On Auto-Pilot? Just Exhale.
Do you ever look up from what you’re doing and feel like you’ve been on autopilot for months? That’s the feeling I got today while I knelt in our new bedroom and put away the two baskets of clean clothes that had been sitting there for at least a week.
I think what kicked me out of that gear was the perfect storm of a moment. The bedroom is the only room on the second floor of the house we just bought. The low, vaulted ceiling resting on the four foot walls – all wood – gives off a warm glow and feels cozy against the -21°C winter wind I just came in from. Ripley, our pup, watched me lazily from the bed in her anti-incision-licking pajamas she got last week after her spay surgery. I knew that downstairs in the living room, my wife was warming up by the fire after feeding the pigs their slop and hay dinner in the brand new trough we got them so they didn’t have to eat off rocks like savages. She would be under a blanket cuddling with Frankie – our eleven year old dog – and Rusty – our four or five month old kitten that never even knew our home in Toronto.
Never knew our home in Toronto. Something about that thought, in that atmosphere, just jolted me. Almost everything about our life changed in what feels like the blink of an eye and in all the excitement and chaos I forgot to take a minute to just – exhale. We moved from a downtown apartment to a hobby farm in Muskoka. New jobs, new chores, less friends and family (well we see my Dad way more often which is great), no last minute run to the corner store for *insert missing ingredient*.
In the whirlwind of it all some things fell to the wayside, but what’s been bugging me the most is that I stopped writing when I packed up my office in Toronto and never started again. Setting up a space here for my office was low on the priority list, and even once I had it set up, so many things felt like they were more important that writing. Firewood, pig-proof fence, new job, the well went dry, and of course there was Shelby, our nine week hound visitor (I’ll get into that more later when it’s not so fresh). Those things were all important and necessary, of course I wasn’t going to let the pigs escape and have Wendy run onto the highway again just so I could sit here and write. But the truth is, my soul feels a little emptier with all these thoughts all jarbled up in here, like my skin is slowly inflating like a latex glove. UGH.
Exhale. Jarble on paper. I feel lighter already.