Things I miss and want back in my life

Have started to feel a bit depressed lately about the things I miss from my life and want to try and work them back in.

First, reading. I read a lot, a trait I inherited from my parents I think. Dad was a librarian for a while during a hiatis from classroom teaching, and he has always had a pile of books several feet high beside his bed waiting to be read. I find it more than a little ironic that we now seem to compete on who has the most unread books beside their bed. I think he is hoping when he retires sometime in the next few months that he will have time to catch up on some of this. Knowing him, that’s never going to happen – he has so many other things he wants to do, I’m sure he won’t get that much reading done ! But enough about Dad, this is about me.

Anyway, I seem to have developed a slight case of hyperactivity in recent months. I don’t seem to be able to focus long enough to be able to concentrate on a book and get some serious reading done that I actually comprehend as well. I have better luck with non-fiction, particularly the sci-fi or fantasy books that I’ve read since my early teens, but I haven’t even found time to read much of that lately.

The problem is that in addition to my sometimes quite demanding job, I also have way too many other personal projects I am working on – I keep a to-do list, but it keeps getting longer each day. I am getting better at prioritising, but how do you prioritise reading time in to a schedule that sees me getting to bed close to 2am every day for several months straight ?

It’s not as if I don’t read at all – I just find myself spending all my time on the computer reading these days. It’s all just-in-time learning – I work on a project and I need to know how to do something, so I hit the ‘net and find the information, digest it, then get on with my work. It’s a new world, highly productive, but not terribly satisfying. I spend my time learning about what I need to know now, this very instant, and not learning about things I will need next week, next year, or later in life.

Even on planes, I tend to find it easier to read the weekend Australian Financial Review (which I save up between trips so I have several of them to read while traveling). I can get through an entire weekend FIN on a flight between Sydney and either Melbourne or Brisbane – about an hour and twenty minutes one way.

So, I know there is this problem here, but right now, I am driven to finish these projects I have taken on. I think I will just need to be very careful about which new projects I choose to take on once I finish what I am working on now, and try and include some serious down-time before I launch into anything else major.

The second thing I miss in my life right now is my music. This is something I’ve been missing since I moved to Sydney about five and a half years ago. We moved into a small unit and simply did not have room to set up my keyboards and synthesizers – so I had to send them back to my parents place to store in their shed.

One of the reasons I’ve been pushing myself so hard of late is a goal we have set to buy ourselves a house to live in here in Sydney (no easy task given the cost of real estate at the moment). I want something large enough to be have room to be able to set up my keyboards and get back in to playing for relaxation and fun. I’d also love to buy a piano, but that might have to wait. Perhaps an electric piano with MIDI would be a good compromise, but I’m undecided.

I’d also love to cook more than I do – or more the point, cook different than what I do. I simply don’t have the time or energy to get creative with finding new things to cook either for ourselves or when entertaining (don’t do much of that anymore either). I do enjoy cooking, and I’d like to experiment more.

I have some theories about these things I miss and how I can get them back into my life, but now is not really the time for that. Perhaps when I do some more travelling for work I will have some time to ponder the bigger picture and will write about it then. For now, I have work to do and projects to complete.

PS. Please excuse my self-indulgent ramblings, I just needed to write some stuff down as a way of reminding myself what is happening, so I can see what needs to change, and then actually start the change process.