Stop the World, Let Me Get Off!

Have you ever had that feeling where everything just seems to be overwhelming you and you want to just shout ” Stop The World, Let Me Get Off?”
I remember being in the local play park as a child and sitting on the roundabout, while one of the bigger kids constantly grabbed one of the metal handlebars and ran for all they were worth in a circle so the roundabout just get spinning faster and faster and you did everything you could to just hang on and not become dizzy.
Whenever life gets overwhelming I often think of that roundabout and the feeling that you are just going around and around, faster and faster but not actually reaching any end point.

There have been times in my life when I have been juggling so many balls and realistically I know that I’m going to drop one of those balls and having to decide which one, if dropped, will have the least effect or detriment to my overall life.
As a single Mum working more than a full time job to progress a career there were many times when I just felt like running away from all those responsibilities.
My two week Summer holiday was my escape from all of that when my children would happily play in the pool and I could just chill out in the sun, reading copious amounts of books.

When I took early retirement I thought those days of the world spinning at such a velocity were well and truly over. I had earned a rest, hadn’t I? But somehow here I am seven years into that early retirement I worked so hard for and already there are times when I want to press the ‘stop button”. The urge to do that, however, isn’t the same as it was in my working life. It comes from a very different place.
In those high powered career days, as previously mentioned, it was all about escaping the daily stress of life, trying to keep the balance between working and parenting and not caving under all the pressure.
Now in my retirement I cannot believe that I now have days where I question “when did I have time to go to work?” my days are so full. I don’t need to escape the pressure, I just need time to breathe, to relax and to some degree escape being with someone 24 seven.

There is also still one common denominator -guilt! When I was working I often felt guilty if I thought my work/life balance was getting out of synch and I was spending too much time at work and not enough time with my children. Now I feel guilty if I take time to relax and read a book, there’s a feeling of not being productive as if I am still answerable to someone. Who? I don’t know!

Last year I rather selfishly, depending upon how you look at it, took three days away on my own. I had dropped my daughter up in Lincolnshire and instead of heading straight home decided to take a three day solitary break. It was all completely planned, hubby was aware.
Prior to my arrival I remember being full of exciting anticipation, revelling in all the things I was going to get done, how ahead of myself I would be when I returned home.
The joy of not feeling answerable to anyone, doing what I wanted when I wanted and above all else not having the ever encompassing feeling I get at home when I look around and realise the washing needs doing, the housework is mounting up, the beds need changing, life admin is constantly being shelved etc etc.
Then I remember arriving at my wooden lodge, that slept two, and immediately questioning whether I had done the right thing. Was I wasting our communal funds selfishly on myself? Was this actually going to benefit me?

I worried I might not be able to sleep with only one other lodge on site, maybe I would feel insecure but then I remember waking up with the sun rising to my left with the sound of the wood pigeons. Dewy grass outside revealed a rather large rabbit munching away that scampered into the woods when I tried to get a photo.
I was free to set my own pace, there was peace n quiet, a sense of tranquillity and no one to answer to. I saw it as a chance to take a breath and reset. There was no doubt that I missed my hubby but there was also a sense of freedom. My life was solely my own and I could go back home and move forward, safe in the knowledge that I was ahead of myself in terms of all my hobbies and interests.
On my return, however, those aspirations lasted all of a couple of weeks and then I was more or less back to where I’d started. Trying to juggle my time between keeping fit and healthy at the gym, maintaining a healthy body weight at Slimming World, reading both in terms of enjoyment and to learn more, writing my blog posts and ensuring my social media reflected what I had written, keeping on top of life admin, trying to spend time with hubby, creating travel itineraries, staying on top of housework and washing, seeing friends and family etc etc……………

My mini break had definitely created “a time out” but how often could I truly expect to do that? And realistically had I really achieved anything in the long run?

This year we decided to take some time out together. Wow! that was a revelation.
We packed ourselves off to a friend’s cottage in Cornwall. We thought if we chose somewhere we had been before we would be less tempted to go out exploring and would actually spend time relaxing, enjoying our individual hobbies and in my case trying yet again to get ahead of the game.

The rain poured down, the wind howled a gale outside, the truck broke down en route and again whilst we were there and the cosy cottage soon became somewhat claustrophobic. We had definitely got it wrong!
The only moments of enjoyment were the day we spent at Trebah Gardens, one of my favourite places to go in the world! See my previous post:
https://amidlifeadventure.org/2024/05/17/the-amazing-place-that-is-trebah-gardens/ and another afternoon where we went out walking along the coastal path, chatting to a couple of locals we met en route and just enjoying the magnificent views and tranquillity.

Not only couldn’t I escape hubby, who had originally planned to go out and do some photography while I wrote blog posts, finished travel plans and read etc but I felt like I was wading through treacle. There just wasn’t enough hours in the day.
I’d recently become a Parish Councillor and had training to complete (which still isn’t finished even now a couple of weeks later). I’d hoped to get ahead on my blog posts so that, like now when unfortunately I’ve spent nearly ten days feeling ill with Covid, I would have posts lined up to publish.

So where do I go wrong?
Is it that I’m so used to being “busy” that I overfill my time? Is guilt never going to free me from its grip? Is relaxation just not a part of my DNA? Or is everything just a learnt behaviour?
Are women just prone to guilt when men don’t even procrastinate about taking time for themselves? As a Mum are we just so used to juggling the balls that a life without any balls is just empty so we naturally fill it?
If we are retired from work are we just on one long holiday and, therefore, not having enough time is just my own fault? And taking time away just to be ourselves without any worries and stress, is that just being ridiculous?

Is it just me who still feels the need to press that great big button, stop the world and get off? Please let me know your views because I really need to try and get it right!