Right now it’s the busiest time of the year in the wedding world. This is the time when most couples choose to get married and for many of us in the industry that means we’re pretty much working 24/7 to make sure that every couple gets their dream wedding and that everyone gets the level of service they deserve for the most special day of their lives.
With both of us working in the industry this is doubly the case, and for the duration of the “wedding season” it’s a real struggle to escape from weddings for five minutes and take some time to just do something else for a bit. The result of this has been quite staggering and taken me to a mindset I thought completely impossible: I’ve found myself actually yearning to do some housework.
Yep, I’ve recently found myself pondering retiling the bathroom, building shelves and doing another of those bi-annual trips to the loft to actually put some stuff away. I think the trouble is that my home to-do list is now just as long as my work one, and when that happens it becomes almost impossible to relax at all as wherever you are there’s always work to be done.
When you work in a creative capacity this can start to really feel like a major problem. Doing wedding after wedding with little chance for respite can make you feel like you’re perhaps not thinking as artistically as you otherwise would. Your work may actually be getting better and better but it’s easy to feel like you’re not pushing the boundaries as much as when there’s more of a gap between projects. You feel like you’re just doing the same things over and over again rather than doing something new and mind-blowing. This feeling is actually rarely exhibited in people’s work – in fact the continuous run of work generally helps to hone skills and make your standards more consistent, and actually that’s much more important than finding “something new”. But from speaking to friends and colleagues it’s clear how much that nagging feeling can bring you down, no matter how good the work may look to everyone else.
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o for me I’ve decided to try to combat the feeling that I’m just working constantly the way I used to – by taking 20 minutes out of my day to try and be creative in a completely different way – playing a musical instrument. Trouble is that whilst playing my trombone may be a thoroughly relaxing enterprise for me personally, it’s not exactly a calming influence for Dom in her similar quest to find windows of relaxation. But the other day I came across an instrument that I bought a few years back at the height of a similar all work, no play period – the ukelele.
Recently a friend of mine learned the Ukelele rapidly enough to be able to play a friend of ours down the aisle on her wedding day and it’s made me think I should actually get around to learning it enough to at least bash out a few vaguely recognisable tunes on it. It’s quiet, easily transportable and currently gathering dust in a pile that’s on my my long list to put in the attic, so I reckon it’s time to pick it up and spend 15 minutes a day mastering a whole new skill. Who knows, by the end of the season I may even have gotten as far as having learned how to tune this instrument that I’ve owned and failed to play for over 2 years… but let’s not get our hopes up too high.
So I’m sure my wife will be delighted to hear that re-tiling the bathroom may have to wait in order that I can learn how to play an often slightly irritating instrument very badly. Could be worse though wifey… I also quite fancy being able to play the drums!
