Friday, September 4, 2015

Doing stuff


A few hours ago, Mommy laid down her magazine, looked up at me, and said, "We have to figure out what we are going to do."  She spoke this in the tone that she'd used to use years ago to "get organized."  It struck me when she said it.  I was getting ready with all the shampoo and water and wash clothes and towels to wash her hair, and I thought.  Well, that's what we're going to do.  We are going to wash her hair.  (I didn't tell her this because day before yesterday when we were getting ready to wash hair I told her, and she didn't want to, and so we didn't.  I'm trying to let her have her way in every instance where starvation, dehydration, or a rash won't be the result.  Giving her as much power over the details of her life as possible.)

Anyway, so all the time I was washing her hair I thought these thoughts:

Life with Mommy is teaching me how to be content with today.  That is quite a feat as I am possibly the most impatient woman of our age.  All my life, I've had most of my heart and both my eyes on the big tasks in the future, and I've had little heart and pretty much no eyes at all on the small jobs set for today.  But, Mommy is teaching me to think differently.  It is very obvious (even to big-dreaming me) that Mommy can't plan and do what I would have named great tasks in my yesterdays.  She can only do what is set for her today, pretty much this moment.  Nothing else.  And, that is, maybe, THE great task.  And this fact is teaching me, because it's less obvious but just as true, that I can only do the tasks set for me today.  I'd always managed to ignore this truth, and so I never finished the small jobs of each day and, possibly because of that failure, a lot of the big tasks were left unfinished as well.  This probably seems to anyone reading it like Life 101.  It's an obvious truth, but I never learned it before, and the nice thing about it is that the knowledge frees forty-seven year old me from the past and from the future and sets me nicely (and happily) down in today.  Today, I can do what I can actually do today.  No more.  No less.  And if I seem fail in that, tomorrow has the same task.  And, tomorrow, I'll be free from what I've left undone today.  I can't do more tomorrow than tomorrow will hold.

1 comment:

  1. I keep telling you "don't sweat the small stuff!" .. finally sinking in?

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