being busy bees
Posted on 16. Oct, 2012 by Princess Lasertron in at the office, pertaining to alice
This is my little studio at home. It used to be our bedroom upstairs. When I moved out of CAMP I had just a few days of notice, so I moved my work into this room pretty hastily. It still feels temporary. Nothing of permanence has been created to designate the space as something special.
With my smaller space to work, it’s harder to have employees, and with the launch of Hello Holiday (See how many business names I can drop in this post. I am wack.) I’m working all night on packing and shipping orders and promoting that. So I’m taking fewer orders for Princess Lasertron–about 5-6 per month instead of the 20-30 I was doing at the height of PL’s profitability.
All of those orders happen here. Usually late at night like this–3:50 am, after I go home from working on Hello Holiday, before I snuggle into bed to wake up at 8:30 to drive everyone in our one-car family to work or school, I cut out the flowers and pick out buttons and turn on an episode of Law and Order and enjoy my hobby. After seven years of the routine of pulling strands of thread out of a skein, running the ends through my mouth and into the eye of a needle, and the rhythmic up-and-down-and-up-and-down of stitching a design through a piece of soft wool felt, I feel very comfortable and reassured by going through the motions of the work and reflecting on the purpose of what I’m creating.
I saw this on Facebook today posted by my friend Kelly Newell, who owns my favorite boutique here in town. I feel always sort of pulled between my nature of working all the freaking time and the tendency that creates to sit and spin my wheels. Acting like I’m working when I’m not, because it feels good to feel busy. It’s a waste of my time because I have REAL, actual responsibilities for two businesses and a family and a home and myself.
Being less busy isn’t something I can do, realistically. But examining why I’m busy helps me avoid wasting time on goals and projects that are going nowhere for the time being. I glorify and celebrate what fulfills my soul, whether it’s work, free time, drive time, family time, sleep time, shower time, whatever. But it’s true–the popular notion that having your butt in a chair means you’re working and “busy” is nothing to celebrate. It’s okay to get up and go and do something better.
Tomorrow after I pick up Alice from pre-school, we’re going to learn how to make peanut butter sandwiches. She knows how to pour a drink for herself now and cut up a carrot. She loves to sweep floors and make beds and draw pictures and trace things. She threads beads onto a string. I think about how busy she is, and how none of it is really meaningless to her because she doesn’t get the idea of “wasting time” or “looking busy.” She’s never busy, just wonderfully, magnificently enthusiastic, curious, and motivated to keep getting better. Never too busy.
xx
meg
