Now that school is back in full swing for most Orange County families, the lazy summer schedule is starting to feel like a dream. Of course, many families don’t have a relaxed summer schedule either, especially if the parents work full time and have young kids who need transporting to camps or daycare, but if you were able to slow down this summer, the sudden uptick of things to do and places to be can feel stressful.
There’s been a lot of attention in the media lately being paid to what people are calling a “busyness epidemic.” A 2014 book by Washington Post journalist Brigid Schulte, “Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time,” takes a look at our overloaded modern schedules, including her own. She writes, “Somewhere around the end of the 20th century, busyness became … a way of life. … And life, sociologists say, became an exhausting everydayathon.”
Sociologist John Robinson, who has studied for more than 50 years how we use time, claims that working women actually have 30 hours of leisure time a week, five more hours of free time than they had in the 1960s. This idea seemed impossible to Schulte, who kept time diaries for a year, then met with Robinson to find out whether she actually had 30 free hours a week.
He highlighted activities as “free time” that she would’ve never considered: Exercise, which she saw as obligatory, lying in bed for half an hour while listening to the radio and trying to get up, waiting two hours for a tow truck, taking her son’s bike to the repair shop, etc.
I doubt many mothers or parents think of these moments as leisure time, but maybe it’s how you perceive what you’re doing that counts. Waiting for a tow truck could be shaped into free time if you have a good book to read (or your daughter to play tic-tac-toe with, which is what Schulte did) or a phone to play scrabble on or call a friend with.
This summer, I took the perfect vacation to slow down my busy life. We camped on an island with no running water or electricity with my sister and her family for five nights. The only decisions each day were what to eat or drink from our cooler of groceries, what book to read, and when to take a swim or a boat ride. It was rustic, but that was the best part. It was so simple I couldn’t over-think anything.
I returned home determined to maintain the calm I had felt during that week on the island. It started to crumble a bit during my first commute to work. Then the small daily stresses of work and home began to build up again – nothing extremely unmanageable, but still not as peaceful as the island.
It got me wondering if we should move, if California itself is too laden with stressful moments: the traffic, the time it takes to get anywhere, the lack of water, the poor air quality.
Then I remembered that the daily stresses of life existed in idyllic Madison too, and that I really love California.
Instead of moving away to a small town where I can walk everywhere and people just sit on their porches drinking iced tea and chatting, I’ve been trying to slow down my mind and not do 10 things at the same time in an attempt to feel less busy and scattered. I also try to carve out an hour or two of each day to just enjoy myself. I’ve noticed that if I take 45 minutes or an hour for lunch to just sit and eat with a friend or read a book alone, it makes my day better. It’s nice to have that still spot in the afternoon around which the rest of the busyness revolves.
Then at night, after the 10 million chores are done, lunches made, kids on their way to bed, I make a cocktail or scoop a bowl of ice cream and sit down with my husband to watch an hour of TV or read a book on the porch.
These aren’t my only pockets of leisure time, by any means, but they are two I try to fit in every day, and I think they help settle my mind.
When the kids were very little, I was sometimes stumped by free time when it arrived. If I had a free hour, I really wanted to make that hour count. I needed to do something I really enjoyed, but I took so long trying to decide what that perfect thing should be that I often wasted half the time! I still have a tendency to not relax or do something I enjoy, even when I have the time. It may be hardwired from being busy for so long, or just part of my personality, but I am trying to evolve into a more peaceful and relaxed person.
Schulte arrived at the conclusion that people now wear busyness as a badge of honor. If you’re not busy, then something is the matter with your life. I’m sure I’ve bought into that a little bit. Luckily, my husband is excellent at relaxation and is good at pointing out to me that I am doing too much and should just sit down. My kids are both good at enjoying life too. So I’m going to use my family as role models and try to calm down a bit, to re-create the island feeling on land.
Contact the writer: hskyler@ocregister.com
