I Know Exactly What I'd Do With It
I spend a lot of time thinking about widening the aperture around what’s possible. So much more than we think, if you ask me. “There’s always a way,” that’s what my dad says. I tend to agree.
Our ideas, our endeavors, our craft -- the possible configurations, expressions and movements are nearly infinite.
Right now I’m thinking about the value of considering the boundaries around what’s possible. It’s a Sunday night and the weekend will end in 72 minutes. The limit exists.
Have you ever found yourself at the end of a weekend begging for just one more day? You know, that spot where you’d give just about anything for three days instead of two? When the expanse between MLK Day and Memorial Day feels so vast and cold and gray that you can just barely peel yourself from the coziness of covers in the morning?
The weekends are two days and that’s all there is to it. Off to work and life. There’s no bargaining to be done here.
When really good weekends come to a close — the kind that are full of life, the kind where Vinny has taken a glass jar off the kitchen shelf because the moment called for a maraca — then you sit on the bank of Sunday night just wishing you might just float a little bit further on. The water is fine and the living is good. Just one more day. I know exactly what I’d do with it.
But Sunday night comes and goes and this time there’s no holiday to follow. The weekend ends. That’s all there is to it. The question is, how do we get to the clarity of I know exactly what I’d do with it before we get to Monday morning?
“Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you — rear, kick, and try to throw you— while you hang onto the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air ask in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you may feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend.” - Annie Dillard in The Abundance
