When you have laboriously accomplished your daily
tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.
- Victor Hugo
I’m not sure when I first read this quotation – I
don’t think it was more than about six months ago – but it’s one of those
quotations that made less of an impression on me upon first reading than it has
in the time since with its sticking power. I didn’t dwell on it or commit it to
memory when I first came across it, but recently I think of it almost every
night as I get ready to go to bed. It reminds me of the sense of
serenity from acknowledging that the day is done and it is time for closure on
all that the day involved.
Sometimes, too, I find myself thinking about the
other ways that this idea has been expressed in the common vernacular. I think of taps: “Day is done.
Gone the sun. ….All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.” And I think of Goodnight
Moon, when I’m shutting down my computer, only I like to rephrase it as “Goodnight email.
Goodnight calendar. Goodnight Facebook friends everywhere.”
All of these examples convey the same idea: there is
a time to acknowledge that the day’s work is done. In the past, I’ve so often
found it easier to rebuke myself for all that didn’t get done as the day ends
than to accept it. Housework left incomplete. Interviews for the following day
that I haven’t prepared for all that well. Emails I haven’t yet returned.
Errands I’m procrastinating on for yet another day.
And it’s so easy to get entrenched in these negative
thoughts of what didn’t happen that you overlook what did: another day brought
to an ultimately successful conclusion.
But somehow these words make it easier for me.
Goodnight to this day, I tell myself now with Victor Hugo’s lines in mind. I’ve
done what I can and it’s someone else’s turn to keep watch now that it’s
nighttime.
But, interestingly, once I decided I wanted to try
to write a blog post about this half-remembered quote, I couldn’t recall who wrote it, and I
had the idea that it was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Finally I found it, and saw that it was not Emerson but Hugo, but then
realized there was another Emerson quote with which I was confusing it:
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done
what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as
soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with
too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Emerson, Unitarian minister that he is, doesn’t
bring God into it; he simply gives us the responsibility for finding closure on
the day ourselves. Never mind God keeping watch, Emerson seems to say; the
point is still that your work is done and you are ready to begin again tomorrow.
I like both quotes. I like the text of Goodnight Moon too. I
like the idea that it is all right to just walk away from undone or half-done tasks at the
end of the day. Because as both writers say, there’s time enough tomorrow to
try it all again.
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