On the horns of a dilemma

My nine-year-old said the words I love to hear perhaps above all others yesterday. “Mom, could you just read outside while I ride my bike around the driveway?”

She likes to do driveway laps, but not without company. So she likes me to sit there and read while she bikes. It’s like being given a job as an ice cream taster: surely too good to be true.

I pulled a lawn chair out of the garage and found my Kindle, but just as I opened to the front page of the Sunday Boston Globe, I realized that the circumstances were ideal for tackling a household task I’d been procrastinating for months, which was digging through the myriad packing boxes in the garage to find the nighttable lamps we’d never unpacked after moving a year ago. It’s one of those things I keep meaning to do, and yet unlike laundry or cooking, it’s never essential. It’s always sort of a second-tier priority. And second-tier priorities never seem to get done.

If I was ever going to search for those lamps, this was the moment.

And yet there on my Kindle was an entire Sunday Boston Globe plus an entire Sunday New York Times to be read, and the circumstances were ideal for that as well.

It was a fairly straightforward dilemma. The benefits of searching for the lamp were obvious – locating something I needed and garnering the additional satisfaction of crossing off a task that had stagnated on my To Do list for months – but the benefits of the newspaper couldn’t be overlooked either: awareness of current events, exposure to informed opinions, overall intellectual stimulation.

I spend a few idle moments contemplating the nuances of this admittedly trivial dilemma. Reading the newspaper, especially the Sunday paper, really does make me a happier and more fulfilled person. I genuinely feel lacking when I go a whole Sunday without reading the paper at all. I worry that I’m missing out on important world developments. I feel hesitant to join in conversations about current events, feeling uninformed.

On the other hand, procrastinating on household tasks takes its own mental and spiritual toll. Though there are surely people who never think about housework and are able to devote all of their discretionary time to intellectual pursuits, I can’t imagine being free of the gnawing voice inside telling me I can’t let the household tasks get away from me; they multiply like bunnies. Dust bunnies, that is.

In the end, I treated the conflicting choices inside my head the same way I treat my own children when they quarrel: I made them take turns. First I read the lead story in the Globe; and then, with a deep breath, I approached the mountain of packing cartons.

I suppose the outcome was inevitable. Household chores always manage to sink their teeth in; you give them an inch, they take a mile. Two hours later, I was still going through boxes – not because I hadn’t found what I was looking for but because one thing leads to another with a job like this, and once I’d located the lamps, I needed to find the lightbulbs, and while looking for the lightbulbs I came across a favorite vase that I wanted to bring into the house, but if I was going to find a place for that vase, I might as well find the one that went with it as well. And so on.

Not until after the kids were in bed six hours later did I get back to the paper. It was nearly ten o’clock and I was only one article into the Sunday Globe. Unless I stayed up ‘til midnight reading, I knew I’d feel just a little bit behind, intellectually, all week.

Still, knowing there was one fewer task on my To Do list was worth something. So it was with a very small and yet unquenchable sense of accomplishment that I finally finished one last article and reached out gratefully to turn off my much-missed bedside lamp.

To Do....or not To Do

I woke up yesterday morning already facing defeat with my To Do list.

I just knew I wouldn’t get through it. I never get through it. And if there was ever a weekend when my odds were good of navigating my entire To Do list, this weekend was it. We had almost nothing on the calendar other than bringing Tim to a school dance on Friday evening and picking him up afterwards, a children’s theater event on Saturday afternoon, and church on Sunday morning. So if you start the clock at 5 p.m. on Friday – the time that I consider the work week over and the time that both kids are home from their afternoon activities – and run it until 10 p.m. on Sunday – the time I try to get to bed – and then subtract eight hours each on Friday night and Saturday night for sleeping, that leaves about 37 hours to fill however we chose.

But by Sunday morning, I knew I wouldn’t get through my list, and as I lay in bed thinking about getting up, I found myself unwittingly cataloging those items most likely to get bumped. I knew I’d get through the basics: running, church, cooking meals, washing dishes, probably a load or two of laundry. But I knew I wouldn’t get to any of the lower-priority tasks, like putting away the props from the play that ended its run two weeks ago, cleaning up Holly’s room (which in terms of the frustration it causes me should be top-priority, but because of the amount of work it constitutes always gets bumped down a notch), and searching through the boxes that we still haven’t unpacked since moving here last spring for the nighttable lamps that I really wish we could start using again.

