Mindless appreciation

I'm not very good at taking time off. Or to put it another way - I'm not good at scheduling myself time off. I just work myself to death until I fall on my face from exhaustion or a migraine takes me out of life for a few days. My spare time activities simply have to have a purpose - otherwise I feel lost.

As some of you know - last month I visited my Parents in Poland. We don't see each other very often. The last time I saw them was almost 2 years ago, so whenever I land in Poland - I try to spend as much time as possible with my Parents. And it's not easy, because even though they are both retired, they have their own rigid daily schedules. From stably fixed meal times to a specific time for walking the dog, to watering the flowers. So, in order to spend some time with them – I have to adapt to their schedules.

To give you some idea of what my days with them looked like, here are my 'activities' during one such day:

-early in the morning I went fishing with Dad(Dad is a keen angler and now - apparently- is eel season!),

-then I weeded the beds with my Mum,

-then I'd go grocery shopping with my Dad,

-then I'd come back and prepare dinner with my Mum,

-then I picked beetles(colorado potato beetle to be exact) off the potatoes with Dad, yes, seriously (it's a particularly nasty creature, my mate called them 'Devil Ladybugs', which I think is the perfect name)),

-then we had coffee(even if everything was crashing and burning at 4 pm there has to be coffee, cake and their favourite TV show),

-then I cleaned the attic with Mum before the upcoming roof renovation,

-then we transferred the feathers from the old duvet cover to the new one (there is a photo of the new duvet cover I stitched by hand to prove it),

-then I went with Dad to visit my aunty Irena (the sweetest person in the world! she lives by a lake, so we went canoeing with Daddy for a while:),

-and in the evening I folded the laundry that Mum had taken off somewhere in the meantime (laundry dried in the fresh air is probably my favourite smell under the sun).

I tried very hard to spend some time with each of them, as they actually function completely independently of each other. Apart from having coffee and meals together - they don't spend time with each other actually at all. When they were both working it was exactly the same. I don't think they are too fond of each other. I know, however, that at least they used to like each other, because there are photos that document this fact. There aren't many, but there are some. I attach their photos together too. From them I know, they(photos) were taken even before they got engaged.

Why 'mindless appreciation'?

The places I remember from my childhood - like the forest and the hill featured on the pictures (locals call the place 'Fox Hill') - always give me the same kind of feeling - a quiet bliss. They don't provoke memories, which is probably what should happen. They don't. They stimulate my head to complete tranquillity. Meditative almost non-thinking. My head is completely silence. And that doesn't happen to me often, and being completely honest - it absolutely never happens to me.

I am convinced that if you were sitting next to me right now you would hear a buzzing. My head is boiling non-stop. During the day I am constantly planning something, worrying about something, recalling the most embarrassing moments of my life. At night - my surreal dreams weary me to the point - if I manage to fall asleep, of course, because that's always a challenge - that I wake up terrified and exhausted in the morning.

It's very different in my family home, my Parents lead a life I would never have chosen for myself and that's probably one of the reasons why we find it so difficult to get along with each other. But it has a lot of peace and beauty in it. A love of nature, gratitude for good health, small daily joys. When I witness all this - I smile without a shadow of insincerity but also without any great reflections or sentiments.