Take the Space

A lot of the time I have this feeling like, “Where the eff did my day go?” Like all of a sudden it’s time to pick up Ax, or even time to go to bed, and I know I was busy all day doing stuff that seemed like it needed to get done but I kinda don’t know what I was doing or why it took up so much space.

And as quickly as I accomplish things more things get added to the list so it’s just kind of this endless to-do with maybe a comma here and there but no full stops and certainly no paragraph breaks. Just going, going, going.

And then, if I let myself get on a run like that, it might be days or weeks or years or decades before I look up and say, “What the eff? What am I doing? How have I not done that thing that matters most to me? Or even those top three things? Not really.

“How did I let maintenance and management take up so big a chunk of my life?”

And then, if I’m really smart about it, I sit down in my chair, one of the old cat-scratched, stained ones that have not been reupholstered or had new slipcovers made for them, and perhaps never will, and I look out the window, at the bushes we planted three years ago that are still too thin to hide the neighbors’ shed or that telephone pole, and I breathe in, then out, then in, then out. 

Those bushes will probably never grow thick enough or tall enough to do what I hoped they might do. But they are pretty nice bushes. They could use a pruning. 

And so, just like that, I’m faced again with a choice of pruning the bushes or turning to something seemingly larger, more important, to me, for me.

And I think, “What do I need right now?” And maybe I’ll write it, because there is some magic that happens when I write stuff down rather than let it simmer in my head, and maybe I won’t write but instead go get those hedge clippers and get out there and just get those few stray branches. Just a few. And then I’ll do that other thing.

Or I could stay in the chair, take the space to get down to what I know I want to do, and keep going. Just slow down long enough to back-burner the hedges, the slipcovers, that one quick call, and all the other stuff. It will all be there whenever. I’m gonna keep going.

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