By the time I get home from school, my head is often still full of the day. Teaching involves making decisions constantly. There are lessons to think about, pupils who need your attention, conversations to follow up and things you must remember to do tomorrow. Even when I leave school, I can find myself going over things in my head, planning ahead or remembering something I have forgotten.
What I really want at the end of a day like that is a bit of quiet. Time to sit down with a book and switch off for a while. The trouble is, switching off is not always as easy as it sounds.
There are things to do at home too: messages to answer and jobs that have been waiting patiently for my attention. Even when I do sit down, I can feel that little nudge reminding me of what else I could be doing. I suspect I am not the only person who finds it difficult to relax when there are still things to be done.
Recently, Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot has been just the book I needed. I loved the writing, found myself really invested in Abra as a character and wanted to keep reading to see how her story would unfold. I kept picking it up whenever I had a spare moment, keen to find out what would happen next. It was a welcome chance to step away from everything else and become absorbed in something entirely different.
That is one of the things I love most about reading: the moment when I stop thinking about everything else and become caught up in the world on the page. My mind has somewhere else to go. I am no longer planning tomorrow or working through a mental list. For a while, I am just reading.
Permission to slow down.
And yet, even when I find that time for myself, I sometimes feel that I should be doing something more useful with it.
I wonder why it can be so difficult to give ourselves permission to stop? We spend so much of our lives working towards something, ticking things off and measuring what we have achieved. It is easy for that feeling to spill into our free time, too. Even the things we enjoy can become things to fit in around everything else.
There will probably always be something that needs our attention. If we wait until everything is done before allowing ourselves a little time to stop, we might find ourselves waiting for a very long time.
Perhaps part of slowing down is accepting that not everything needs to be finished before we can take a break.
And then there are our phones. Even when we have a few minutes to ourselves, it is easy to reach for them almost without thinking. There is always something to read, respond to or catch up on. Sometimes, I wonder whether we have become so used to filling every quiet moment that we have forgotten how to simply leave a little space.
But not everything needs to have a measurable outcome. We do not have to finish a task, learn a new skill or make progress on something to justify how we spend an hour. Sometimes, we can do something simply because we enjoy it.
For me, that might be getting lost in a book, taking a walk without worrying about how far I have gone, or sitting with a cup of tea and letting my thoughts wander. I do not always manage to switch off as easily as I would like, but I am trying to get better at allowing myself that time without feeling guilty about it.
I have a growing pile of new books waiting to be read, including Peck and Peck, The Original and Daphne du Maurier’s short stories in After Midnight. As November begins, I am looking forward to spending some time with them. There is no particular order in which I want to read them, or target I am hoping to reach. I simply want to enjoy them, one at a time, whenever I find a little space.
There will always be something else to do, but I do not want to spend all my free time thinking about what comes next.
Sometimes, I just want to make a cup of tea, pick up my book and enjoy a little time to myself.
