Pondering this weekend

I've been thinking this week about work. How many hours should I be working each week? What do I want to achieve with those hours? How do I wish to spend my non-working hours?

I'm fortunate to be able to choose my hours, working in my own business. But I need to reassess how things are going from time to time.

I found this to think about, from Enough - Breaking free from the world of more by John Naish:

Working part-time is better for your own ecology, as it liberates space  to tend your mind, life and body. It also spreads the available work around to other members of your community, rather than making you hoard it as a time-starved, exhausted salary earner. It's often more efficient for employers too, as they are buying only the hours in which you are genuinely interested in working, rather than also funding your tired-time, bored-time, and waiting-to-go-home-time.

What do you think? What kind of hours do you put into paid work, and are you happy with the amount of hours you work? Let me know in the comments.

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Happiness, journey, and everything-is-going-to-be-all-right-ness

Last week I posted some quotes I loved at 16 - and now.

Here are some more:

The smallest good deed is better than the grandest intention

It's only when you quit that you lose

Things turn out right a ridiculous amount of the time. Stephen King

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Chinese proverb

The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost. G.K. Chesterton

Don't be the best in comparison with others; be the best you can be

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. Abraham Lincoln

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Inspirational quotes I loved at 16

At 16 I didn't keep a journal but I had this very slender, purple notebook that you could seal shut with a stud. I used it to scribble down quotes I liked from conversations, books, short stories or poems.

All this time it's been in my top bedside drawer. I hadn't opened it for years and years and forgotten what was inside.

The other morning I was trying to convince my wide-awake baby to lie quietly in bed with me for a while.  He hauled himself onto my face and started grabbing tissues from the tissue box on top of the drawers. As you do when you're 13 months old.

I opened the drawer and scrabbled around blindly for something to keep him still for a while. Out came the book, and I let him chew on the corner before opening it to find out what I had written in there anyway.

I thought since it would reveal my idealistic, teenaged self. A nice momento of who I was then, but not irrelevant now that I'm all grown up and so much has changed in my life.

I opened it, and guess what?

I am the same. Staggeringly so. There's something so comforting about finding out that I'm just as dreamy, determined, idealistic, realistic, and nerdy as I ever was. And the ideals by which I wanted to live my life are unchanged 20 years later.

Here are the thoughts from the first pages. I don't know where they all came from. I'd love to know if you like any of them or what your favourite inspirational quote is.

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience. Goethe (I wrote this one on the first page, two days before I turned 16.)

Enthusiasm is one of the most precious of all jewels in the crown of life.

Definition of a saint: a sinner who kept on trying!

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Love one another as yourself. Gospel of Mark

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

An interested person is an interesting person.

Happiness is the art of making a beautiful bouquet with the flowers you are given. (I've written on happiness here and here.)

One can never consent to creep when one has an impulse to soar. Helen Keller

Got a favourite quote? Leave it in the comments box below, and see more quotes here.