the social calendar

My huge green parka tucked itself slightly underneath me as I slowly, exhaustedly perched myself on the edge of a step on Elmbank Street in Glasgow. The cold, soggy stone beneath me sent a welcomed chill up my claggy spine as I wiped a bead of sweat from my brow. I've never arrived late to anything looking suave and sophisticated. Wheezing, thighs cramping, I looked up at an overcast sky in hope of catching a breath. "Fuck sake," I managed.

I'd been working the back shift all week, during which I tend to loose all sense of time. I wake up around eleven each day and make myself breakfast. In the past, that would be a huge plate of scrambled eggs on toast, but this year I've started gravitating to vegan pancakes, porridge or toast with banana, peanut butter and chia seeds. I'd wash the lot down with two cups of strong black coffee from a cafetière before running a sink of soapy water and tending to a day or so worth of dishes. They tend to build up a lot more when I'm working U.S hours. Then I'll set about literally anything else I've been putting off for a while. I'll stick on some laundry or run a hoover over the floors, take the bins out or go for a long-overdue haircut. I'd clean the bathroom or catch-up on a passion project, or take a run to the recycling centre with a boot filled with bulky items I've been meaning to throw away, the items which have instead been cluttering up the hallway for weeks. That's all before I even start my shift, which runs right through till 11 PM. Then I'll sit up till around 2 AM, catching up on new box-set episodes or rewatching old ones. After all, if I go to bed too early, I wake up too early and come Friday I'm a zombie, too tired to function. People tend to scoff at shift work, especially in the tech industry, but in honesty I quite like it. Having time during the day to get things done feels like a bit of a luxury, a welcomed break from the normal daily routine. If you can call it a break that is! Paradoxically, working an out-of-hours, anti-social shift where your contact with other people is vasty reduced, usually ends up in my week being much busier than normal!

This week had been no different. The mental checklist of routine tasks I'd been putting off had grown arms and legs and all were completed on auto-pilot, requiring little thought. Much as it's not ideal, it's a needs-must for shift workers. Sometimes we need to fit our lives around our work, getting around to shit when we can. And of course there's a price to pay for that.

I'd been running round like a blue-arsed fly since the moment I woke up. I started early (at least for a Saturday anyway) with a quick breakfast and some obligatory household cleaning. Naturally, I lost track of the time and so, running late, I had a quick shower and ran down to the car. I had planned to take the train but both my preferred and back-up trains had already left! Yeah, I was running very late! So a 20-minute drive into town it was. I hadn't actually checked my phone properly yet but it was tucked away in my jacket pocket to refer to later.

Coming off the motorway into the city centre, I parked at my office and legged it seven blocks to Elmbank Street, the home of Clyde Scouting. I'd already missed the meeting start time but hoped I wouldn't be too late, taking shortcuts through alleyways I'd become accustomed to. This wasn't the first meeting I'd been late to! I led myself up the stairs, into the building through the front door and round a right-hand corner to the door of the office itself. Heart racing, I punched in the buzzer. It's usually pretty quick to open, but as a few moments of silence turned into a half-minute or so, I hit the buzzer again. I was unconsciously holding my breath (as I often do) in anticipation of the door clicking open, but there was nothing. Confused, I had a quick look around the ground floor for someone to ask, but it seemed nobody else was in the building. No surprise really, it was a Saturday after all.

Still oblivious to my mistake, I wandered over to the In-Out board by the main entrance. Barely a moments glance had me saying aloud to myself, "Wait... that can't be right," as my brain tried to make sense of the visual evidence. Every name was clicked over to "Out". "Weird," I thought. I'd expected at least Terry or James to be here already. It was only then that I pulled out my phone to call one of them. I started planning my opening sentence as I reached into my pocket. I don't know either of them well enough to lead with "Sapnin," but "Hello," is a bit too formal for me. My chain of thought was interrupted when I saw my lock screen and slowly realised I needn't go further. "January..?" I asked myself, "...but the meeting isn't till..." My train of thought tailed off, followed swiftly by a loud and belligerent, "Aw fuck off!" On the kerbside through the window of the main door, heads were turning to investigate what was wrong.

I showed up an entire month early.

So there I was, sat on a soggy step looking up to the sky, the arse of my 501's slowly soaking up rain water. I started shaking my head in disbelief of my own stupidity, before starting to question every decision I'd made which had lead me to this point. It was then that I remembered I'd turned down a visit to the pub the night before. I gave it, "Can't tonight guys, sorry, I have a thing tomorrow," without actually checking that I did.

You could say that being an idiot ruined my weekend, but so too did the notion of being busy. Somehow I had managed to convince myself that I had plans and so turned down an invite to the pub in case I drank myself into oblivion, missing the meeting. Ordinarily that would have been a sensible decision, but the reality is that I turned down the offer before even giving it a serious thought. Had I actually checked, I could have said "Hey I have no plans tomorrow, I'll come along for a bit!" So really, it was my autonomous behaviour that ruined my weekend, my passivity and absent mindedness. Being constantly on auto-pilot was ruining the flight.

I'm not saying that going to the pub would necessarily have changed the fact that I showed up to a phantom meeting! But at least I'd have given myself the permission to switch off for a while and spend some time connecting with people. Rather than allowing myself the time to spend with at least a few friends, I never saw a soul that weekend. Instead of waking up in a heap on my landing in the morning, I was in a heap of my own making on a quiet city centre street, staring at a threatening sky that screamed pathetic fallacy, as though the big man upstairs was laughing at me. In other words, hard as it is sometimes, you can't allow yourself to neglect your social calendar.

I've done it myself, so naturally I feel qualified to call it as it is! If you drop off the social calendar, it's very much your own fault. Back in my hay day of social ignorance, the extent of my social interaction was sitting on the train for thirty minutes trying to ignore the appalling halitosis of the person across from me. I found it very easy to blame work, voluntary or otherwise, for my going AWOL. Sure, we will all have other plans at some stage or another, nobody can expect perfect attendance from you when it comes to social gatherings, but when the occasional, "Sorry guys, not tonight" turns into your habitual response, I'd argue that you should be thinking about whether your busyness is worth it. Are you, as Joshua Fields Millburn puts it, "drudging through the drudgery" in order to reach a milestone you know will give you immense joy and satisfaction, or has your work simply consumed your entire life?

When you go to the gym and lift weights, you are strengthening your muscles. The more you use them, the stronger they get. The social distancing measures of the Coronavirus lockdown has made me come to think of socialising in the same way. If you neglect your social life, you get shit at it. And even though you don't need to be an expert in everything you do in life, adults tend to avoid doing anything we are shit at. And so the wheel keeps turning and will continue to do so until you go out your way to put a stop to it. So personally, I see those social events that I can least be arsed going to, or have the least time for, as the ones which are in fact the most important to show up for - for my own sake if nothing else.

~ Aedan.