Tick, tock
Me with Wayne and our friend Genna high atop Pic Paradis on St. Maarten in the Caribbean.
by Christine Kling
Okay, so I’ve blown my blog deadline again. I always try to get my blogs posted by 3:00 a.m. so my Friday blog appears all day on Friday, but I’m finding that time is slipping away from me these days. Minutes, hours, days, whole weeks pass, and I look back and wonder where they went.
What’s changed? I’m not flying solo through life anymore. When I used to talk to the Yorkshire Terror, he never talked back. The conversations were all one-sided, and it was so easy to keep on track and focused. This relationship stuff is certainly a challenge when it comes to getting things done (GTD).
All writers struggle with finding the time to write, and most of us here at Write on the Water have written about how difficult it is to work on a boat while writing a book. We’ve often said that we need to focus on one or the other, so we do boat work in spurts between writing our books. Since returning from our week-long trip to St. Maarten, I’m trying to move all my gear off Talespinner (boat work) and get her ready to sell, do research on my new book, keep sales up on my current books (book work), and hold up my end of the conversation. And I’m trying to get ready to leave on a two-month research trip in Europe. This is exhausting!
But lest I give you the impression that I am having second thoughts about this new tandem lifestyle I’m leading, let me also share this. Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m turning the big SIX-O. Tick tock, indeed. Where has the time gone? I don’t feel sixty and thanks to this new life and the joy I find in it, I don’t think I look sixty either. I used to think that sixty meant being a little blue-haired old lady, not a strong, fit sailor.
When I was a child and looking at my grandmother when she was a little old lady at age sixty, the life expectancy of Americans was only that they would live until they were in their sixties. But modern medicine has changed all that and the age keeps climbing. According to this country list on Wikipedia, an American female can expect to live until 82.2 years old, and the USA is number 35 on the list! Canada is #12 and Japan is #2 with a life expectancy for women of 87.2 years. I think the laid-back sailing/cruising lifestyle could add another decade onto that, so if I am going to be around for another 30 years or so, I have plenty of time to figure out how to get my books written with another human being around.
So while this IS going to take some getting used to, and I am struggling with finding the time and the discipline for GTD, I wouldn’t go back to being solo again for one minute!
Fair winds!
Christine
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