If it were that easy…
The simple things are seemingly so easy but in the end they take the lions share of your time.
I have this idea that I need to focus on the many tasks in front of me. I need to compile my lists and start with the most arduous and idiocyncratic tasks first because they will take organisation and time and mental acumen.
So off I go, trying hard to live up to my own expectations of delivery, to manifest all the things my imagination conjures and in the right space in the right time and to the right quality. The reality is, it never happens. Then I persecute myself for having not delivered the goals I should thought of as casual and could have drawn in by crayon, fuzzed around the edges and simplistic by design rather than the bold hard black marker pen I’ve drawn the detail into.
So, I either have my backs and fronts and ups and downs and insides outsides around and sprung and that then means I confuse the simple with the complex, because its always the simple that’s just buggering up my life. It’s the easy simple crap that’s just not working.
4 bolts for a BMW - we all know AF threads will not fit! So why did they give them to me?
2 fork seals each a cm too big.
Camping gear and patience because its snowed and been returned and needs ordering again…
There are so many of these simple bits that planning and organisation slip over like a stream running over pebbles leaving them unturned and un motivated to fit into the bigger pond.
How do you know when you have planned and thought enough. How do you know you have considered all the right things?
How would anyone else measure their success in a task that is quite so undefined as the one that faces me now?
Is preparation an excuse because I cant measure up to the ideals of spontinaety?
Do I persuade myself that I’m quite an individual but really I’m hiding behind ordinary.
Spectacular is and extra ordinary word.
I feel as though I have been bleached by long hours in the sun, I’m colourless and worn, frayed and a little tatty. In the last year I have been both entertaining and entertained but currently, the bleached, dried grey and weary has taken its toll and i feel as though the spring in my tigger has been lost.
I’m sure its not far away.
Confused as I have been and will continue to be, I do now know that I prefer myself as Spectacular and Extra ordinary than I do as grey and sun worn.
NO matter what the cost I prefer me as me and not as the model citizen others predispose me to be.
Look forward to finding the spring. I enjoy being eccentric, I enjoy the fun it invokes, I don’t enjoy the lack of humanisation that is commensurate with it.
Next time yo see a tigger, also see the difficulty that tiggers face - because they are the only one.
You didn’t tell your big sister you had a website and blogs etc. Did you know David has a Tigger hot water bottle which he cuddles when he’s feeling sorry for himself (not that he’s feeling that way at the moment as he finishes work on Friday). Do you want to borrow it for your trip?
Hopefully you will let me know when you actually leave, you could come over and have a free meal, maybe those sausages you like from the Farndon farm shop and some red wine. Oops got to go, lunchtime and mum will wonder where I am.
Ooohhh the lovely Mr Jo, don’t worry and don’t panic, planning in crayon is very sensible, that way you can smudge it and swoosh it and change it to a different colour and a new plan will be made, and it will give some nice new colours and patterns to your trip, it will all change once you get out there, the small things are small, because they are small, they are only becoming big because you are worried that they will, and the things which seems so big now will dissapear and you will have new things to worry about, like is that smell me? how do you wash up without washing up liquid…a tea bag, and where can I buy a tea bag, and is it normal for my feet to be that colour, if I leave this outside will the ants come and eat it, or the lions and how on earth is the sky that glourious shade of opal…these things are the things which will occupy your brain and will, I have no doubt, bring out the werid wondeful and marvelous tigger in you!! You will forget something, you will wish you had remembered to do something, you will get cross that you don’t have the big swiss arm knife you thought you had packed, but thats all a part of it, and don’t forget you have a whole section of Europe first, and they still sell things like tea bags and big springs with twisty bits which will go in your bike! Planning the important things in black marker like visas, passports, travel insurance and some Pounds (Dollars are very overrated) and everything else you will find as you go around. Life doesn’t change the moment you leave the shores of the UK, but it does change as soon as you let go of being the you which you think everyone wants and expects you to be and just relax into being Jo, a Jo that no one knows, no one will judge and the Jo that everyone loves just because you are you. Big sloppy snogs and hugs sazzle xxxxxx