Spending time and reflecting on January

Last friday night, after our big lunch out for Tim's birthday, we were still so full that all we wanted to do was sit on the couch in loose pants and relax.  And that we did.  Ella was fast asleep so we decided to watch a movie - In Time, with Justin Timberlake.

It wasn't the best movie I have ever seen but it was entertaining enough and I found the concept of the film really interesting, and once or twice you get to see JT with his shirt off so it can't be all bad.  Basically, the film is set in the future in a time where people are genetically programmed to stop ageing at 25 years of age.  Once you turn 25, you have to 'earn' more time or else you will die within a year.  Time has become currency.  The poor live their lives with only a matter of hours or minutes on their clock and have to do anything they can to earn more time or else they will die, but they tend to make the most of the time they have.  The rich on the other hand, have all the time in the world, live for centuries, can have anything they want and don't have to worry about clock watching.

Whilst time isn't exactly currency in the real world for us, it really made me think.  About how I spend my time.  It's actually something that I have thought about a lot prior to seeing the movie and was part of the reason I started this blog.  For a long time I have been coasting through life, day in and day out, happy enough but when I look back I felt unfulfilled because I really wasn't utilising my time doing the things that made me happy.  I was just doing 'things'.  Things that took up my time and didn't really mean anything to me.

So on new years eve when I wrote my first post, I was making a conscious effort to turn my life around and get back to finding me, to the things that are important to me, the things that matter to me and to spend my time focusing on them.  Spending more quality time with my family and friends who mean the absolute world to me.  Getting back to my creative old self - I've studied art and graphic design, I love to draw, I love to write, I love to make things, but I let all that slip by as I sat on the computer looking at Facebook and Twitter, or by sitting on the couch watching television shows like Lost.  Incidentally, now that really was a bad return on my time investment!  I loved that show, watched it religiously and looked for every little hidden thing that might mean something or tell us what the island really was, and then they gave us that ending.  That crappy, crappy ending.  Yep, definitely a poor investment right there.

Since becoming a Mama I have had to adapt and become more efficient in the everyday - I amaze myself at times with the things that I can do within an hour and a half while Ella is sleeping if I put my mind to it.  Makes me think how much extra time I used to have on my hands before I had a baby and how little I did with that time.

So we're a month into the year and since my resolve to consciously look at how I spend my time in 2012 I have been starting to get back to my old self and back into the things that I love, or more importantly, not focussing on the things that don't matter.  I write here regularly and love getting my thoughts out of my head so it's clear again.  I've started several craft projects including some beautiful long stitches that I intend to hang proudly in Ella's nursery.  I even bought a cute elephant cushion project to sew for our new baby niece - I haven't tackled that one yet because I really have no idea how to sew.  But I intend to learn.

I've also consciously changed my diet, eating habits and stopped wasting so much of the food that we buy each week through meal planning.  I've started exercising again and have already lost over 2 kilo's.

But every now and then I creep back to my old time wasting ways.  Dr Phil still calls me to the couch and I spend too much time stalking on Facebook and playing Bejewelled Blitz.  So after watching the movie, and being reminded again to refocus on not wasting time, I removed the Facebook and Bejewelled Blitz apps from my iPhone and magically I have gained an hour a day to do something constructive with my time.  That's just two small things that have given me time in my day to do something more purposeful.

It's not easy to change old habits, but I'm trying and feel like I'm well on my way to getting my old self back.  I'm making the most of my time and filling it with things I love, and things that will help me become the person that I want to be.  And slowly the things that don't really matter in my life are melting away.