So I got out of bed and focused on the beginning-of-day items I wanted to get through: writing in my journal, eating breakfast, putting bacon in the oven for when the kids woke up (they sleep late on weekends, which is truly one of the many joys of reaching the tween years). But even as I drove to church, I was still thinking about all that I wanted to get done but probably wouldn’t find time for.

And then at some point I had a change of heart. What if I just catalogued those things that did get done, instead of those that didn’t? What if instead of rebuking myself for never getting those last few boxes unpacked, even eleven months after our move, I celebrated the fact that I was out for a four-mile run before church? What if making the bed mattered more than not getting the laundry done?

Just thinking this way put a more positive spin on the day. And when I got home from church, the sun was shining and the temperature had already reached the low sixties. Holly wanted to go for a bike ride, Tim wanted to play badminton, and my friends Jane and Donna were coming by for a walk at 2:00.

So I mentally threw away the To Do list and just enjoyed the sunshine. Truth be told, by the time dinnertime rolled around, I’d accomplished even less than I expected. I hadn’t even made it to the supermarket, having rationalized that if we had milk, orange juice, and lunch-makings for Monday, it could wait another 24 hours.

And yet I’d gone running, biking, walking and played badminton, as well as collaborated with Tim to set up a ladder and pluck three errant badminton shuttlecocks out of the roof gutter. It was a late-winter day that felt like summer, and I’d spent more than half of it outside. Yes, the laundry went unwashed, the groceries unpurchased, and the nighttable lamps left in their storage boxes for yet another week.

But I’d stopped thinking about it. For the rest of the day, I counted what I did do rather than what I didn’t. And that made me feel as if I’d accomplished plenty.

An ordinary Sunday

Just an ordinary Sunday.

After breakfast, I ran three miles. Not a particularly impressive distance, but it was 14 degrees out as I headed out the door. Three miles was all I could brace myself to do, and it was enough. Day 1646 of my running streak.

At church, I was prepared to teach Sunday school, but none of my students showed up, which is not unusual during ski season. So instead, I was able to attend the sermon given by our impressive student minister.

After church I stopped by my parents’ house. Mom gave me a batch of brownies to take home, and I showed her how to transfer an audiobook onto her iPod so she could listen to it in the car.

Back home, the kids had just finished unloading the dishwasher. True, I had left a note before I went to church specifically asking them to do that, so I wasn’t surprised, but it was still nice to return home to a partially cleaned-up kitchen.

My friends Jane and Donna came over to join me for a walk in the woods. We bundled up against the cold – typical for February, but not typical for this particular winter – and headed out planning to walk for an hour, but we were having such a good time being out in the woods and talking about a variety of issues that we stayed out for an hour and twenty minutes. Then we came home and ate the chocolate cookies that Tim had asked me to make earlier in the weekend.

Later in the afternoon I read the paper for a while and mixed up a batch of vegetarian chili for weekday lunches before heating up dinner: leftover pizza contributed by my parents, who had stopped by a new pizza parlor late last week. Over dinner, the four of us joked about Valentine’s Day ideas and made plans for Rick’s upcoming birthday. Tim and Holly played a video game together before bath time.

It wasn’t a holiday or a travel day or a day when we did anything very unusual. It was an ordinary day. And yet absolutely wonderful in its ordinariness. The life I live now is the life I dreamed of living when I was in my twenties and thirties: happy, well-adjusted kids and husband, comfortable inviting house, good friends, welcoming community, parents nearby. Getting paid for writing articles and essays. Being able to head out the back door for a walk in the woods any time I want to is the icing on the cake.

These are the kinds of weekend days the kids will remember, I think to myself as the day ends. Yes, they’ll remember vacations and special occasions, but also the days when we mostly just hang around enjoying each other’s company. Pizza for dinner; a video game or two; nothing spectacular. An ordinary day. I look back at my own childhood and remember similar days: listening to records, playing with the dog, maybe a board game or a ping-pong match with my sisters. Regular daily life.

