September Reset
Cooler weather marks the return of a predictable routine.
The kids have all returned to school this week, and I joke that now my vacation begins. I am kidding, of course. The whole family is back to a daily routine, with early-morning wakeups and a breakfast rush and lunch-making and music practices and running around looking for clean socks at the last minute. And even though summer is my favourite season and I’m sad to see it go (I’m a rare redhead who loves heat and sun), there is something thrilling about the return of fall and the routine it represents.
Over the years, I’ve learned that I thrive under predictability. This goes against my nature as a self-identified thrill-seeker and adventurer who claims to chafe under the yoke of monotony. Time has shown that I do better when I make myself submit to schedules, deadlines, and precise goals. Within limits I find freedom, as counterintuitive as that sounds.
Annie Dillard once wrote, “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.” And I can tell you that, without a net, those days do not get caught, despite the best of intentions; they simply vanish. They may vanish in a wonderful whirlwind of fun, and plenty of living does get squeezed out of them, such as biking to the beach with my kids to meet friends and swim in Lake Huron, lying on the toasty warm patio with a great novel in hand, planning elaborate dinners, and hosting friends for spontaneous midweek happy hours that inevitably derail any evening aspirations of working out, cleaning the house, or doing laundry. That’s what summer is for! But there comes a time when it has to settle down and stabilize, and the downtime I’ve enjoyed must then be channeled into new, recharged productivity.
So, this week I have reimplemented my usual school-year schedule. My alarm goes off at 5:30 a.m. (and it must be across the room, otherwise I will hit snooze without even registering). I spend an hour engaged in deep reading—not novels, but rather books that stretch my mind and teach me things about the world or writing.
I escape to my new little 12’-by-8’ backyard office, slowly constructed by my father over the past year and now thankfully usable (but still incomplete), where I start my “real” job as a freelance editor and writer. This gets briefly interrupted to make my youngest son’s lunch and have breakfast with the kids, but then they head off to school and I return to my office, with a glorious stretch of six solitary hours ahead. My time gets divided among my various freelance jobs (which thankfully now add up to full-time hours), book promotion, and contemplating my next big writing project. I work in absolute silence, rarely listening to music, keeping my phone off, and trying to stay as focused as possible. Six hours fly by.
A Digression on Time
Time takes on different meaning for parents of young children. When I think back on how much time I used to have and took for granted, without realizing what a luxury it was, it baffles me. Why did I squander those vast expanses of emptiness on so many silly, meaningless activities? But then I realize that one often cannot learn the value of something until it’s gone.
As I tried to explain to my sister recently, the hardest part of parenting for me is feeling like I never have time or mental space for my own thoughts; I am bombarded all day with hundreds of questions, comments, stories, and demands from three young humans who naturally assume my attention is theirs to monopolize. (I once read that a child asks 200 questions on average each day. I believe it. And I’m quite sure I field 600 questions every day from my three boys.)
The rest of my brainpower goes to paid work which is inherently cerebral, household labour which typically happens when kids are around and talking at me, reading and absorbing other people’s words, and the (occasional, brief) uninterrupted conversation with friends or my husband. Even my solo time at the gym is spent focusing on the physical challenge, not dwelling on anything meaningful.
Then I collapse into bed at 9:30 p.m. and realize I haven’t even had a chance to work through some complex idea or thought my mind. Forget meditation, journaling, or anything remotely resembling introspection. When I tell a family member, “I haven’t thought about it yet,” I mean I literally haven’t had 30 seconds to think about it uninterrupted.
I do not wish for the alternative—a life in which I am childless and have unlimited time to exist in my own mind—but there are moments when I envy how it must feel to have a continuous thought that only ends when you choose, not when someone taps you on the arm to ask where the cereal is or to accuse someone else of taking the last of the milk. All this is to say, every minute of solitude feels like a gift during these rich and fleeting days of family chaos.
Routine to the Rescue
A routine makes the most of those precious limited hours. It puts them to work—some days, more work happens than on others—and it creates a framework for consistency, which I’m realizing more and more matters above all else when it comes to high-quality and high-volume productivity. Not talent or skill or genius or brain-boosting substances, but simply putting one’s butt in a chair and keeping it there. To quote Christoph Niemann, “Relying on craft and routine is a lot less sexy than being an artistic genius. But it is an excellent strategy for not going insane.” Writing my first book taught me that: All I had to do was show up day after day, and eventually it came together.
And so, I will keep showing up each day when my kids are in school, taking advantage of my fresh schedule to put in time and effort, trusting that it pays off in the form of articles, interviews, and, hopefully someday, more books! I welcome the fall for the structure it brings and the incentive in the form of cooler weather that makes it easier to stay inside, settle in front of my computer with a cup of tea, and write.
It was a big news week for Childhood Unplugged!
A big op-ed in the Globe and Mail, September 5: “My son is starting high school, and he still doesn’t have a cell phone.”
A great, lively podcast interview, In the Village, September 6: “Kids are wasting their lives staring at cellphones.”
CBC Radio, August 30: 17 interviews on different stations across the country. Whew!