As I have hinted previously, I’ve been becoming less and less interested in performing. It was touch and go whether I performed at last year’s Festival and, as you probably know, I decided not to do so this year. I’ve been wondering for some while now whether to give up performing altogether, hesitating to make any rash decision in case it was a feeling that would pass. In short, after giving it a chance, it hasn’t, not so far. Consequently, I’m not planning any shows in the foreseeable future. Whether this will be a permanent thing, I really don’t know but don’t hold your breath. I already feel a sense of relief at the thought. It has ceased to be a pleasure and become a chore. As they say in sales, there’s only one thing more contagious than enthusiasm and that’s lack of it.
The other factor is that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to keep abreast with just the routine daily tasks, even though I seem to work a 7 day week and my day is generally twice as long as when I had a proper job. Just to give you some idea, today I’ve shipped 9 trade orders (39 reels of rope), plus around 15 retail orders, gone through my email inbox of 186 emails (not including Facebook and Fetlife messages), had a meeting about the Festival and started clearing a whole load of crap out of my stock storage area. It’s now 2:53am and here I am posting on my site. In a few hours, it all starts again as I rarely sleep more than 4 or 5 hours a night these days.
Consequently, I never seem to have time to move forward with all the plans I have. There’s the next tutorial DVD to do, a Festival to organise, web site updates, new tutorials to shoot, a pile of video tapes to edit that go back further than I like to admit, items to add to eBay and Amazon, plus a lot of stuff I can’t even recall without referring to numerous To Do lists…not to mention personal stuff like a house to sell, the contents of aforesaid property to deal with, redecoration that’s well overdue at chez Esinem, vehicles to get MoT’ed…so it goes on. I told my fellow organisers of the Festival today that this will be the last one I’ll be working on and that it’s time to pass that baton on to whoever feels brave enough to take it.
You see my problem? I really need to cut the dead wood and concentrate on what’s important. Right now, performing comes very low on that list, as does TFP/TPCD photography and other unpaid work. Quite simply, my time has become too valuable to work for free. If I’m not getting paid, I want to be enjoying the fruits of my labour, since at the moment, I don’t get the chance. I desperately need to spend time enjoying Spalding Grey type perfect moments on Thai beaches and searching for that palm tree at the perfect angle to recline underneath with an ice cold Singah. The latter is far more demanding that it might sound. Just any palm tree won’t do. Things like that take time, research and many beers. I plan to dedicate more time to important things like this. Life isn’t a rehearsal and you are dead before you know it. I have taken careful note of the health of many of our Japanese heroes and it is a dire warning of what this lifestyle can do to you. I think I need a rope-free holiday or, at the very least, some time to dedicate to realising some of my plans.