Ending off the year / productive

I was off work for about ten days towards the end of the year. It was productive.

I cooked 3 meals, cycled, played board games, VR games, and spent time with many different people.

On the last night before going back to work, I felt just a little sad to have to go back to work, I didn't want the break to end.

Now I'm back at work, and yea it's fine haha. I don't dislike work so I'm perfectly fine with going back to it.

I think what made me feel a little wistful / poignant about it was not work itself, but the sense that going back to work means going back to a 'normal life' where work dominates the majority of our waking hours and little time is devoted to anything else.

The ten days have exposed a little of what else there is that life can offer, but is often out of reach.

It made me miss the old times where friends were just around. In school where you could just pop by and say hi. The countless saturdays I've spent hanging around before or after youth, popping by the various rooms. Even the meetings till late.

My colleagues are great, but it just isn't the same. We get along well and I think we would have been good friends, but the work that needs to be done and the professional nature of our relationship at the foundation makes it different.

I'm someone who does well being alone. Being in India, staying at home due to covid, sure I miss hanging out with people but I can do well perfectly fine. But I have to say, it's nice to really just hang out once in awhile.

Not necessarily catch ups. Something I realised this week. Meeting up with people, finding out how their lives have been, what's been going on etc, catch ups have their time and place. What I do also appreciate though is just hanging out. Being in each other's presence.

For the two dinners I hosted and the visit to my friend's house, there was limited catching up. We didn't sit round a table and took turns to ask each other how life has been. We just hung out like we always did as friends. And I think that's nice.

I do feel at the end of it that I didn't really get to know how the people I havn't seen in awhile are doing - so catch ups are still necessary if I want to do that. But it struck me that we shouldn't underestimate the value of just hanging out. Even if we didn't know the details of what is going on in each other's lives, it wasn't all that important at that moment. It was just time spent enjoying the friendship.

Personally, I'm not all that concerned if my friends don't know about what I have been up to lately, but I appreciated being able to just chill with them.

Extending that a little further, I think there is an element of this sense of community in that.

It reminds me of my days in youth, and how everyone, even people I hardly talk to, were my friends. I don't know many things about many people, but there was a sense of community and belonging.

It wasn't about hanging out with any specific friend (though of course having people you are closer to around helps a lot), it was about the collective.

I look at my guest list, and used camp attendance list to help refine the list. It really takes me back,

Camps were interesting. Supper and the final nights in particular were when a random spattering of people would end up gathering. You may not know much about each other, but it was nice.

Maybe part of what was great about the final nights were that everyone would be half asleep, too tired to do much, but wanting to sit around and be in each other's presence. It was a shared experience.

Today I am old. It's past 1am and I'm sitting at my computer writing this. The good ol' days are gone and they won't come back. We have all moved on in life, past that phase. We are adults, with responsibilities, with careers.

Being an adult isn't bad. I like earning my own paycheck and being able to buy tasty food. It's covid now but when that's over, holidays are a thing too. I have an amazing wonderful person to share my life with, someone with whom I have plans to buy a house and build our lives together. So no regrets right there.

I am of course also acutely aware that these are nostalgia lenses and there were plenty of not so great things about the good ol' days too.

But tomorrow morning my alarm will ring and it will be back to the routine of being a 'productive member of society'.

Perhaps that's the thing. I'd like to be able to 'waste time' and just hang out with community. We could be in the same place and I'll literally be doing my own thing while they do their own thing, and occasionally we'll do something together briefly, and that will be cool in my book.

That's what I'll miss most about the good ol' days, and these won't come back. Occasionally, like in the ten days I've had, they may pop up in brief glimpses, but then we will all be swept up again.

It's not even really 'busyness' I think. I mean I myself am not totally busy that I can't afford any time at all. Free time does definitely decrease however and becomes limited to specific slots, and with competing attentions for the limited amount of time remaining (some of which certainly needs to be devoted to personal time and rest), it becomes nigh impossible to collectively mobilise the energies to 'waste time together'.

Also, the feeling that we ought to spend our time better. That there are looming deadlines. That there is work to be done. Productivity.

So well. No more of that, adults don't do that, we won't sleep in camps on the floor in sleeping bags (even if I wanted nobody else would volunteer to do it with me heh), we don't have the time to spend time doing nothing with each other, time is precious, it must be spent productively.

So goodbye sleepovers and late camp nights, goodbye regular saturday hangouts with community. You were an important part of my life. I am now a productive member of society and have no time for you.

I think there will still be glimpses here and there though, and these will be all the more precious - and to me also certainly a productive use of my time.

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