Galah's editor-in-chief Annabelle Hickson writes about the new world order now that her youngest child has left home in Issue 12's letter from the editor.
Having children in your life brings many things. Lolly wrappers stuffed in weird places, lots of small socks to peg on the line. It also comes with routines. There are the routines that you decide – like how militantly you keep to the sleep timetable when they're babies – and then there are the routines that arrive, as if chiselled in stone, that you have no say in. Like the school timetable.
In our house, the school bus arrived at the letterbox at 7.30am and came back at 4pm. This gave a structure to our days that had nothing to do with me or my work or how I was feeling. This was a routine that I didn't have to maintain or be responsible for. It just was.
Now all of our children are away at boarding school. There is no bus to meet. I chased a bat out of one of their empty bedrooms last night. Ed and I are like astronauts floating in space, only just tethered to the spaceship. We're up there somewhere in that midnight blue sky on issue 12's cover.
We both work for ourselves. He works on the farm, where we live. And I work on my laptop, which lives wherever I am. The separation between work and the rest of life has, at the best of times, been blurry. We really like working and the feeling of doing.
But the school routine did mean there was a sense of switching the work button off. At 3.55pm I'd close my laptop and walk down to the letterbox, even if I was in the middle of something I really wanted to finish.
Without the school bus marking time for us, the day just spills forward, uninterrupted. We stumble into the kitchen now around eight o'clock, bleary-eyed and a bit surprised to find ourselves at the end of the day.
"Oh hi," says one of us. "Are you hungry?" says the other.
I always wanted more work time – if only the school day could go for one more hour – but now that I've got it, I'm not sure it's a good thing. The extra productive time comes at the cost of non-productive time, and I didn't realise how essential the latter was.
I'm not Jewish, but I love the concept of the Sabbath. One day a week – a seventh of your life – dedicated to not being productive. Instead, you light a candle, have a special meal with family and friends, turn off your phone. You gather. You stop doing and start being.
I desperately need to bring something like this into my life. Mini secular Sabbaths each evening to delineate the day. I want a part of each day of my life to be about enjoying earthly pleasures that have nothing to do with striving and achieving and producing. A walk, a good meal, meandering conversations. The occasional chance to stop and reflect. Those dear children forced that on me and life was so much richer for it.
Productivity is a skill, but so is not being productive. Perhaps that's what this next phase is about – learning to land without a school bus telling me when to come back to earth.
Annabelle
This letter comes from Galah Issue 12, which will land in subscribers' letterboxes any second if it hasn't already, ahead of the official on sale date of April 7. Order your copy here.
Because I live at the end of the world, in terms of postage delivery, I will be standing next to my letterbox like this for the next week. Please feel free to distract me with pictures of your delivered Galahs in situ, either by replying to this email or DMing me @galah.press.
Help us celebrate the winners of the Galah Regional Photography Prize at the 2025 exhibition party.
Join us as in Armidale, NSW, on Friday 2 May as we celebrate the 42 finalists and announce the winners of regional Australia's richest photography prize. Tickets are available here.
