I’m looking for a rhythm that I haven’t been able to find. I have a lot that I want to do and a lot that I want to learn. It’s not that I don’t have time. I seem to have a ton of it. Life as a caregiver is very difficult. But my father sleeps most of the time most days. And cognitively, he doesn’t engage much. I try to have coffee with him most mornings. We sit and listen to music, but even that seems to be exhausting to him now. I wonder what he’s thinking. What he’s really aware of.

The rest of the time, I’m trying to work, clean the house, cook, get a workout in, read, and learn things. Most of what I’m trying to learn is work-related. That sounds pretty blah, but I love this stuff. I really enjoy programming and I just signed up for a design course that I’m excited about. But all of this takes time. I’d love to get into the wood shop, but I’ve pretty much written that off for now. It’s tough to do much with the time I have left after everything else. It’s the one thing I can’t do much within a small amount of time. If I only have 15 minutes, I can read or spend some time working on a piece of JavaScript or CSS. In the wood shop, it takes me that long just to figure out what I’m going to work on. But maybe that’s the problem: no clearly defined goals and no specific project to tackle.

I’m determined to not let the lack of rhythm get to me. I’ll figure it out. Like now, for example. I want to have a daily writing habit. This morning, I set my timer for 5 minutes. My timer just went off, so I guess that’s one day in the books. I’ll expand my goal beyond 5-minutes at some point, but that seems manageable. Long enough to get some words down, short enough to start building a habit.