.
- I’m no good at it.
So there’ll probably be some overlap between The Basic Things and Feeling Things categories.
And recipes. Probably those too.
A Thank You
I’m very grateful that I have a lovely wife who has shouldered a lot of the burdens, though not without doing her damnedest to get me involved. Vickie handed finances off to me at a very early stage, and though at times managing our financial situation feels like shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic, I do feel like I at least have a solid grasp on where our money is.
What are you doing?
What basic skills do you feel as though you’re lacking in?
What basics do you have nailed?