Accidental Down Time

Hopefully this will be a brief post. I only say that because the subject of this post is about taking time to do nothing.

Today, I accidentally took some down time. I had a full-blown Saturday To Do List, that involved running all over creation.

The plan included driving to Hopkinton to watch a some of my girl friends from CrossFit compete, stop at a couple farms for provisions, bank, post office, cleaners, oil change, drug store and the dump. Then I still had in-house chores to do.

It was a typical “rest day”, where I had booked every minute from the time I got up, til when my head hit the pillow sixteen hours later.

But my plans were scuttled!

I arrived in Hopkinton at 9:00, watched the first round of the competition and headed out. I got on the highway, it was snowing intensely and it was heavy and wet. The roads were getting greasy. I stopped at Faulkner Farm and got eggs, and then continued home. I hoped Suzanne was close to home. I parked the truck at 11:00 and left it in the driveway for the rest of the day.

I cooked a late breakfast and cleaned the kitchen. Suzanne came home around noon and I did it again. Then Suzanne said, “Go upstairs and take a nap, it’s a good day for it, and you seldom get to do it.” So I did.

As I got into bed, I glanced out and watched the snow falling. Our South-facing wall looks over the pond. In the bedroom, there is a ten-foot expanse of French Doors, leading out to a balcony. The mullions divided the panorama into sixty one-foot vignettes. One square might be just a snowy sky. Another a pine bough bending under the load of the fresh wet snow. And yet another offered ghostly shadows of the trees on the opposite shore, barely visible through the heavy falling snow.

I hesitated for an undetermined bit of time and just sat on the bed taking in the serene majesty of what was happening outside that glass wall. For the first time in months, I just sat there quietly, still, and I observed what it was like to be in the present.

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