I woke up early today, at about 3. It was one of those wakeups and you know there’s no going back to sleep, at least not yet. I was thinking hard.
There was anxiety, but no obvious good cause. I like the definition of anxiety as worrying about something in the future, i.e. where you have little or no control. There was certainly money in there, but also the arrival of Zee’s 21y year old niece Zoi. About briefly discussing my nervousness about new people with my psych last week, she asked that I write down what’s happening at such times, to try and understand where the fears come from. This is probably one of the more straightforward ones. I have never met Zoi, and fear awkward time together with little in common. It’s probably that simple.
I went out for a night walk, which usually helps at such times. The only trouble is that Zee usually wakes, and I also don’t like her worrying about me walking through unlit forest paths at night. But she seemed ok, and drifted back ok. It was a warn and gentle night too, and completely lacking disembodied arms carrying lanterns.
Came back and crawled back in, and happily managed to catch up a few hours of sleep. We were both running slow, so I whipped Z up to the station to save time.
Then I planned my day, knowing there was a good chance I’d crash early afternoon.
So all the hard stuff first. I mounted Zee’s beloved drum on the wall (or at least sorted the hooks out: she doesn’t like people touching it), then did all the washing, drying and ironing, in advance of the rapidly incoming cold change. Chopped back a lot of the garden, both for Zoe and for the green collection tomorrow. The the bins went out.
Back on the computer then to get the lawyers onto chasing barb. The current geo-politicals are getting me nervous about sorting all my finances at last. And for god’s sake, she left me three years ago, and it’s still dragging on.
Next job was to get some options together for Zoi, both here in Melbourne, and next week in Sydney. There’s a lot of options….
Zura was on my back through the afternoon to take Clara to Melbourne with us. Her imminent move probably won’t be able to include two cats. Not sure. Lovely cat, our Clara, but very high maintenance. We’ll talk tonight.
Rest of the day was running around doing banking stuff. And now I’m only just fading at 5. Good effort. I even organised dinner….
Whilst I was driving, my podcast was scarily relevant, and (I hope) prescient. [It](Managing Transitions in Life - The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks | Podcast on Spotify) was talking about the regular passages we go through in life, again by my favourite happiness man Arthur Brooks. He was joined by another author I knew, Bruce Feiler. Through a convoluted life path, this guy had interviewed vast numbers of people in order to look for patterns (and frequencies) of life changes, big and small. I had actually heard the whole podcast before, but this time I noticed Feiler talked to a lot of people about their lives. And you just knew that this was a service for those people, but to have their stories heard, and to help them interpret those stories in the context that everyone does this in similar ways and frequencies. It’s given me some added impetus to push along the nursing home life recordings, and think about possible expansions at some point.