Life's busy season

Sometimes life has a busy season. Odd though, it’s been busy for as long as I can remember. That’s the baseline, but for the past 12 months the pace has accelerated. Almost nonstop. Leaping from one large-scale activity to the next, one holiday or social gathering to the next. A treacherously long list of items crossed off, one at a time. Cross off one, add two. Cross off two, add four.

Thankfully, we’ve lately crossed off more than we’ve added, but there is a very large-scale activity looming in the near future that will have a ripple effect on our list. These individual tasks haven’t really reached a critical junction in terms of an impending deadline quite yet. We’re planning a wedding. This June. 3 months away. That critical junction will soon be here.

On the one hand, it’s not a big affair, no significant fanfare. But on the other hand, it’s our wedding, for goodness sakes! We want it to be special and memorable and lovely. We’re doing almost everything ourselves: hand-drawn flourishes on each hand-written invitation, home-made decorations for the house, in-house catering (courtesy of the sought-after Cristy&Diane catering co), arranging our own hand-tied bouquets, even holding the happy event in our home.

From here, about 100 days away, it seems as though it won’t be a problem.

OK, perhaps not. But let’s look at it from another perspective. Factor in a handful of additional activities that will hit the calendar over the next 100 days, but are not on our current list: 6 birthdays, 2 graduations, 1 school choir performance, Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day.

Uh, well. I’m still optimistic.

I think it’s just the tempo of life. My hypothesis is that when I was younger I had less of an appreciation for the level of effort involved in keeping a balanced life moving forward smoothly. I’ve had to re-calibrate my baseline, or maybe just adjust it to compensate for this realization along with the possibility(?) that my ability to multitask has diminished through the years. Hmmm. For some reason, I seem to be OK with that.

Thank goodness I still drink coffee.