Last Friday’s Six Word Friday used the word “count”, touching on a topic I’ve been thinking about lately:
Making each day count is hard.
So many of my days have a gray sameness to them. The gray, rainy (and humid) weather isn’t helping, but it isn’t just that. With much effort, the garden got cleaned out and planted, and some of it is already dying. The tomatoes are growing just fine, but are infested with some bug. The hollies are infested with a scaly mite.
The new windows are finally FINALLY done, but the new mini-blinds are not. It will be at least two more trips to get that finished – once to replace a set that was manufactured wrong; the second because the order was short a set of blinds.
We’re eating out too much because we’re too tired and busy. Work is into the usual routine for this time of the year – working on audits and getting numbers ready for tax return preparation (I need the federal return to be done first, but I have a whole series of things that need to be ready before then or we can’t do the state income tax returns that I’m responsible for).
But I don’t want my days sliding off into oblivion. Quite frankly, that’s no fun. I did that several years ago and at the end of the year, had little memorable to record. I was really unhappy with that. It’s easy enough to let just happen. Lack of attention, lack of caring, and just not noticing anything except what’s right in front of me all contribute to this.
Can I do better?
Yes, I can.
I wrote in my last post about taking a break and just enjoying some fresh air.
I’m not doing as many field trips this year, but we are planning a longer trip and some short weekend trips. Daily photographs are fun, but after a while there’s nothing really new to record, at least at this time in my life.
I’m not posting in my blog as frequently, but I am writing with much more frequency in my personal journal. Surprisingly, I’m doing it by hand. I haven’t done that for nearly 15 years, when I started doing it on the computer.
But mostly, I can make sure to enjoy the small moments each day brings, from someone who smiles nicely at me in the parking lot or makes chit chat in the elevator. It’s seeing an eagle circling over the James River as I’m talking to my boss. It’s going to a local seminar and laughing afterwards with people I’ve gotten to know in the local tax community.
It’s noticing a sale for a bouquet of 100 roses and sending it to my daughter to thank her for a lovely time when I visited. It’s cooing over a beagle who got his teeth cleaned and is still groggy afterwards. It’s my husband pointing out that the peony is finally in bloom.
Making each day count is hard on some days, but it makes life so much better to make the effort.
