Do it (for) yourself

I’m temporarily on sick parade after an episode at home which led to a trip to hospital in a big yellow/green taxi. That whole story deserves a breakdown which I’ll probably write in the coming days.

Being temporarily not working means I can revisit, in a bingewatch kind of way, Angry People In Space (aka ‘The Expanse‘). I can also spend time watching lots of helpful DIY boat videos on YouTube (looking at you, Just About Sailing).

If we lived closer to the boat (if the boat lived closer to us?), I would definitely be up for loading the car with tools and dogs, and spending a day or so getting on with the joblist (with occasional breaks for doggy interaction and chocolate, in either its solid or liquid form). On this thought, Deganwy is a five- to six-hour round-trip and that’s too far for regular journeys. Besides, I’d spend so much time with the dogs, compensating them for the car trip, that I wouldn’t have time to get anything done on the boat. And yeah, that’s absolutely true, so it cancels out the first sentence in this paragraph.

Of course I could move the boat closer to solve (or mitigate) the travel time problem, and no, I don’t mean having it put on a low-loader, having it driven here and then parking it out on the road. I’ve just taken delivery of Reeds 2022 Almanac and Reeds 2022 Marina Guide. They both tell me that the nearest (to where we live) marina alternative to Deganwy would be Hull, which is 1-1/2 hours away. Obviously, a three-hour round-trip is preferable over a five- or six-hour journey. But improved travel time aside, there’s little benefit in moving the boat to the east coast. And the east coast water is just so… muddy. The last time I sailed on the Humber the water was chocolate, not the lovely blue/green colour that we see in West Wales.

But the boat is in Deganwy, so piffling about where it is and where it could be and the pros and cons of both places is irrelevant anyway. This is where we live. That is where the boat lives (for now, at least). Everything else is a compromise.

The thing I really wanted to say is that whatever our planned life looks like, and whatever incidents and accidents we encounter, the one thing we must do above all else is to look after ourselves. I’m forcing myself to back off from work because it’s going to benefit me (and, therefore, it will benefit my family). Yes, I’ll take a financial dip because if I don’t work I don’t get paid, but if I’m not able to work (through continued ill health) then I’m still not going to get paid.

‘Nobody lay on their death bed and said “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”‘ is a most insightful comment (Harold Kushner). I’ve just had a text from Sam that indicates she’s exhausted and close to cracking under the strain, and this makes me fearful and sad. If she breaks then she will suffer, her daughters will suffer, I will suffer and so will the dogs. Yet she’s intent on pushing on. She won’t speak to her line manager about the strain she’s under or the pressure that she’s enduring. Such is her commitment to her job (and, primarily, to the children she has responsibility to/for), and her stubbornness, and her work ethic, that she won’t consider her own wellbeing, even though that would be the logical thing; logical for us and also for her, and for the benefit of those same children in her care.

But this is the C20th/C21st way of working we have been programmed to think about, this is our inbuilt and fully dysfunctional work/life balance.

This is not the way it should be.