I think of money, time and energy as the three interchangeable resources we all rely on — but watching the video below made me realise there's a fourth resource: possessions. Items we own, stuff we have in store, is of course a resource and I hadn't factored that in.
So in this video, Madisun Gray (I love her channel) takes us through how she used that fourth resource of possessions — traded it in — to maximise money and time, so her family could create a reservoir of shared memory and transformative experience to enrich their lives.
There have been two times in particular when I've had to focus hard on budgeting time or energy.
My first child was born in the March of 1980, and my second child in the late October of 1981. That was a nice gap, and felt very manageable to me. I had plenty of energy back then. I thought we'd have three children in all, then call it quits. At the time we lived in a small Victorian workers cottage with two bedrooms — it would have been three, but the middle one was at some point made into a bathroom.
So after a similar gap came my third pregnancy, but that turned out to be twins, which was a very different conversation. They were born at the beginning of August in 1983, so for a while we had four children under four years old. Looking after twin babies is a lot more than looking after one. All four of them were in nappies at night. We also had a dog and a cat and a garden, church responsibilities, and my husband was a school teacher. My energy budget was quickly exhausted.
During those days, I remember there being a particular issue around four in the afternoon. My husband had after-school duties because he was a music teacher (choirs, bands etc), so he wouldn't be home until perhaps five o'clock. When he came in we'd have tea (supper; our evening meal), then it would be bath time, then bedtime. But at 3pm the children were awake after their afternoon nap, I'd been doing the usual household chores that I could get on with while they were sleeping, and he wouldn't be home for what felt like ages.
I noticed that I'd get very snappy around 4pm, and I stopped to ask myself why. I realised that I was just tired, and the only source of energy I had left was adrenalin, which is very irritable energy — anger, really. I thought about Jesus, on the road on foot every day, followed and surrounded by people desperately needing his healing touch, gathering in crowds to hear him preach, and I wondered what was the fuel he ran on. I suppose one might say faith or prayer, but the answer that came to me at the time was that Jesus ran on joy; that was his energy. I identified that in times of energy deficit the two options available to us are anger or joy, and that's to do with the orientation of our souls. Writing it down now, I have to admit it doesn't sound very plausible or convincing, but it's what I've always believed since those days.
Owning less helps, of course — fewer chores and more naps are two of the luxuries of minimalism, and living simply makes the money go further, which meant at least I was only trying to be a mother and a house angel, I didn't have an outside job as well.
Budgeting time came into focus for me in the season when my first marriage ended. The odd circumstances of what happened meant that (through no fault of my own) we lost our home and my job, as well as my husband's job. But there were still our five children not yet fledged, so I had to come up with options and solutions and apply them fast.
While I rebuilt my life, I worked in a number of different roles — as a palliative care assistant in a nursing home, as an assistant in a gift shop, writing, and crafting non-standard ceremonies for marriages, funerals and welcome-to-the-world ceremonies for babies. Eventually I was reinstated as a Methodist minister and had pastoral charge of churches again, but I kept on the ceremonies work as well, and it was time-consuming. Meanwhile I was living in a two-roomed apartment with one of my daughters, sleeping on the floor in the kitchen/living-room, and also running a fresh expression of church we called the Universal Glue Factory (because the glue that holds the universe together is love). That room where we lived and I slept and worked and wrote, and we cooked and ate, was also where we held church parties and taught theology classes and had the Glue factory meetings. It was insane.
I had to budget time very carefully, because the ceremonies were paid by fees, so had to be good quality, and often required accompanying leaflets with liturgies or orders of service. There was a lot to do.
At that time, in order to fulfil everything and forget nothing, I timetabled every day from 5am through to midnight. I made weekly timetables on paper, with every hour of every day mapped out and coloured in so I knew what I'd be doing and when. There were some blocks that doubled up. I discovered it is possible to prepare something that needs thinking about while you are asleep. You can instruct your mind to come up with a ceremony or a sermon or a chapter when you lie down to sleep, and it will be there in the morning. 5am is a good time to start, because no one else is up and the phone hasn't started ringing. That's the time to write down what you asked your subconscious to come up with on waking, when you went to bed last night. The other doubling up was meal times. I could check correspondence and pay bills and deal with electronic paperwork while I ate my lunch. I could allocate time to my family over the evening meal. For a while, it was the only way to get through.
Then I married Bernard and everything changed. At that point I was driving around East Sussex running 4 churches and looking after him as he became ill. Then I discovered, when I ran into deficit of both energy and time, that music keeps you going, especially music with a pronouncedly rhythmic beat. I had rock and roll CDs for my car, that kept me awake and functioning when, at ten o'clock at night, I was driving home through the Sussex countryside to check on Bernard.
So — joy, music, and meticulous planning. Those helped me. It's good to have a sense of humour too, because laughter fuels joy. And since you have to have money and you can't stop loving people, there is also that necessity which is the mother of invention. Somehow you get through.
And then, if it feels helpful, I like this as a prayer for letting all the accumulated baggage drop away.
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