Letter 16
These Days
Dear Reader,
It’s a hot summer day, the kids are back in their school routines and Annie Dillard is keeping me company in my head.
She wrote in her book The Writing Life:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.
And I am thinking of this passage to myself as I use an old toothbrush to scrub Shout stain remover on to a child’s shirt attempting to salvage it for a few more wears.
How I am spending the days, apparently, is cobbling together the minutiae of household chores, finding dirty socks by the back door, organizing work-related administration, preparing final coursework, finding dirty socks in the downstairs, relishing the joys of mommying, cutting the kids’ hair, putting together all manner of family schedules, and finding dirty socks on the steps going upstairs.
Dillard’s point in her book was geared to how to become a writer. To do so, one writes, she is telling us. One makes a schedule to write and day after day a person who writes is a writer because they are spending their days writing.
The rest of her passage talks about how a schedule is a “scaffolding” and “a mock-up of reason and order” and “a peace and a haven” that after years provides security for living.
We fall into roles in our lives, some roles given us and some we have chosen or jumped into being. Creator. Fixer. Nurturer. Avoider. Leader. Listener. These roles can quickly eat away at the seconds and minutes where we are spending our days, especially when we are the ones at the other end of asks: “We need volunteers …” “Please join us …” “Do you know where to find?” … “Could you? …” “Would you?…”
If saying “no” is difficult for you, come over to the porch for a cup of coffee (or tell me “no” for practice :) because we would have something in common.
While getting older can be frustrating in a lot of ways, one of the bright spots is understanding ourselves better. As I child I often heard, “you are being too sensitive.” But what was going on was all the feelings of taking on everyone else’s emotions, of seeing something and being moved by it and wanting to do something to remedy the situation. While the trend in the last decade has been to find ways to be more empathetic, I have been searching for ways to “turn off” the senses when walking into a room means becoming totally invested in a person who needs help (when that might not be best for them), for ways to stop caring when someone I have to be around regularly doesn’t seem to like me, for ways to stop putting off something that makes me happy because a million other things from others seem more important.
Priorities, personal ones, as well as others’ priorities and how we fit into them, can be true guide posts when searching for answers on how to spend one’s time. Who or what is choosing us? Maybe that’s a clue in making our daily choices of how to spend our time (or in finding the next job or making the next life decision). And maybe all the details of the day, the meditative acts of weeding flower areas, or cutting fruits and vegetables, are all part of an “incubation period” explained in a podcast from Verywell Mind. This daily living and these “nonthinking” tasks are where our breakthrough solutions or ideas might reveal themselves.
There are all kinds of ways to spend the days nobly, justly, humbly. Filling pot holes. Feeding birds. Wiping down tables. Driving someone to or from somewhere. Smiling at strangers. (Not sure telling people you live with repeatedly to pick up their socks makes the list, though.)
I hope you keep living in a way that fills your soul as well as your days. Keep dreaming, too, ‘cause the other words that come to mind often are from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day”:
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Love,
Traci
Hey - just a little note - teaching started last week, final class for degree starts this week and my active kids have me running around so they can run around parks, fields, race courses. My goal is one letter a month this fall unless something just bubbles up and chooses me to write it :). But I will think of you, readers and friends, when I squeeze in cooler morning walks and runs as I wait excitedly for upcoming sweatshirt and stocking-cap days.