I'm looking for something

I am home alone this morning. My husband gets back from the city later today after a 2 night "me time" break. I go away for work or fun quite a bit.  Huge gratitude to everyone that I am able to do that, especially the fun parts.  So last winter as the snow looked like it was staying for ever my husband said that he fancied a weekend away in Toronto. Nice idea I thought, but who will look after small person?  " Well you will Fiona, I'm going alone".  I'll admit that my mind went at 300 miles an hour from "how dare he; what's he up to; it's alright for some" and then I applied the brain brake and realized that this was a great idea.  He gets to sit in silence if that's what he needs; he gets to drink beer in a bar and watch sports that he is only now starting to understand, like Curling.

So he's off having fun and being the smartest man alive he also seals the deal this time by asking "do you want anything from the L'Occitane store".  Smooth!

So I'd planned mummy and me time with Small person.  Nothing elaborate, just a meal out Friday and a trip to the movies Saturday.  Turns out that when you are 8 you don't need your mum so much, you prefer friends. Apparently people have studied this. I can vouch for it being true because on Friday night he fidgeted throughout the meal and acted like he was sugar high and then he dumped me for his mate who asked him for a sleep over. I could have said no but I have learnt that dragging him kicking and screaming with me with the order "we will have a nice time" is exhausting and not so much fun. So, home alone, plus cats. Strong tea and calabrese toast with Scottish Marmalade. It's so quiet I can hear the silence.

Having had time to myself this weekend I have been sorting things out, in the house, at my bank and in my head. I tried to explain introversion to others at work this week, but I'm not sure I did it that affectively. I said "everything that I see, feel, need to do, need to understand, every imagining of any kind is a file in my head. So when we are at work and it's busy, and we need to work out what to do first, all of those questions are files in my head, additional files.  My head ( physically larger than it should be for sure, as my family have mahoosive heads) has to hold all of the information.  So when I check a box on a survey that says " workload is too high or not fairly shared out" what I mean is there is too much to fit in my head.  It's not about my ability to prioritize at this point, because if you imagine hundreds of files shoved in a finite space there is no room to sort them and move them around. It just becomes a pile of stuff wedged in a box.

That to me is the crux of introversion  - it is the beauty of being able to think before I speak and the burden of having a very full head.  So the challenge then becomes about doing thing that silence the thinking. Doing absorbing things that have me focus in the moment. I am back doing yoga. It's helping but I still find that the silence in my head is a new space that get filled with thoughts on how to solve that work conundrum.  It will take time and practice, probably over a lifetime I reckon.  Another way that works is to get lost in a crowd of people who are just like me.  It's kind of diversity in reverse in a way but if I go camp out in the woods with my tribe the need to "work it all out, whose who and why" isn't needed. My brain slows right down...and that my friends is why I am going twice to Squam this year. Woot woot!

Namaste