The Eternal Time Optimist

There is a particular kind of person who looks at a Tuesday and sees infinite possibility. I am that person. I have been that person my whole life. I am also, without exception, wrong.

The eternal time optimist suffers from one delusion: that things take as long as they should take. Not as long as they actually take. The fence should hold. The weeds should stay put for a week. A man buying a chimenea should buy the chimenea and leave. None of this is how the world works. The world runs on its own clock,  and the clock and I have very different ideas about time.

Take this week. On paper, reasonable. On paper, everything is reasonable. That is the whole problem with paper. We're getting the farm ready to sell, but a farm is not an apartment you tidy. It is a living organism that generates new tasks while you sleep. You fix one thing and two more quietly break.

Spring isn’t helping. Up here it doesn’t arrive, it invades. Everything grows at warp speed, and ninety percent of it is something I did not plant and do not want. The veggies takes their time, but the weeds move in like they own the place and have always owned the place.

Then there's the alpacas. The shearer we booked called in sick, and the next one available can't come for a month. But the weather has turned warm, the alpacas are still in their full winter coats, and a month is roughly a month too long. So we will do it ourselves, because that is what the eternal time optimist does when the help exists but not in time. We have bought the tools. The tools are very real and slightly terrifying and currently sitting in the barn radiating confidence I do not share. How hard can it be, I keep saying, which is the official motto of my people, carved above every doomed barn door.

Meanwhile my mare is due to foal any day now, which means “any day” is now a tense I live inside, on foal watch, which is a stakeout where the suspect knows and is content to wait you out.

Meanwhile we are also driving to our new farm, Solli, to help the current owner prune the apple trees and learn how to run an apple farm, a thing one apparently learns in an afternoon, the way one learns the violin or Mandarin.

Meanwhile it is tick season, peak tick season, and we run a tick repellent company. You’d think this was good timing. It is not. It is running a lifeboat business during a flood.

Underneath everything, five horses, who need mucking out and feeding three times a day regardless of my plans, my mood, or the existence of foals, alpacas, ticks, or books. The horses do not read my to-do list. And the dog would still like her walk, please.

And then there are the chimeneas. We are closing the business after twenty-three years — a decision the chimeneas have not accepted, because it is peak season, and nothing sells harder than the moment you decide to stop selling it.

And in the cracks between all of this, I am supposed to be promoting my books about taking back control of your life. About writing your own script instead of running someone else’s. I stand by every word. I’d just note the comedy of promoting Screw the Script from inside a week that screwed mine first.

Here is the part where a normal self-help person tells you they learned to slow down. To breathe. To release what no longer serves them. I did not learn that. I never learn that. And I should be honest about why: nobody is doing this to me. I chose the horses. I chose the alpacas, the farm, the foal, the books, every last unmovable deadline. I built this circus on purpose, and I would build it again tomorrow, because the alternative is a calm, sensible, well-rested life, and I have seen those and they are not for me. The truth is I'd be unbearable with less. Give me a quiet week and an open calendar and I'd have it full by Wednesday, probably with another animal.

Tomorrow my list will say, in my own handwriting, "light morning, should take an hour." I know it won't. I know exactly how this ends. I write it down anyway.

The eternal time optimist cannot be cured. She has no wish to be. And the alpacas, I'd remind you, are still out there. Unsheared. Waiting. Watching me unbox their tools.

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None of this chaos is an accident — I chose every bit of it. But you can only choose your own life once you can see the script you were handed. The Bullshit Detector shows you yours. That's where it starts.