Marking Time

Last chance! Save! (insert percentage) OFF!


The email barrage won’t stop, so I do. I decide to unplug, sign out, walk away.

There’s a frantic desperation in the attention-grabbers, the peddlers, the flea market of arm-twisting, manic, panicked retailers. I want none of it. In fact, I might arbitrarily give away some of my own things just to protest the mayhem.

You see, they're right. It is my last chance. Only chance. Today is all I’ve got (and even that’s uncertain). I am saving. My life, my sanity, my dreams- I’m saving it all from this. This madness.

Let’s talk about 20% OFF, shall we? How about twenty percent of my current body fat? Off. Now, we’re having a conversation. Wait. No. I won’t buy into it. Any of it.

Resolutions? Whose? Why?

They’re a swelling blister, those resolutions. Skinned rubbed to the point of detachment, fluid-filled pockets of misery begging to be drained and put to rest, once and for all.

It’s all temporary, transient, impermanent- attachment to the good and the bad cause suffering in equal measure.

All I have is today, this moment, this Present. I hold it gently, openhandedly, lightly. I’m a little bit in awe of it, really.

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For her twelfth birthday, my daughter asked for one thing: a clean slate. The privilege of not being reminded of days and ways that she’d repeated the same lesson again and again and again was all she really wanted. Don’t we all? I can offer her my compassion and understanding and the brand new-ness of each day and its opportunities, help her see the wider scope of things both good and bad and how necessary all of it is, and is not, all at once.

I told her that I give her a clean slate with me, hour by hour and day by day. It is as it should be. Perhaps, I thought, I should ask her to do the same for me. She is the memory-keeper, the Reminder, the prompter- after all. My mistakes are harder to forgive, I think. My unlearned lessons more painful for her, as I go back again and again until the aggregate is part of my skin. She doesn’t think so, though. Just wishes I’d stop yelling at the drivers of other cars from the composite bubble of my own, but mostly because she is the only one who hears it. And she is weary of it.

I wrap my frustration, fear and impatience into tight little sighs, now. Not nearly as cathartic as pounding the steering wheel and cursing like an ice road trucker, but my sighs don’t make her shrink into her puffy jacket. So.

Above all else, do no harm.

I mark time in years by her birthdays. They match the year, pound for pound, number for number. We are here, we are Now. We will write on our clean slates with Metolius super chalk, we will not etch permanence where it doesn’t belong. We will be mindful, gentle, leave behind no record of wrongs or rights. The new year doesn’t care, either way. It doesn’t need our resolve, our determination, our single-minded focus. It is arbitrary, it is Gregorian, it is recently installed- practically still shedding its papyrus all over January the First. It is what we made it, what we make of it.

Today. This moment. THIS requires attention. Celebration. Determination. Purpose.

That is all.

That is enough.
 
 

Des's tropical cake, courtesy of my friend, PJ.

 
 

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