Time With My Mind: Summer Week #16 – 9/18/24
Time with My Mind
When I was young, I had long thick blonde hair. In high school teachers would ask me if I dyed it. I was very offended, as I have always been more of an au natural kinda person. I loved having long hair and I remember saying offhandedly to my mother, the way teens do, “I’m always going to have long hair! I don’t understand why older women always cut their hair so short. I want to keep mine long, long and let it go gray”. This I said to my mother with short hair, dyed to hide the gray.
Oh youth. We think we know everything.
Now that I’m in my 40s, age and multiple pregnancies have thinned my once lustrous hair. It’s light brown now, sun-bleached and grazing my shoulders. The question of whether I will dye it seems a few years off, but I know it’s coming. I like to keep it shorter these days. I like it just long enough to pull back into a small pony tail, just long enough to warm my neck in the colder times, just long enough to give me a hockey mullet that competes with the pros.
When I was younger, I hated driving in the car. I complained incessantly (my poor parents). Now I drive all the time living out on a farm. My kids are older so I do a lot of sports taxiing. Car time is precious time now, as it’s one of the few times I can really hear how my kids are doing. Drives for weekend trips are now part of the fun of the experience – 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted time with friends and loved ones where there’s nothing to distract. Drive time is now often a positive experience for me.
Our perspectives change as we age. Our needs change. Things my young self considered as solid and always, have revealed themselves to be more fluid and changing.
Similar to my hair and my thoughts on driving, my social desires and needs at the farm are changing as I age. In my younger years I was always right in it with the crew, not wanting to miss out on the connection and laughter.
Now many of our crew are just a handful of years older than my daughter. And while I love to occasionally dip into conversations and enjoy the laughter to make it through the long, harder harvests (potatoes… endless potatoes!), I find myself increasingly working on my own. It’s strange, this change, as I’ve always considered myself fairly extroverted. But more and more I find myself appreciating working alone. I get to be alone with my thoughts, the breeezes and bird calls, my music, or my Spanish lessons. Time no longer creeps by when I am working solo, it moves just as fast as it always does.
Honestly, it’s funny how much I enjoy the time alone. I get to watch how the light hits off the different greens of the things growing around me. I get to wonder what bug I hear making noise and make a mental note to look it up, that I know I won’t remember to do later. I get to reflect on my kiddos…. watch the highlight reels of particular positive or negative experiences in my mind with my kiddos and think about what I want to change, what I don’t want to change.
With age, I have learned to tune into my wildly active, semi-anxious, distractible brain and for the most part enjoy it. I work in a beautiful place, full of gorgeous visual and aural stimuli. More and more, I like spending time with all of it alone.
And when my mind gets too loud or bored with itself, I have the amazing luxury of being able to join in and work with others to share in what their fascinating minds are doing.
Feeling lucky. Loving my job.
