It’s Easter Sunday and some of you will be celebrating the end of Lent with a feast of chocolate having deprived yourself of something for the past forty days.
There is much to be said for self-imposed restriction, but sometimes giving up can have surprisingly positive consequences.
Martin has been here this week painting the front door, porch, and re-staining the bi-fold doors that lead out into the garden.
It’s useful having a friend who is a tradesman, and even more useful when said friend is also a perfectionist. He compensates for my complete inability to concentrate on something for long enough to do it properly.
A few years ago, noticing that they were beginning to look untidy, I decided to stain the back doors and re-paint the garden furniture.
By the time I had assembled all the materials for the job, my enthusiasm had already begun to wain.
In my memory, I did thorough preparation but by the following summer the paint was already peeling from the garden chairs and the rear doors looked as if I had modelled the colour scheme on a loaf of tiger bread from the local supermarket.
A few months ago I bought a new sander and started to think about finding some time to redo the work but I stopped myself and wondered why I was so intent upon doing something that I neither much wanted to do nor have much instinct for completing to even my own pretty low standards.
Better surely to free up time for myself that can be spent doing the things I enjoy, do well or, best of all, enjoy and do well, and either get someone else to do the rest or accept that it doesn’t matter enough to me anyway.
Everyone loves the newly painted doors so I feel vindicated in my decision not to get involved.
Since then, it seems as if the universe is reminding me of all the other things I gave up because I just couldn’t hack them.
In a conversation about getting older, I am reminding my daughter that I can enjoy free swimming now at the local leisure centre.
“But you can’t even swim,” she says.
“No, but I can splash around in the water which is cathartic in its own way.”
I did have swimming lessons as an adult when my children were young but found I was unable to tread water and concluded, even though I never had this conversation with my instructor, that this was a prerequisite should I ever fall overboard and be waiting for rescue, and so my inability rendered the whole project pointless.
Then this morning, walking the dogs with my sister, one of hers ran off to the fishing pitches to look for food that delinquent fisherman might have left behind.
A few moments later, as we are chasing the dogs to try and retrieve half a loaf of sliced bread from their mouths, I am thinking about how I pursued fishing as a hobby for a few years but gave up having never caught a single fish and having seen one of my rods pulled into the river by the propeller of a passing boat. It was clearly a sign.
I haven’t missed fishing and the days I gained back from giving it up have doubtless been spent in a more productive and enjoyable manner, although I do miss sitting on riverbanks eating sandwiches.
I decide to use the time saved from not having to paint and sand doors to sow the vegetable seeds in the raised beds.
“I can’t imagine ever giving this up,” I think to myself as the last row of carrots is in the ground.
Later, through the newly stained and smart-looking back doors, I can see the puppy digging in the raised beds destroying my afternoon’s work and I wonder if it might be a good idea to have another go at fishing.
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