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Golden Time

I'm on Facebook a lot, watching conversations and a lot of humour as people deal with having to stay home. As I've posted before, staying at home is not something I do under normal circumstances - there seriously isn't a day, ever, that we aren't out and about. Staying at home has always felt like a wasted opportunity.

Fear of missing out, perhaps, or my father's voice in the back of my mind telling me that I'm wasting my day by staying inside.

In any case, now I'm home. All day, every day, with the kids... and turns out, it's a golden time.







Facebook jokes that "I never used to have time to deep clean my house. Turns out, time wasn't the problem." - and I get that, but this kind of thinking is what actually gets me to do things. Now I have time. What have I been putting off, pushing away? What will I likely wish I had got done, when this lockdown is over and life gets busy again? Will I, should I allow life to get that busy again?

That's not to say I'm being super productive each day, or structured. There is no structure really! My ambitions for each day much exceed what I actually look back on in the evening, but they are ambitions - not targets. In other words, it's good to have aims but there's no hurry in achieving them. We have time, lots of it, and there's peace.

I let the kids play, and they play so freely, so beautifully. Just watching them is a source of such deep joy. That isn't new, and being able to be with them all day every day has always been the most amazing gift for me; but perhaps right now, I'm less worried about ensuring they have something to do, somewhere to go: I just let them be. In the past year or two, N would often ask me, where do we go today? Because that was our normal. When we were home, she knew we'd soon be out again. Now though, we're not going anywhere. They know this and are happy to just get on with playing - it's nearly 2pm and no screens have been on today yet.

I do have to admit that the age they're at, and the fact that they're so close together, makes things easier for me as it means that they do play together really well and need minimal intervention from me (compared to, say, a year ago!) - and that means I do have time to do things. I try to do something physical every day, which is certainly more than I've done pre-lockdown. I read books. And, yes, I clean the house.

Having spent quite some time at Worth Abbey (Benedictine monks) and having visited various monasteries for silent retreats (long before children were on the cards!) I have some idea about living intentionally away from the world. And that's what this is; it could easily be wasted time, taking in whatever the media is feeding us right now - the time will pass, whether we use it well or not. I want to use it well: physically, spiritually to connect deeper with God, emotionally to connect deeper with my family; feeding my spirit, my intelligence, my body well.

Because this golden time will end. How will we be different then? 
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