Holidays

The Puja vacations...

Once I used to plan so much to do during vacations and then ended up doing very little. Except maybe catch up with friends, spend lazy mornings reading on the bed or sunning myself after a bath on an easy chair in the late afternoon sun in the verandah and watching TV in the evenings.

Now I don't plan. I take things as they come. Like when I spent an hour every evening last week in Salt Lake out in our local park with my school cum para friend Juieen. We ambled along at a leisurely pace, sometimes pacing up when we remembered we were actually supposed to be exercising. We caught up on old times, friends and foes, introspection and analysis about almost everything under the sun. It felt nice to relive old times, contemplate the ways in which we've changed over the past few years, how marriage has affected our lives and so on.

Similarly, I'm enjoying my quiet hours at home. Experimenting slightly with breakfast options, tidying up my wardrobe, curling up in the afternoon with one or the other of the Twilight Saga books, watching some random movie being aired at the very time that I've chosen to surf channels on the TV, exercising on our terrace in the evening, a leisurely reading of the newspaper that encompasses almost the whole day (!), clearing the backlog on my reading of other blogs, Facebooking, practising my Spanish grammar and well...it's a long list really.

I'm enjoying my me-time. And the fact that I don't have to meet any deadline or go through the daily routine at a breakneck pace so that I'm punctual for ... um, almost everything that needs you to be on time.

I now realise how stressed out our life has become. And how teaching in a school has its own little compensations. Like these holidays.