Leave me Alone.

It’s official.  Life is insane.

I’ve been pondering this lately, as I’ve considered the things I need to be sure I’m healthy in the midst of a somewhat chaotic season of life.  What I need the most is: alone time.

How often do you want to be alone?  What do you with that time?  Do you feel like your getting enough or are you needing to create those spaced more intentionally?

At this stage of life, I look at single folks, or marrieds without children with intense jealousy: “arrgh, do they know how good they have it?  Do they appreciate how often they can just go off and be alone?!”

I remember feeling busy & booked in college life.  Yes, I juggled job & school but still I had the rights to my own body -unlike my current bonded servitude to a breast feeding child- and I could still be alone for the amount of time that I felt I needed.

I am now faced with that bizarre reality of feeling insanely busy, booked & backed up beyond belief.

I knew it was bad last week when I was trying to figure out when I would have time to shower and wash my hair before my trip.  I’m just running, running, running until the kids go to bed and then I am wiped out.  Done.  Finito.  I can’t even blog at night anymore.  It’s just too much.

I think the multiple trips lately, (Cleveland, Atlanta, Cancun, Wisconsin, Cleveland again, Pennsylvania & West Virginia) coupled with breastfeeding an infant, not sleeping well since March of 2009, having a busy body toddler and navigating a new job have left me feeling… a tad bit pressured.

Mostly, I just want to be alone to process it all.  I’m a flaming raging extrovert of gargantuan proportions.  I’m always the last to leave a crowded room and as I flew this weekend I was reminded about how I’m always last to leave a plane no matter where I’m seated.  It’s just too hard to leave when there’s still fun to be had.

It feels like Dave & I are in a constant state of trying to help one another get that precious alone time.  Not alone time where you catch up on work emails, or clean the disgusting house, or sleep.  No, I’m talking about the alone time that is meaningful and leaves us feeling actually rested.

I know that looks different for everyone.  I wish I could watch a movie and feel rested, but I don’t.  I watch movies for fun.  Doing things for the sake of fun, doesn’t leave me rested, it leaves me happy.  Happy is not the same as rested.  Fun is good, but rest is better.

For me, I need to time to think.  Getting out an overall to-do list for the next month or so, so that my brain can put itself to rest for the coveted alone time.  And then I keep the to-do list close by so as my brain comes up with other things or new ideas I can write it down and move on to restfulness.

After that, I’ve got to do a good, hardy, in-depth Bible study of some sort, whether using a guide or just picking a random chapter.  I need to be refreshed by truth.

At some point, being alone has to include journaling.  I usually start with journaling prayer, bringing all of my joys, concerns and requests before God.  At some point, it switches over to random things like, “I am feeling so disappointed in how unhealthy I’ve been eating lately.  What I am going to do about this?  I feel like I won’t really get healthy until I become a lard and will be forced to by social pressure and too-tight-jeans.”

For example.

If I have a bigger chunk of time to be alone -which, um, I don’t any more- I try to do something artistic.  Whether that’s writing a blog post, working on my book, trying a new hairstyle or making digital scrapbook albums, I really enjoy exploring my artsy-fartsy side.

I would if I could at any given moment always take a warm, bubbly, soothing bath when I’m alone and am guaranteed at least an hour to put on Nora Jones-esque music, light a candle and devour the latest issue of my favorite magazine, Readers Digest.

After that, the best alone time ends with me reading a great book and falling into a deep and peaceful sleep.

Being alone, I’m telling you is the one of the best things since sliced bread.  I know all of you introverts have known this all along, but I am relatively new at the wonders of refreshing and refueling yourself.  How could you not tell us??

I realized the importance of “true rest,” especially in the last 4-5 years when I realized that my job was relationally INTENSE (to say the least) and when I started seeing a spiritual director and was mandated to take one 8-hr. day a month to be alone with God.

Those days, called “retreats of silence,” are my haven, my breath, my love, my everything! I need them, I think about the next one, I dream of when I get to sit and be alone & not talk to anyone except God.

It’s flipping fantastic.

And so, as I reflect on the last few months where I’ve been racing from here to there, traveling like crazy, and completely behind in every area of my life from cleaning, to bills, to mail, to several aspects of my job, to working out to ahem, showering… I’m realizing I need need need to be alone.

These last two days I did two heavily relationally intense days of work at the University of Pittsburgh and then the University of W. Virginia.  Everything about my work there was amazing, fulfilling and productive.  But, now I’m tired.  I miss my children, yet I’m longing to just be my myself.

The great news? (Or depending on how you look at it, the bad news)

I just missed my flight.  I was sitting here in the airport blogging, sitting at the wrong gate & I missed the doggone flight.

And now I have 4 hours to sit here in an airport.

All alone.

Hurrah! 🙂