This evening my dad and I went to the gym then stopped to pick up supper–sub sandwiches. When we got home, I asked my mom, “What did we miss?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?” I replied. “NOTHING happened while we were gone?”
This is a game we play sometimes, me and my family. Obviously, SOMETHING happened. Something came on the television, the dog barked, the toilet flushed. Maybe nothing remarkable happened, but something happened. I’m sure of it. Something, after all, is always happening. Still, when I sat down to blog I thought, I don’t know what to say. NOTHING happened today.
This afternoon my dad, in his own words, got “a burr up his butt” and did some yard work. That is, he saw our neighbor trimming their bushes and thought he should too. So he trimmed our crepe myrtle, which needed it; it was beginning to look like something out of The Addams Family, overgrown and full of horror. Then Dad said, “Maybe in the next day or two we can bundle up the branches and haul them off.”
“Let’s just do it right now,” I said. (I don’t know what came over me.)
So that’s what we did. Well, you know how one thing leads to another. The next thing I knew we were on the side of the house (the crepe myrtle is in the front) pulling up privet and dead hydrangea bushes, which I thought looked like Medusa’s head. Then our other neighbor, who works for the city, came over and said if we’d pile everything up by the side of the road, he’d haul it off.
“You won’t pick it up right here?” Dad said.
Y’all, we filled three fifty-five gallon trash bags full of yard debris. Plus, there were the crepe myrtle remains, which I’d tied together with rope. No kidding, I did so much manual labor, I actually broke a sweat. (I’m sure Dad did too.) And whereas that may sound like a complaint, it’s not. For one thing, because of my knee injury, I haven’t been able to break a sweat in months. But today I did! (I’m not saying I smelled great.) For another, the sun was hot enough FOR me to break a sweat. Spring is literally days away. Praise Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Bye, winter! Don’t let the equinox hit cha where the good lord split cha.
Two weeks from yesterday will mark two full years of daily blogging. That will be 730 posts (tonight’s is #717). Recently I’ve been going back and re-reading all my entries. I’m currently at #38. And whereas I’m often critical of my work, I haven’t been. Sure, there are things I’d do differently now, but I’ve actually been enjoying what I created–the funny moments, the tender moments, the honest moments. Indeed, I thought one of my least favorite posts was #19, but when I re-read it, I found plenty to enjoy and be proud of. Was it my best work? No, but what I did in our front yard today wasn’t my best work either, but it was still worthwhile, still an improvement over doing NOTHING.
This is something I’ve learned over the last two years. Often I’ll think, I have NOTHING to say, but if I take time to sit down and write, SOMETHING good will happen, SOMETHING good will come out, even if it’s one simple phrase, one clever joke. Plus, there’s the discipline itself, the act of practicing. And even if you’re not in love with your work, you never know what will speak to someone else. Hell, Emily Dickinson wanted her work destroyed. I can only assume she thought it wasn’t anything remarkable. But look at what the world got. Geez. Artists are such self-critical hard-asses.
Lately I’ve been reading about attention and the idea that we often hyper-focus on whatever we’re doing–raking leaves out of a flower garden, let’s say–but that we have the ability to tune into everything that’s going on around us. For example, this afternoon while working in the yard, I not only noticed what I was doing, but also noticed the sound of cars driving by, the feel of sweat on my skin, the sensation of my feet on the ground, and the smell of the moist dirt. My point, again, is that SOMETHING is always happening. And not that you have to recount every damn detail of your life whenever someone asks you what you did yesterday, but I think it’s important to remember–
So much is constantly happening that it would be impossible to recount.
My therapist says the important work we do is the work that nobody notices. For example, I’ve spent a lot of time these last five years working on my interior, cleaning up the past, connecting with my heart, and creating healthy boundaries. And whereas none of this has paid my bills or kept me warm at night, it has made me a better human. However, because I’m so focused on being productive–teaching dance, cleaning the yard, working out–that on days when I don’t do those things and instead stay home and watch Netflix, I too often say, “Nothing happened; I didn’t DO anything today.” But what about the fact that I was more patient with myself on Monday, more patient with a stranger on Tuesday?
Isn’t that something? Isn’t that remarkable?
Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)
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Ultimately, we all have to get our validation from inside, not outside, ourselves.
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