040: It's Not Free Time If You're Exhausted

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now on to today's show.

Good morning friends. It may not be morning for you listening, but it's morning here at the park and I'm at Morningside Park. I can explain why I'm recording outside in a moment, but wherever you are, whatever time of day, sending you greetings from the top of the morning, the topic of today's episode, it's not free time if you're exhausted, is not about making anybody feel bad about their energy levels, but rather quite the opposite. To say that just because you have an open window in your schedule or on your calendar does not make it how I define free time, which is free time to be present and joyful and with your family or your yourself or free time to be doing your best work. If you're exhausted, you don't need free time per se. Or rather you will quickly find that your free time is filled by a need for deep rest and rest time, recharging time, rejuvenating, replenishing all the wreaths that these last year and a half has really shown to us. I just read a fantastic article from Anne Helen Peterson in her weekly Culture Study newsletter. She said it talks about why we're all still exhausted and that there hasn't been a true break from any of the madness of the last year and a half. And we all keep carrying on, but meanwhile there's this deep underlying fatigue that so many of us are experiencing.

In my case, I woke up Last night at 1:08 in the morning to a mosquito bite on my ankle. And if any of you have mosquitoes around, you know that in the middle of the night they are just enemy in chief. It's like we have a screen, a floppy screen door that Ryder can go in and out of. He loves sleeping outside on. We have a tiny little terrace.

But it means sometimes mosquitoes get in. So 1:08 I wake up, I find this little mosquito. I kill it. Sorry. My animal kindness, it just does not extend to mosquitoes in the middle of the night. And I couldn't go back to sleep for two hours. So I woke up at 6, 6:30, no, maybe later. Or 7 to Ryder kind of whining. That's his little signal. It's his little form of alarm clock to get me up and out of the house. I sleepwalk downstairs. It's still dark, but sure enough, Ryder goes to the front door and he scratches his paw on the door. That's how he says he needs to go outside. So I sleepwalk. I make some instant Joe coffee.

Assemble the backpack, and I kind of decide to myself, you know, Ryder, we're just gonna do a neighborhood walk today. That means we're not gonna go to the park and do his favorite game, which is Frisbee on a 30 foot leash. We are just going to walk around the neighborhood. And you win some, you lose some. This is kind of my mindset. Like I had maybe six hours of sleep total. It's not enough. I feel groggy, I feel exhausted, and I'm also dealing with some uncertain fatigue. Yes, it could be pandemic fatigue, but I also wake up sneezing and with asthma. My asthma has come back. So I feel that there. I'm like dreading the truth of this, that there might be a mold issue. Toxic mold. Oof. Just hearing about other people who have these symptoms.

Or who knows? Dust. I'm allergic to dust. I'm allergic to mold. I could be allergic to rider dander. Although it's very pronounced in the bedroom. So I think there must be mold somewhere around there or something like that. I don't know what it is yet. I've been in just that denial mode of not even wanting to hire a mold remediation person because I just like, don't want to confront the consequences. But alas, it's time. I wake up every day feeling groggy. And sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I go sleep downstairs. We have these really comfy La Z Boy chairs, and sometimes I'll sleep downstairs. So I have pinpointed that I think there is some kind of issue with that part of the house. Okay, why am I telling you all this? Because I'm telling you that it's been a struggle lately. I wake up and I'm already tired, and I know many of you, especially if you deal with chronic fatigue issues. Lyme disease, fibromyalgia. There are so many. Not to mention the chronic fatigue of the last year and a half of the pandemic. On my end, I also just sent the book to the printer in my head. It feels like I shouldn't still be tired from that. But Michael reminds me, you know, you buckle down, you focus so hard. You wrote this book in a year. He reminded me that it was only just three weeks ago that we sent it to the printer and that I had been kind of obsessing morning, noon, and night over the index and the endnotes and the final proofing and catching every last typo and fixing the. The dust jacket. And I did. I did push really hard to get it over that last finish line.

We'll be right back just after this.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite winter spiced cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor fusion Sprite winter spice cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up. This sip and season, and only for a limited time. Sprite.

Obey your thirst with Venmo. Stache a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment, and more, pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with stash. Venmo stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms@venmo.com.

So whether it's pandemic fatigue, unknown mold or dust or allergen issue combined with pandemic fatigue, I've not been able to do very much. And again, I know I'm not alone in this. So this morning, I kind of gave myself permission. All right, you know, with Ryder, we're just gonna. We're just gonna amble around the block. And I wasn't even that present with him.

I get home, he likes to sit on the stoop and people watch and dog watch and car watch. So as we're doing that, I realized something. I realized that today is his second birthday. And in that moment, my heart sunk. On his second birthday, what did I do? I basically slept. Walk around the neighborhood, not even paying that much. Attention to him, dragging him a little bit when he didn't want to walk. Sometimes he tries to go to the park, and he's almost £100. So if he doesn't want to move, you know, sometimes I'll pull him a little toward the direction I'm trying to go.

And I just suddenly felt so, so bad. It is his second birthday. We just had neighbors. In the last year, our upstairs and downstairs neighbors had to put their dogs to sleep because of health issues.

