The Queen of Delayed Gratification

This post is something I wrote over a month ago, before our country...

---

From December 28, 2026:

It is traditional for big aerospace companies to observe a plant shut down over the holidays.  The origin surrounds the inability to move a steady production line with a significant number of skilled workers out of office.  So, rather than fighting to make inefficient progress, companies just let every one take the time between Christmas and New Years off.  Typically, paid.  Although I work in a small division of a  medium sized company, they observe a plant shutdown, that, utilizing a few days off, can easily be stretched to create a 2-week block off from work.

First things first, it irks me that Christian holidays are still so centric to our culture.  I’m not going to look the paid-time-off in the mouth but what would it look like to let everyone chose a time of year that feels the most spiritual for them?  For me, it would mean a summer equinox, 2-week, celebratory backpacking trip with my best pup where I would spread my father’s ashes in beautiful wilderness spaces.  It would look like the celebration that I have chosen rather than the tradition that is meaningless to me.

As it stands, for the past few years I have used these two weeks to work on home projects.  From the moment that I stepped into my newly acquired 1920’s home in my dream city, I thought of the space as a living breathing creature that I was stewarding, rather than owning.  This home tells parts of the stories of the lives held within this space after nearly a century of existence.  They’re in the original lathe and plaster walls, where, as cracks appear and spread each year, they’ve been repaired in many different fashions by many different people.  There are stories in the remnants of failed DIY projects and snippets of decoration from trends that stopped being popular long ago. I’m sure there is a story behind the hammer on a stump that holds up a floor joist under the kitchen, the pants that are shoved into an air gap in the crawl space as insulation, the horse hair that pops out from the lathe and plaster where it’s been cut, and the original roof shingles that are still visible under a second, newer roof.  The projects that I’m working on now will be stories in their own right, told to the next home owners as this place will very likely outlive me. I'm proud to be doing this work, yet...

...my relationship with this home is complex.  The problem with the love and respect that I feel for this space is that, the moment I tap into that need to protect anything, is the moment my devotion turns into an untenable ‘need’ to pour myself into said stewardship.  This is all to say that I spent the last two weeks working, mercilessly, on home upgrades, as has become my tradition for this plant shut down…  yet I question if this is what I want to do with my “…one wild and precious life.”

[Walking back in time for the dog shower I've been building for YEARS]

As for those home projects, someday I will do a proper recap of my work.  Today though, I will tell you that my tradition of hard labor over the holidays tends to wrap up with me, cursing myself for being the queen of delayed gratification.  How much delayed gratification is too much when we all know that time is finite?