But such a happy reality, then and now. Sure, special events make for great memories, and those are the ones that end up in the photo album: family trips, birthday parties, class plays, enormous snowmen, sand castles, baseball championships. We didn’t take any pictures yesterday; it didn’t occur to us that any of it was worth photographing, and we were probably right.

Perfectly ordinary days are difficult to capture in images: what would the composition of the photo actually consist of? Fortunately, the requirements for good memories aren’t quite so stringent.

Pausing

Our church service yesterday morning focused on the theme of taking time to pause and concentrate and absorb. We sang a hymn I hadn’t heard before about the need to behave like cows and sheep, standing in the fields watching and thinking. Our student minister read the well-known poem by Mary Oliver in which she describes spending a whole afternoon contemplating a grasshopper. And in the sermon, our minister described a classroom method biologist Louis Aggasiz practiced at Harvard in which students were required to stare at dead fish for days on end and describe it in detail, only to discover time after time how very little detail they were actually absorbing.

This was good for me to hear. I hadn’t been to church for several weeks because of other options on Sunday mornings. A couple of those weeks I’d been out of town, but other weeks I’d wanted to concentrate on other priorities: spending time with my sisters and their families when they were in town on a rare weekend visit in mid-October, going for a run with a friend another Sunday in early November and urging her to stay for a cup of coffee so that we could catch up a little bit.

So sometimes, going to church feels to me like the opposite of pausing and concentrating. Sometimes, I avoid going with the excuse that when Sunday morning comes, I just can’t rush around anymore. I rush every weekday morning to get the kids to the schoolbus on time; I hurry throughout the course of my work day; I hurry to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour; I hurry to get to bed early enough to try for seven hours of sleep. On Sunday mornings, sometimes I just need a break from hurrying – even if hurrying means something as theoretically contemplative as being at church. I need to pause at home and regroup.

But being back after several weeks away yesterday reminded me that in some ways, the only time I really can stop and concentrate is in church. I tell myself some weekends that I’ll have a leisurely, focused breakfast and maybe even read the paper, but more often than not, I eat while simultaneously unloading the dishwasher and making breakfast for the kids. I imagine going for a leisurely run instead of church, but instead I run with one eye on the clock, calculating what time I need to be done and showered in time to be on time to the next commitment.

I’m not good at pausing and concentrating, and during the holiday season this tendency for distraction only grows worse: instead of letting my mind absorb the present, I’m thinking about the next party, the next cooking project, the next holiday performance on our schedule.

So it was good to be in church yesterday morning to hear this message, and also to be able to enact it just a little bit. In church, there is nothing to do but sit and listen. I couldn’t unload a dishwasher or go for a walk even if I wanted to: it’s church. So that’s the one time of the week when I know I really will just sit still. And it was good to be reminded yesterday of what an important priority that is – at any time of year, but perhaps on the brink of the holiday season most of all.

Busy Sunday

At 7:56 last night, I sat down and glanced at the clock.

7:56. I was sitting down for just a moment, but at that moment I felt like it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to avoid getting up again all evening.

But then Holly called from the shower that she needed a towel, and the dog looked like a trip outside for her might not be a bad idea, and I remembered that the clothes needed to be moved from washing machine to dryer.

It was a busy day. I arose early to write my usual one thousand words of Morning Pages. I decoded the problem I was having syncing my Google calendar with my new phone. And though the peace and quiet of the household with everyone else still asleep was blissful, I headed out for a four-mile run.

“Tell me one thing: why do we have to exercise?” a man who looked to be in his sixties and was out for a walk near the state park called out to me as I approached him.

“Funny you should ask; we were talking about that just this weekend,” I told him, which was true. “It’s because we don’t do manual labor! If we were out working in the fields all day, we wouldn’t go running!”

I finished my run and made waffles for the kids’ breakfast. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and took a shower and headed to my friend Jane’s house. She and another friend and I did a 45-minute walk in the warm midday sunlight and talked about how odd it was to have a sixty-degree November day just two weeks after an October snowstorm.

I drove back home and put in a load of laundry and swept the floors. I welcomed a new friend of Holly’s who came over to play. I figured out what to make for the next several dinners and made up a grocery list. Then it was time to go grocery shopping.