And I love Ryder so much, Michael, and I love him so, so much. As it was earlier in the week, I saw the chairs on his hands started to turn light gray, and he's only 2. And I thought, you can't have gray hairs already. Oh, that. That melancholy, you know, the simultaneous joy and sadness. It's so tough with dogs. They say that when you get a dog, you sign up to have your heart broken. And I remember with my Australian shepherd that she lived to be 16. So in the last few years of her life, every time I looked at her, I was just on the verge of tears because I didn't know how much time we had left. So when I realized that today was Ryder's second birthday and I had not been present, I had been sleepwalking around the block. We got home, I saw him laying on his bed just looking totally sad. And whether that's a pet projection or not, Michael and I call it like a radio show today on pet projections, when owners just project whatever, like, human feelings that they have onto their dog. I looked at him. I have a podcast interview starting in two and a half hours, and I just looked at him, and I thought, I cannot accept this. Like, that's not good enough. I can't. I just could not allow on his birthday to have had such a silly outing. And so even knowing I have an interview coming up, even knowing I needed to prepare and I hadn't yet, I packed the backpack, turned right around and walked us over to the park and just found a second wind, pushed the work aside, and here we are. Now we're playing Frisbee. And by the time he runs and leaps into the air and catches a Frisbee, it's all worth it. And that I'm so glad. I'm so glad that I turned us right back around and, okay, I'm not doing so many things. There's a hundred tasks for the book that I'm behind on. There's so many adulting tasks in my life that I'm behind on. There are so many work things I'm behind on recording. This podcast was on my agenda for the morning and I said to myself, you know what? It's okay. So many of us are tired and fatigued and carrying so much and dealing with so much. There are so many. Even when I talk to friends, like random, crazy things happening. But I do want to say that if. If you're exhausted, as I have been feeling, it's not really free time and that's okay. That I try to remind myself that it's rest time and it's rest time until it isn't. It's rest time until you are rested. It's so often with big projects, all the shoulds roll in and all the pressure about. For me, I haven't even sent a newsletter in the last six months. So I have this hanging over me and I'm guilty every single week that I don't do it. And yet, is there something to the resistance? Is it trying to tell me something? I like to think so. It also may be trying to tell me or any of you that maybe we have too much on our to do list. Maybe we have the to do list of a past self, not the current self. Here at Morningside park, there's this awesome art installation. It's called Reclining Liberty. The artist is Zach Landsberg. This statue is huge. I encourage you to Google it. I may have mentioned it on an earlier podcast when I was doing the Notion walkthrough. She is laying on her slide and the artist says, like the Reclining Buddha. But also he has the Statue of Liberty lying on her side. Imagine she's perched up on one elbow, kind of. Her head is in the crook of her hand. Her feet are stacked on top of each other, almost like if you do yoga or Pilates, a forearm plank or a side plank, you know, she's just laying. She's horizontal. And the artist said that it's also to convey the weariness of the last year and a half that we're so used to the Statue of Liberty being this majestic. She's sitting in the Hudson river on the New Jersey side, as it were, striving and welcoming everyone to our shores. She's ambitious. It's incredible. It's a sight to see. I'm always delighted when I see the actual Statue of Liberty, but these days I'm just as delighted when I see this one. Because the point he's trying to make is that what would it look like for Americans to chill a little bit? I know not all of you listening are American, but for any of us, any of us around the world. What would it look like to let our guard down, to admit that we're tired? You know, she says, bring us, you're tired, I'm gonna bungle it. You know, you're tired, you're weary. What if we are tired and weary and we need to rest? Free time is truly free. It's when you have the energy to be present, when you have the energy to do your best work. And if that's not happening, it's not free.

It's a debit, It's a deficit. There's that saying. I love the saying, don't write a check that your body can't cash. We've been writing so many checks just dealing with life and health and everything of this time.

So it's not free time if we're in an energy deficit or a sleep deficit, as I have been dealing with. It's time for something else. And I hope that I'm saying this as much for myself as for any of you. I hope that that lets us drop some of the guilt of not not being present the way we want to in our, quote, free time. Not getting as much done as we want to in our, quote, free time, and instead acknowledging, oh, this must be rest time. Thank you for listening and for any background noise you're getting. The soundscape of the morning with Ryder. We are indeed here at Playing Frisbee. Even though I have a podcast that I'm recording in an hour and a half that I have still not prepared for, at least I'm recording this one imperfectly. I'm counting it as a win, and I know I made the right decision to take him to the park and to see his smiling face. You can hear him panting. You want to say hi, Ryder there? Yeah, he just licked the phone. So. Happy birthday, Ryder. I just turned 38 myself couple days ago and wishing all of you a happy, happy start to fall. Thanks again for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show, and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful. And for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my tech toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use along with the total monthly spend. To run my business where no one works full time even me, visit itsfreetime.com/join. Remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.

This episode is brought to you by Marketa. When it comes to your payments provider, you can't afford to compromise. Marketa's modern payment solutions flex with your business without the trade offs. Stable and agile, secure and innovative. Scalable and configurable. If they say you can't have it all, don't believe them. Your business demands more. Choose a payments provider that delivers more. Choose Marketa. Visit Marketa.com Spotify to learn more.