Riding on the Rims Part 2

Last night (Friday) Pete said ‘How about we go over to the markets at Lawnton in the morning? We can leave right after breakfast,’

I said yes, that would be fun. But in my mind I was thinking of the basket of washing in the bathroom. And the pile of dirty mops and cleaning rags from our jobs during the week .Not to mention the mess on the lounge room floor.

See Paddy has an upturned cardboard box – his little cubby house – which he chews to pieces with great gusto. It’s our answer to having our furniture chewed. But every other day I need to clean up all the little bits of cardboard from the floor, and I mean all over the floor, not just in his little spot on a mat in the middle of the room. He has a way of spreading it everywhere.
Oh and the dear little fellow had managed to sneak off with a crust from a piece of toast and taken it up on the sofa to eat, so the arms of the sofa and part of the seat was covered in powdered toast.

But I managed to drown out the little voice in my mind and we did go to the markets, and it was a very pleasant outing. We got a bit of exercise walking around all of the stalls and we stopped to chat with some people selling birds. Three of the birds were the same breed as Paddy, but one was a Cinnamon Conure, which is a completely different looking bird, although he certainly displayed the same kind of antics. All he wanted to do was play, hanging upside down on his perch and chatting away in his birdie babble to Pete.
We got some lovely bananas, a book for Pete and a sweet treat for our morning tea. And, when we came home, there was still plenty of time to do the laundry and to clean up the mess.

Sometimes we can miss out on a whole lot of life because we are so regimented in our thinking. To me Saturday morning seems to be the time when I should do the laundry and the housework. Now when I worked full time, commuting back and forth to the city each day, Saturday morning was really the only time I had to do these things.
These days, with our contract cleaning work, I have much more free time so it really isn’t imperative that Saturday morning is set aside for housework. Yet it was still the first thought in my mind when Pete suggested an outing. Regimented thinking, see?

Okay, so it might sound a bit sad to you that my idea of Riding on the Rims is leaving the housework to go to the market, or going bird watching instead of hunting for jobs on the internet. It probably would have sounded pretty sad to me a couple of decades ago too, but happily I’m at a stage in my life where it really doesn’t have to be all high drama and wild excitement.

No, it’s more about making the most of whatever opportunities we have in life to enjoy ourselves; to escape from the humdrum, even if only for a couple of hours and do something different – something that will refresh and energise us to get back to it all again later.

©Lyn Murphy 2012