Terenia Taras
I NEVER thought I’d hear myself say ‘I wish I was busier’.
When I set up my PR company I worked round the clock; weekends, and holidays were always interrupted with me having to respond to emails or calls.
But since the pandemic has slowed my business right down I’m at a bit of a loss. It’s been a year now since we moved to Mallorca and we were just three weeks in when COVID hit.
As the death figures soared and businesses plummeted I didn’t have much else to do but enjoy being a newbie on the island. And enjoy it we have.
We’ve been to many different places on the island, spent many a day on the beach and savoured long leisurely lunches in the sun, just because we could.
So why is it that I miss being busy? What is so good about being busy? We are so fickle, us humans. When we have this, we want that, and when we have that we want this! Why can’t we just be happy in the moment?
I do feel so much luckier than family and friends of mine back in the UK. The weather makes such a difference when we can go out for a bike ride, or a hike in the beautiful countryside when everything has been shut.
My son and I often swap views from our windows and man, is his view bleak compared to mine. I wouldn’t want to be in the UK during the pandemic that’s for sure.
So why am I feeling flat? Why does working and being busy seem important compared with just being able to enjoy our lives?
I guess it’s because we’ve become hard-wired to working and being constantly busy that without a full weekly list of things to do, at work and home, we feel a bit adrift!
My other concern is when things do come back, how will we feel about resuming the old normal way of life? We’ve all had more time with family, time to just enjoy the basic things like cooking a nice meal and plenty of time to reflect.
So do we really want to work as hard as we were used to? My dream is still to sit in the sun and write my book, a project which has been on the go now for years!
But I’m afraid to, because no-one will want to publish it, or read it, and then what do I have left to pull out of the bag?
You’ve got to keep some dreams going because it gives you hope that you might just write that bestseller, climb Everest or take that trip to Antarctica you’d always planned to do when you had A, the time, and B, the money.
And hope right now is something we’re all clinging on to. But when we’ve got through this pandemic and can look back and think ‘what the hell, we’ve survived that so I’m not going to be afraid to do the one thing I’ve always wanted’.
I really hope so because we don’t really need to be busy fools working flat out just to give ourselves a false sense of purpose.
I know having a year out from that has been a gift and a curse at the same time, but ultimately when my time is up, I think I’ll be somehow grateful for the past year.
You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @tereniataras
