There’s nothing really giving my life structure in this season. Sure, I can create my own schedule. I can give myself firm end and start times or specific hours for work. But without any sort of external influences – going in to an office each day, evenings out of the house, Sunday mornings at church, etc – days are passed without a skeleton to keep the different areas of my life supported and suspended.
Instead, everything piles together – work flops into every hour of the day, swapped and rearranged constantly with household tasks. Interweaved with internet musings and nature documentaries. There is no ‘off limits’ time for any of these without any set schedules telling me when I have to show up for work, or when I’m not allowed to simply lay on my couch and read a while.
With the lack of structure in my schedule comes a lack of structure in my energy and emotional state as well. I find myself drifting fluidly, constantly throughout the day into and from states of laziness, exhaustion or purpose-driven energy. Sadness, happiness, loneliness, inspiration – every moment of the day is seemingly fair game for these and more.
It’s an odd way to live. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Often it’s frustrating.
I have much more than others, and I’m sorely lacking much besides. But days, weeks and months spent without a skeleton can be a messy way to walk for anyone – no matter what else they’ve got.
Picasso’s Letter
“Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on only one thing: my paintings, and everything is sacrificed to it – you and everyone else. Myself included.”
This is a quote from a letter Pablo Picasso wrote to a lover, discovered through this video about the daily routine of the artist.
It seems quite a dreary way to live, but effective. Isolating, but inspiring. Like so many things, there are positive things to glean and add to my own life, and things to leave behind.
It seems as if Picasso was the ultimate hustler.