Home from the supermarket, I tried to unload groceries, talk on the phone to my mother, and make dinner all at the same time. It took a while, but I succeeded, more or less. I made meatloaf and baked potatoes stuffed with a steamed broccoli mixture, and it was one of those rare evenings when everyone not only sat down together (that’s not the rare part) but ate what was offered.

It wasn’t an unusually strenuous day. As I told the man who was out for a walk while I was running, it’s not like we were working in the fields. Or performing surgery. Or piloting a steamship or keeping a spaceship in orbit. It was just regular weekend life.

And it’s wonderful. I love all of these things: running by myself, walks with friends, cooking, taking care of the house, being with my family.

Still, I felt decadent submitting to inertia at 7:56 while Holly took a shower. But I couldn’t help it. The days are full. Still, every aspect of it had meant something to me. Fellowship. Parenthood. Nourishment. Physical well-being.

Days like this seem mundane sometimes. They aren’t the ones we remember, the way we remember vacation days or parties, say. They are just….days full of weekend-day type things.

But I wouldn’t have taken away a single part of it. Even if by 7:56 I was ready to give up on all mobility for the rest of the evening.

Yes, I was worn out, although I managed to rally enough to do what else needed to be done before bed: tucking in Holly, letting the dog out again, locking the front door. Despite not having been toiling at any kind of manual labor, I went to sleep with that invaluable sense of having done a good day’s work. Even if I have no material harvest to show for it.

Sunday paper

I tell myself there wouldn’t be a Sunday newspaper if no one ever read it. Therefore, it must be possible to do.

And I tell myself that if other people can manage to find time to read it, then surely I can too.

(Unless, of course, like me, the continuity of the Sunday paper is merely a sign that people are paying for it, not reading it. But surely not everyone can be like me.)

Come Sunday, I would dearly love to sit down and read the paper, the whole thing, all at once, in one marathon reading session.

But it never happens. Instead, I chip away at it all week long: a section while on my stationary bike on Monday morning, another section in the waiting room at the doctor’s office on Tuesday, and still another section while I sit at the end of the lane waiting for the school bus to arrive on Wednesday afternoon.

When a day like yesterday comes along when there’s barely anything blocked off on the calendar – church in the morning, and a visit from some friends in the afternoon, but those two events combined won’t take more than three hours – I think surely today I’ll sit down and read the paper.

And then the day comes, and I think “After I make breakfast for the kids, I’ll sit down and read the paper.”

And then “After I eat my own breakfast and wash the dishes, I’ll read the paper.”

No; it’s time for church. Maybe after church. But lunchtime goes the same way: I prepare something for other people; I prepare something for myself; I clean up. The paper awaits, tantalizingly full of stories, untouched.

All right then, I tell myself. No matter. Guests are arriving midafternoon. Once they leave, I’ll have nothing I need to do; I’ll sit down and read the paper.

Well, nothing to do – as it turns out – except accede to the internal pressure to change the sheets on all the beds and weed the garden.

Weeding the garden is hard work. I tell myself as I do it that when I’m done, I’ll cool off by sitting on the porch reading the paper. I take a moment to appreciate the fact that I did my daily run first thing in the morning – before breakfast or church or anything else – so once I’m done in the garden, the rest of the day is free.

And it is free, except that I really want to see my parents before the weekend ends. It’s only a five-minute drive, so the kids and I head over, and when we get back, it’s time to make dinner. While dinner is in the oven I’ll read the paper, I tell myself.

Which I probably would have, had I not instead called my sister to hear about her weekend. When the call is done, so is my cooking. We sit down to eat.

After dinner never feels like a time for reading. I’m helping the kids finish homework and get ready for bed. I’m making lists of what I need to get done Monday morning. I’m making up the bed with the sheets I just washed. I’m organizing the kids’ Monday lunches. I’m filling out permission slips.

Reading in bed? Sounds wonderful. What a great time to read the Sunday paper: just before going to sleep, when all of my duties for the day are behind me.

Except I fall asleep. So once again the paper goes unread. I’ll chip away at it throughout the week. One section here, one section there, and by next Saturday I will have read the whole thing.

The next day a new edition of the Sunday paper will arrive, and I’ll plan to sit down with a cup of coffee and a few free hours and read it cover to cover. Next week. Really.