All in good times

BOOKS: Plagued by the sense that life was passing her by, journalist CATHERINE CLEARYdecided to stop putting off her dreams and start living – one day at a time

HAVE YOU EVER begged someone for time? About a year and a half ago I realised I was doing it on a daily basis. Roughly 17 times an hour, on a bad day, the words, “pleeeaase give me a minute,” came out of my mouth. Typically I would be talking to my children. My own whiney voice began to echo around my head. No one was giving me any minutes. They were disappearing out from under my feet like the rubber walkway of a treadmill. And every year an invisible hand seemed to press the “go faster” button.

When we first moved nearly five years ago, we joked about getting one of those fancy glass door stencils on the room where the washing machine sits. Instead of the utility room we would call it the Futility Room, where the war on socks would be fought, day in, day out. Of course we never got around to it.

Someday we would paint the last bit of skirting board. Someday I would stop feeling time-poor, harried, always just a few minutes behind. Someday I’d get to do those things I’d always fancied doing someday. Out of the frustration came a kernel of an idea which became a book called A Month of Somedays. What if I just roped off a bit of time every day, ruthlessly, to try something I’d always wanted to do? I would be facing down that “future fallacy”– the misguided belief that at some fantasy point in a future with better weather, a capsule wardrobe, a tidier house, things would click into place.

So, in the spirit of doing it now, I came up with a plan: 30 days, six projects, each one marked off a day at a time. I would slot new things into every 24 hours for 30 given days at a time. Most of these would be things at which I was an utter novice. They would shove me out of my comfort zone physically and mentally. At times it seemed bonkers, the idea of tackling “busy-ness” by making myself more busy.

There followed a fascinating and challenging year. I developed something of a split personality. One half of me was a pampered Brooklyn brat shuttling from music lessons to Mandarin classes to a sweaty Bikram yoga studio. “Can’t meet for coffee,” I texted a friend. “I have a flute lesson.” Get me. The other half was still pairing the socks, cooking the pasta, pouring the juice. I got lots of help. The paid childcare, on which all the “how does she do it?” women in the world rely, was vital. Then there was a husband who would be handed a hot grizzly toddler at the front door by a blur running out with a bag of gear or a music book.

But I also patched together all the fragments of time that were there in the first place, and I just hadn’t noticed them. I used the 20 minutes I didn’t spend channel surfing to master the Beatles’ Hey Jude on the flute. I leaned down and switched off the broadband box on the days when I had a deadline. I knew that if went online my kite brain would happily float the time away one distraction after another. If life is too short to stuff a mushroom, then it’s way too short to watch someone else do it on YouTube. I’m pretty certain I won’t wish on my deathbed that I’d spent more time Facebooking.

I discovered that when I did just one thing – concentrated, struggled to remember or learn, or physically hefted shovelloads of soil – life felt more manageable. Just because I can walk and Tweet doesn’t mean it’s good for me. My multi-tasking, laptop on the kitchen counter regime – a world where every idle moment can be filled with screen time – had left me feeling wrung out by the constant compulsion to check things.

Along the way I was surprised by lots of things. Learning Mandarin made me ravenously hungry. Being barefoot is more culturally verboten than leaving the house in your pyjamas. Flute lessons will teach you how to breathe properly. Writing about growing or making food is a whole lot easier than doing it.

The house went un-hoovered for weeks on end and tumbleweeds of cocker spaniel hair gathered in corners. We managed to carve out a just-clean-enough policy and no one came to any serious harm. Plates were dropped in the high-wire juggling act. One Saturday, midway through a class I realised I’d dropped my middle son at a party and hadn’t given the address to his Dad, who was picking him up. A quick phonecall saved the day.

I started one of my 30-day projects on holiday, forcing myself to go cycling and barefoot-running through the rain of northern France. Holiday time seemed more luxurious: long hours when I felt time was my own. And I was able to bring that sense of space back to the daily routine.

I also found out I’m not an early morning person. Those dawn hours were never ones I was able to mine for time to get things done. I was much more likely to be hauling out the baking trays at night, or using the long midsummer evenings to get some weeding in at the allotment.

Someone asked me a shrewd question about the book recently: “Could you have done it if you had a job?” I knew what he meant. My weekly restaurant column is a night job. It’s hardly a gruelling 60-hour week task. If I was commuting to an office every day to sit at a desk, would I have been able to indulge my whims, tick off my own personal someday list? It’s an interesting question. But I think the rigours of a “proper job” come with a structure and rhythm in which just as many useful coppers of time can be found down the back of the temporal sofa.

We’re encouraged to see “me-time” as an expensive spa break, a one-off into which we escape occasionally to recharge the batteries, before shutting down into work-mode again. I found out how to have pockets of time every day when life felt like fun and I felt alive. Not that is was easy. Towards the end I ran out of motivation and energy in a way that meant the book almost didn’t get finished. From now on, I’d like to try just one new thing every year – not six things.

In the course of writing the book, I talked to experts on learning and fitness, and had a fascinating interview with TCD neuroscientist Prof Shane O’Mara. Our brains have a gist memory, he explained, in which days and experiences blur into each other and it becomes harder to remember what it was we were doing at a certain point in the week or year. By puncturing the gist haze with new experiences, things that challenge or terrify us, we plant memory landmarks that help to differentiate one year from the next, help us to remember our time when we look back.

My middle son, ever a dancer around obstacles, has worked out his own way to deal with my cranky requests to “give me a minute”. Now when he asks for toast or juice, he adds for good measure: “take all the time you need”. By shifting my thinking during my “someday” year, that’s exactly what I did. I took all the time I needed, stole it back from regrets about the past or dreams about the future and just got on with it.

[ Twitter.com/catherineeats ]

A Month of Somedays, How One Woman Made the Most of Now by Catherine Cleary is in bookshops now, €12.99 published by Londubh or buy online at Londubh.ie