A Day Complete

Without a structured plan, all that needs to be done in a day gets done. 

I’m learning to untangle from the productivity programming to be present for myself and my people, which includes the menagerie of pets who chirp and bark their own insistence in the morning. To be seen, to be fed, to be cuddled. 

Nearly every day for the last month, I’d say to myself, I will get the taxes done today. Then I step outside and notice a new bloom on the rose bush, subtle russet orange on the outside and creamy yellow-white on the inside. That wasn’t here yesterday, yet here it is now, coyly capturing my attention. And then I move on to notice a few weeds, bend down to pluck them from the damp morning soil, and move along bending and plucking new overgrowth of prickly aggressive weeds. Step again to smell and touch delicate blooms, a riot of color complemented by rays of the morning sun. And onward, until an hour has passed. The hour I could have been working on those taxes, but instead breathed in the living, growing things in the little garden. 

The people, teenagers, insist on solitude and independence, whirling dervishes of energy that rise late in the day. One gets only a fractured moment before they’re off. And to miss that moment is to miss the entire point of the day, of life, before they move out of my home and are no longer a captive audience to my parenting, and my walls no longer hear their dreams and their fears and their laughter, and the sink sits clean and lonely for want of one more day of cooking experiments. 

I am the target of their mature understanding of every imperfection I’ve burdened them with in my choices and actions over their lifetime. It is very difficult to raise good parents and as I am only one, I get all of their focused firepower.

At night I dream of being held, of being safe, of laughter, of flying over the high mountains to the rolling hills and to the blue ocean where we float in buoyant salt water, tickled by fish fins and seaweed swirling below. 

What do to-do lists matter at the end of the day when simply living means we have been fed and watered, we have touched beauty, we have moved our miraculous bodies, we have seen and been seen by those we love, we have worked and run errands and created in the spaces between the moments of being. 

What is necessary is complete. The dreams have carved out space in daylight.