“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” Our Town by Thornton Wilder 1938.
In the play Our Town, our heroine, Emily, is allowed to re-visit one day of her life before she rests forever in the village grave (she died in childbirth). “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.”
I think about this often. Am I living a day worthy of revisiting? Or am I wasting this time? As we age, we realize how much time matters, how precious our days really are. The cliche of appreciating each day now has more urgency.
The challenge of living in our second act is we are confronted by reality that time is running out, while simultaneously feeling restless. We want something new, but we don’t want to waste time as a beginner. We feel pressure to show, to publish, to recite, yet conflicted because we just want to relax and spend our time creating in peace.
When I was caring full-time for small, very active boys, a friend commented: the years fly by, but the days are interminable. Care giving days spool out in long, elastic möbius strips:sticky breakfasts, carrot sticks, uneaten fruit.
Retirement can look like that as well.
We wonder how to fill a May afternoon while masochistically studying the calendar to note it’s almost Christmas and another year has flown by.
Is there just one thing you can do in this day that will earmark it as worth another visit?
What did you do today that nudged you towards a more creative, artistic life?
Can you point to an activity that wasn’t checking email, reading depressing news feeds? Are those activities worthy of noting? Of marking on your calendar?
Instead of watching dog videos, put down the phone and paint a tiny picture.
Write two lines of poetry that could be a song.
Collect flowers, leaves and twigs for a nature collage.
Big is not the point. Small, fifteen minutes of creativity and awareness is.
One morning I dropped the boys off to Kindergarten and that afternoon picked them up from high school. Their childhood zoomed by fast with the years scattered with bits of Sunday mornings, shells and disgusting jelly fish parts on the beach, hikes in the Sonoma mountains, the redwoods, kayaking in SF Bay – all days I would happily revisit.
I am not the first to suggest that how we spend our day is how we spend our life. And not every day needs to be noteworthy. It can be the day you noticed how your socks have soul mates. It can be the day you actually did stop and smell a new rose. It can be the day you made one blue stroke on a new canvas.
“Goodbye, world. Goodbye, Grover’s Corners… Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking… and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up.”
What did you appreciate today? I actually smell the flowers, studied a leaf, and complimented a stranger. I do some of it for art and some for my soul. Don’t appreciate this normal, everyday world after it’s too late. Appreciate that you can get up out of your chair. Celebrate the miracle of hot running water. Enjoy the coffee, eat the food. With each moment we appreciate, time slows: we get more.
