After months of being over-committed and months after I said I was going to stop being so over-committed, I’ve finally, FINALLY, reached the point where life has slowed down somewhat, where I don’t have to be somewhere seemingly every minute of every day, where I’ve gotten through all my commitments without adding anymore on.  That in itself, my learning “NO” is pretty stupendous. That this has just so happened to coincide with the first frost of the season,  pretty much wiping ‘deal with excess produce’ off the to-do list until next spring as well as trying to keep up with two gardens means that I have suddenly found myself with something called ‘free time’ that I’m not exactly sure what to do with. Of course, the holidays are fast approaching, so I have no doubt I’ll busy myself with that, but that’s fun busy – making and baking and visiting with friends and family?  That’s definitely the stuff life is made of, much more than lots of ‘work (no matter how enjoyable and meaningful it is) busy’.

I had a birthday recently and something about turning another year older always makes me contemplate life a little bit. 46 is most decidedly middle aged and there are increasing reminders all around me that I’m not the young lassie I still think myself to be at times. It’s not so much the gray hair – everyone around me tells me I just look blonde with sparkly hair (the grays being the ‘glitter’) or that I am hard pressed to stay up past 9 pm anymore or even that I can’t stand the music the kids are listening to these days. Let’s face it, I’ve always hated what the kids listen to. No, it’s other things, like my husband planning a champagne brunch on my birthday morning, a cloudy, slightly drizzly and chilly grey Sunday morning, the likes of which are practically made for champagne brunches, and I tell him thank you but no thank you, because I need to be slightly productive for a bit before I break out into full on celebration.  I have reached the point where I don’t even gripe about being a grown up, I just am and I’m not even sure how or when that happened.  It may have been the morning I woke up and couldn’t fit my engagement ring over my knuckle anymore, the joint having  expanded in yet another little sign that my body is most certainly aging.

Of course some of it could just be a lingering by-product of being so overly scheduled for so many months on end, realizing along the way that if I was ALWAYS busy, then I needed to be on top of the ball at ALL times, forgetting that I hate being a grown up ALL the time.  It’s totally over rated. I need wiggle room, I need room to play – we all do really, but for someone like me who has a certain threshold of productive where I think I must accomplish X amount of things on a daily basis, I definitely need that wiggle room to goof off, to have impromptu happy hours and to just plain old sit down and do nothing. I am just now starting to realize how undervalued sitting and doing nothing is, which is either another by-product of being too busy for too long or merely another sign that I’m getting older. After a while, the two start to blur.  Maybe that’s the true sign of being a grown up – you don’t know exactly how you got there, you just are.