Do you ever feel that you can never fully immerse yourself in one project without fretting about all the others you still need to get to? Does the shadow of all the other things you could (or should) be doing darken your enjoyment of what you are doing? Do you feel guilty for blogging when you could be writing, for journaling when you could be revising, for baking brownies when you could be scrubbing the bathroom floor?

Saturdays are often the worst days for those feelings. I put so many expectations on the weekends–I’m going to do everything I didn’t get to over the week, clean the house, run errands, pursue my various creative activities (ALL of them), read books, hang out with my family, do something fun and go some place new, and, oh, yes, take a nap. Ha!

Early this afternoon I was starting to get all panicky over how much I wanted to accomplish and how the day was half over and how I wasn’t going to get even a quarter of it done and ohgosh I’m such a lazy, unproductive… er, yeah. I cut myself off right there and instead focused on doing a few things. And enjoying them.

So, today I

• went out with Miss M. to buy food and plants (phlox, marigolds, black-eyed susans and onions to plant), and got some one-on-one time with my daughter, to boot!
• took lots and lots of pictures of flowers (I can’t help it, it’s an obsession!)
• wrote several hundred words on Secret Project X and wrote conflict arcs for several sub-plots in Quartz
• worked on my latest fiendishly difficult piano piece
• cooked two new-to-me recipes from scratch
• and watched the first half-hour of Fantasia with my family (I’ve never seen it before)

Not bad at all! I even remembered to throw a load of laundry into the washer, then the dryer. And I have plenty of leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Little things make me happy.

How was your Saturday?