Industrious

“I’m bored,” said me, every summer, from elementary school through adolescence.

Those days, I’d take on any chore or activity suggested. Mow the lawn. Weed the garden. Walk the dog. Clean my room. Ride my bicycle to kingdom come and back again.

Report cards note that my work habits were excellent but I sometimes lacked self‑control, needed to better listen when others were speaking, learn how to rest quietly and use time to my advantage. My teachers also reported that I did not always participate well in group activities.

Pretty much sums it up to this very day.

If I had not grown up as a baby boomer, but instead been a gen‑x or millennial, my focus‑factor would have knee‑jerked teachers to suggest some sort of attention deficit disorder and professionals to hand out a prescription so that today I’d be overmedicated and point‑blank addicted.

Truth be told, I’m simply industrious, and when my hands, mind or mouth are not busy, there’s bound to be trouble.

I’m at my best with a list of projects to accomplish that exclude social activities.

And what about those social activities? It isn’t that I don’t care about other people. It isn’t that I don’t like other people. But given the fact that I’m simultaneously action‑oriented and physically uncoordinated, social activities translate into little more than cooking, working, eating, talking, walking, driving, shopping, drinking, complaining, crying, laughing, or love‑making.

It is no wonder that the first 40 years of my life were varying expressions of unconscious obsessive-compulsive behavior. And the better half of my married life was in the kitchen, in the yard, or otherwise non compos mentis.

Free time for me is the very definition of disaster.

Thankfully, I have discovered all the things I do very badly so that, now, I can spend more time doing things I do well. I’ve finally got a rhythm working on my behalf. It only took 60 bloody years to get here.