At this time of year Ellen, my yoga teacher, invites us to choose a word for next year. For 2025 I chose efficiency. It is written on a purple heart shaped post-it and has been on my desk all year. It has been useful. It’s rather a business-like word, not really very spiritual or yogic, but necessary nonetheless. I’m always trying to achieve something and being efficient about it helps the chance of success. Somewhere else along the way this year I had a look at what are the things I’m trying to achieve. This was an important step. I am probably never going to learn Russian, although it would be nice to read Tolstoy in the original. I’ve also decided that Chinese is probably beyond me, although drawing the characters is quite fun; another year and I may be able to count to ten, on paper. But I am writing a weekly blog, and doing a bit of yoga each weekday, and reading daily.

A recent activity in the realm of efficiency was to take all the books I am currently reading and categorise them. Each book had a note attached to it that offered an explanation as to why it was on the current reading pile. There were about twenty – as you can see my reading pretensions are similar to my language learning ones. However I came up with four categories: ethnobotany (don’t laugh), spiritual books, novels, and non-fiction.

I need to break off from this detailed explanation. When I try to explain something properly I start to feel weird, some sort of stomach churning starts and I get stuck. It is true that I read a lot of books; I count listening to a book as reading it, and I often do both. I listen when I’m gardening and I read in any odd bit of time I get. I mostly read e-books on my phone, though I am enjoying an actual book at bedtime at the moment, Olivia Laing’s A Garden against Time. This was one of the books from the big pile that had got left behind, after thrilling me when I started reading it; it ended up in the spiritual pile, and that enabled me to look at it again, and I’m loving it again. It’s by my bed and I read a few pages now and then.

Somehow this categorising of books has worked. I’m not trapped by a huge pile, and interestingly I haven’t been near the ethnobotany pile. It does include some very interesting books, and I may get to them, but for now they’re all right where they are. I do want to read the one about living off acorns, and I’m sure I will one day.

The title of this blog is Efficiency/Relax. Relax is my word for next year, and it goes very well with last year’s word. I need to relax efficiently. I have a tendency to tick off and forget achievements and bemoan and remember perceived failures. I might spend two hours in the afternoon feeling tired and unproductive, and forget all the things I did in the morning that I could reasonably be pleased about. When I say relax what I mean is not the wonderful relaxing yoga session that I have just had, but to relax the constant desire to do well at my life. Everything becomes a judgement and it is very hard to escape from that. I think my mission is to continue doing what I’m doing, but not beat myself up for what I don’t do, and, equally important, don’t reward myself with praise for what I do do. It’s all the same: it’s called living.

I walked on Greenham Common with Louise yesterday and saw the birch trees shining in the sunlight; I visited the allotment on Wednesday and the broad beans that I planted on November 5th are coming up; in the garden this morning a dunnock was sparring with his reflection in a mirror; out there the world is turning and we darken for a few more days before the days begin to lengthen; life goes on.