Time Induced Stress

I finally started on the road this morning at 1045.  Quite the change from a 0400 departure I had originally planned.  It all began yesterday evening when my neighbor Greg wanting to say goodbye and have some wine.  That lead to a discussion of photography and reviewing my portfolio.  This lead to him pulling out his camera and discussing its capabilities.  Well, by the time we had gone through two bottles of wine it was 0100 in the morning.  So much for early wake up, how about early go-to-bed!

I was starting to get a little stressed about it, but then realized I was going counter to my goal of just going with the flow.  I was allowing myself to be driven by time, and what was really bad is that I was the one who chose the time to begin with.  When I worked everything was time driven.  Daily deadlines, routine meetings each week and never seeming to be enough time in the day to get everything done.  I actually stopped wearing a watch five years ago because I realized one day sitting at my desk that the computer had a clock on it, so did my desk phone, my cell phone, the car, and of course the clock on the wall.  Why did I need to be reminded of what time it was so often?  It was also about then that I discovered just how much stress I was experiencing just because of “time”.  I have tried to keep from inducing time related stress since that day.  

So here I was giving myself some self-imposed time induced stress at the start of a long trip that has no fixed agenda or schedule.  STUPID!  So instead, I turned off all alarms, took a shower, went to bed and woke up about 0900.  Did the last minute things around the house to close it down for the next two months, and pulled out of the driveway to head for breakfast before I really hit the road at 1130.  About 81/2 hours and 430 miles later, I made it to Bristol, TN about halfway to my sister’s the first stop on the dash to see mother in Texas.   

Today as I was driving and looking at the clouds forming and reforming in the sky.   I thought about Eadweard Muybridge’s cloud studies.  So on my stops throughout the day my photographic subject was the clouds in the sky.  Tomorrow it is supposed to rain, but who knows.