Seeking Sanity

With everyone around you fearful, anxious, sad,
or endlessly preoccupied,
remember to smile, pray, be kind, and look for the dawn -
it always comes.

What long weekend?

The best laid plans always fall by the wayside on a three day weekend - which comes around about every four weeks for me. I seem to get more out of a day or two off than the much anticipated long weekend, purely because there are none of the great expectations attached to normal non-working time. String more than two days together, or, God forbid, a whole vacation, and the pressure to accomplish monumental tasks weighs very heavily, and, consequently, nothing gets accomplished.
This weekend was no exception, except, of course, for creating my blog.
I pulled myself away from my computer long enough on Sunday to shop for birthday and Easter gifts (Martha Stewart's new craft book for my aunt and my cousin, the new Diana Krall CD, and bath and body products), to attend a milestone birthday party for a friend, to go to church, and to visit a new coffee shop with my mother and my husband. I was back online last night and today after completing lots of paperwork, and, at the end of a long, bleak day of feeling very unwell, I am finally completing my second post. I have perused some truly beautiful and creative sites this weekend, so I can only hope that I learn more and more as I enter into this exciting adventure.

A New Commitment

My first mistake was getting online at all today.

I started out the morning attempting to access my Sirius online account, only to find out that the technical problem we experienced last evening had not been corrected. When you start out the day
waiting for tech support, dealing with a very cranky customer service representative, and then being disconnected when you request to speak to a supervisor, you know the day will not go as planned - if there ever was a plan to begin with!!
One thing leads to another online - you check your e-mails, you look up some health information, you check to see who else you can follow on Twitter, and, all of a sudden, you find yourself creating a blog - go figure!!
What I want to know is this: how does one get it all done, in the space of a day, in the space of a week, in the space of a lifetime, when there is so much to do, so much to learn, and so much to experience - with so many distractions?? We all want to live our best lives possible: we want to be productive citizens, model family members, good friends and neighbors. We want to be knowledgeable, connected, excited, driven, and curious. We want the world, and more, but we don't know how to, or don't want to, narrow our field of vision (shorten our to do list) to include only that which we know we can accomplish within a short period of time. We're so afraid that we will miss something - an experience or an opportunity that could transport us into the world we yearn for - a world better than the everyday that we're living today.
I hope I can figure things out in the process of this venture. I've never been very good with to do lists (they've always ended up far too long to serve any practical purpose). I always know what I have to do, but I always figure out a way to sneak in something I actually want to do - and enjoy doing - sometimes to the detriment of the necessary task. Just like the Internet - one link leads to another, and you find yourself one hundred miles away from where you started - thus, my new blog, as opposed to the month end figures I had planned to tackle!!
Please help, or at least let me know that I'm not alone. It's a big, exciting world out there, and life is too short not to experience, in whatever way possible, as much as we can.