Pace

I am always in a hurry. That seems to be the case with most people who live in big cities and if you, and the people around you, do something for long enough it becomes the norm. The problem is, for me at least, living this fast paced life is anything but normal.
My natural pace is a much slower, calm, smooth set of waves gradually breaking over the shallow slope of a smooth, soft, sandy beach. I do not like rushing. I love the city and could never see myself living in the middle of an empty green hill with no broadband connection to the internet, much as I like nature and the unspoilt English countryside. The problem is that large cities with intricate transport infrastructures and a melting multitude of diverse communities colliding together need us rush. If we all went at my natural pace no one would ever get anywhere. At least not soon enough. That makes my current lifestyle even more surprising.
I never did like rushing and no matter how much I do it I never get used to it. It seems that everybody else does get used to it, or through apathy and resigned submission they just accept their lot in life and stop thinking about it. I can’t. I need to fight this rapid pace. I have been told to do this by a wide variety of experts from career coaches to cognitive behavioural therapists to weight watchers leaders. They can offer useful insights and advice and they may have some of the answers but they can’t come and actually implement the suggestions they recommend to help me slow down and chill out. My mind is always rushing around and full of too much inner conflict and fuzzy noise. That should no longer surprise me, but it does.
Sitting here in my tiny claustrophobic excuse for a study on a sunny spring afternoon I should be taking advantage of by going for a walk in the park, I am instead scratching my head and going red in the face. I am overwhelmed by mountains of paperwork and ragged brown envelops from various tax offices. They all seem to be telling me that I have missed the payment deadlines for some form of tax I forgot existed. The business that I set up is not trading, and I plan to wind it down, and even though I owe them nothing I fear the wrath of the taxman just as much as that age old Beatles song from what could well be their best album.
There are many different forms of tax. And for each type of different tax there are different forms to fill and different offices to send these different forms to. I have no job. I started a business to help a family member pursue another wild and wacky business scheme. The company has been set up but is not trading. I don’t have time to run a company. I also don’t have the scruples. I barely have the energy to even get up in the morning. I am still struggling to improve my health, battle the ill health demons and make permanent, positive changes in my life that will bear fruit over the coming years. I did not take this time out of paid employment to chase confusing tax forms and finally realise that it is the Income Tax and PAYE office who are harassing me with Correspondence demons and not the Corporation Tax Office. I better stop phoning them then. Who even knows where the VAT office forms are!
Running a business, just from the admin point of view is not easy. It would be easier if I didn’t have such a fragmented life. You may have noticed that this blog is somewhat fragmented in its composition and the thought process of its author. That is because my life is a continuing series of diverse and often conflicting tasks. That is why I am always rushing. Stop rushing, my psychologist told me. Slow down, close your eyes, take a deep breath, think of slow running streams and silt mountains. What happens when the train comes rushing through the tunnel being bored in the mountainside? I can hear the chugging of its iron wheels on the cold, hard tracks as it speeds up hurtling towards me. I may slow down, but life speeds up.
The clock is ticking as I have a doctor’s appointment in half an hour, to get my monthly dose of Vitamin B12, to power me up super hero style to face the increasingly demanding world bearing down upon me. I wasted 20 minutes on the phone to the tax office and hung up when I realised no one would answer and I could supposedly do it all online. The problem is I need a reference number that I cannot find if I am to go online and use the power of cyberspace in my battle with the mountains of multi-coloured tax forms. I have no idea where that number is. There are lots of numbers in front of me, and confusingly, they all claim to be reference numbers. References to whom and for what? I need an accountant to figure it all out. I am an accountant, Yes but I am a Management accountant not a tax accountant. Even if I were a tax accountant I would need to be a personal tax accountant, not a corporation tax accountant, or a VAT accountant.
I take a few deep breaths and go for a swim in the lake of serenity implanted in my mind by my therapists. It does not work. No matter how many deep breaths I take and distractions I try to conjure up, life just gets more confusing.
On that note, you would have thought that it would be easier to compose and put up a blog than start a business. It may be for most people, but when I tried to set up my new blog last night, this blog, and pasted my first entry I was “greeted” by a nasty corporate auto-message telling me that big brother had identified my blog as a possible spam blog, whatever that is. Therefore, no one could see my pearls of wisdom, posted at 3.00am in the early hours of a post-bank holiday morning. Nothing, it seems, is ever easy. No matter how simple I try to make it, something new comes along to make whatever I am attempting to do, just that little bit harder.
Anyway I better continue the rush and alleviate myself of the current swirling IBS pain in my lower gut before rushing off to the doctors to get energised for another bout of mundane soul destroying suburban life tasks.