Life Unfinished

Stressed. And anxious.

 Why so anxious? To get this thing done so I can do the next thing of course.

 And I only have so much time because there's work that takes up all the daylight hours and I just don't have any time before or after that between making lunch and picking up the kid from daycare. You don't understand, if I can just get this thing done then I can...

 I realized something a long time ago and I'm still trying to absorb it - that I will go to my grave with a to-do list as long as my arm. That's just how it works. If you didn't always have a bunch of stuff to do, what would you do? On my way home from work, I sometimes drive by a particular house.  When the weather is nice, I see an old man out on the front porch of this house, just sitting. He doesn't seem feeble and the view of the road with commuters going by certainly isn't pleasant. Every time I see him, I wonder if he's at peace with himself or if he's just run out of things to do. Usually I conclude the latter.

 It's easy (very easy, in fact) to become so engaged in knocking out the items on your to-do list that you can lose sight of what life is in the first place. When was the last time you genuinely enjoyed one of your daily, routine tasks? I know, me neither. You and I, we're both working so fiercely to work through the (daily|monthly|five year plan) list, we don't consider what's on the other side. We forget that life is a continuous, holistic experience.

Instead of slogging through our list of chores, what if we occasionally, deliberately, injected something we enjoyed? Better yet, what if we slowly removed the unpleasant activities and replaced them with more enjoyable ones, including a few moments to just relax on the back deck, just sitting, or better yet in a hammock under new spring buds?