How Many Hours in a Day

As long as I can remember, there were never enough hours in a day for my taste. When I was a kid, dusk came too soon in the summertime for playing. Bedtime came too soon for the book I was reading. As I got older, there was not enough time for schoolwork and my hobbies, let alone doing mundane things like laundry and dishes.

The whole of my working career, my brain would tell me tales about how wonderful it would be when every day was Saturday and I didn’t have to spend 9-11 hours of it working for someone else. This isn’t exactly about the “doing what I want to do” mentality, but spending the day working on my own projects, doing the work that brings me great joy.

Fast forward to 2025. I retired this year from corporate life. I took a week to decompress (honestly I could have taken 6 months but I don’t know if that would have been enough time and it wasn’t worth it), and then dove into doing the things I wanted to do. I am rudely shocked to find out there are STILL NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY.

I have a number of sewing and quilting projects in progress. Every day, I get a little bit more done on each one of them, but not fast enough for the long line of projects waiting in the wings. Same story on my knitting – I have 3 things in progress right now, and I’m moving forward on all of them but there is a huge stack of patterns waiting in queue that I want to make and there isn’t enough time.

Don’t even get me started on all the OTHER hobbies that I told myself I could explore when I retired. Weaving is at the top of that list. I told my friend Ellyn repeatedly that the first thing I was going to buy when I retired was a rigid heddle loom. Here we are. I haven’t been able to pull the trigger on that purchase yet, because I look at where my days and weeks go and I honestly don’t know where I am going to squeeze that in. I still really want to do that. I probably will give in next year, but I am realizing that time, as a whole, is finite and I cannot do ALL THE THINGS the way I would like to.

I read a meme on InstaGram that the best part of being a vampire and being immortal is how much time you actually could spend to get proficient in a number of tasks and languages and instruments and hobbies and that is about the only way to accomplish the list of things that my brain really wants to pick up. I think the meme was meant to be humor but it touched a bittersweet note in me that I do not have enough time, no matter how much time I am given, it is never enough.

I am going to make thoughtful choices. I am going to give myself some grace. I am going to remind myself that I am fortunate to have the time that I do have while I am able to do the things that I want to do. I could still be working in the corporate world and wasting 3 hours a day sitting in my car (I won’t get on that soapbox here either).

I recently took a beginning class in making bobbin lace. It was fascinating, and I learned just enough to really appreciate the amount of work and detail that goes into that, but I am positive that is not something that I will pursue on a daily basis. I probably need to allow myself a little bit of experimentation, a little dabbling into other areas of fibre crafting to satisfy that little “what if” voice in my head, realizing that those dabblings will be one-off items and I will not invest the time and money into all the tools necessary to take on any of those skills. <insert heavy sigh>

If you will excuse me now, there are dishes to wash (my dishwasher decided to die a death worthy of a Shakespearean play, leaving me with more mundane tasks to do in my oh so precious amount of time), and I just might have to go look at the website for Schact Looms again, you know, just to get some more information then I will gather myself and get back to all the projects I listed above on which I would like to make some more forward progress.

Still never enough time.