Jill Murray

When you were a kid, did your parents make you choose between activities? Mine did. We had to take violin lessons in the winter and swimming in the summer. I figure skated year round. When I quit skating, I got to ski. My brother had it worse. He was caught between soccer or baseball for years. In winter, he hockeyed.

I always assumed the forced choice was mainly because my parents would have been too exhausted and short on funding if we got to do everything we wanted to. Actually, I didn’t need to assume. That’s what they told us and that’s how it was and after whining, we accepted it.

Then when we got older, things started to get messy. We mutinied against the violin. I traded the skis for rollerblades and my bike, which required no carpooling or continual cash investment. Then I started teaching myself piano. And I drew and painted more. My brother slowly backed away from sports and picked up the bass, self-instructed.

Then I moved out and everything came second to work and school. Eating. Drawing. Whatever. There wasn’t a whole lot of any of that going on.

Now that I’ve got my schedule worked out to a clear 3 hours of writing in the morning and 4 hours of working in the afternoon I have enough energy to want to do all of those other things and then some– cooking, painting, reading, beading, designing my own clothes, mixing hip hop beats, four or five different flavours of dance… it’s endless the number of things I expect to be able to do all of the time.

Some of those things are actually money savers, and carpooling is not an issue, but the problem I’ve discovered with wanting to do everything is that one starts to feel guilty every waking moment of the day because no matter what one is doing, one experiences pangs that one ought doing something else.

I know that this idea is out of vogue with the Parents Of Today. I know that unlike my parents, the Parents of Today would just work more and negotiate high-pressure carpooling arrangements with other hard-won parental allies to be able to to send their exhausted children to a different activity every night of the week, year-round.

But maybe learning to choose is a life skill in and of itself. Maybe choosing wouldn’t be so bad. Cooking, for instance, is important. It has to happen. So does cleaning. Mixing beats, not so much if you already have three vocations and nine hobbies. Sitting still for a moment… also an undervalued activity. And how can one appreciate that if one never learns to choose?