As I steer the car down the hill toward the Farmer’s Market, carefully eyeing Ez for signs of seizure, I am suddenly amazed that I can be so vigilant and shift relatively gracefully through traffic…it is a quiet, fleeting art.
I have written about “everyday life” academically for years, but until these last precious, breathless, and unnerving months I have not been much for just focusing on experiencing it. I can be so type-a measuring my self, my day, my value abstractly on the body of work I leave in my wake: test scores, artworks, designs, journal articles…different tangible forms of my progress, my process, my worth.
I never was one to savor the fading joys of a perfectly prepared meal for one, the slow promise of just sitting and just looking, the art of the perfect cup of tea. I needed everything presented, documented, measured.
But now that I am “just home” with Ez, there is no real goal in sight, no end. Now if I measure, I must do so in smiles and laughs, time between vomits, the artfulness of doing just about anything with a limp toddler on my hip, composure and clarity during seizures, the satisfaction of a perfectly draw up syringe of medication, the sigh of my girl in perfectly deep sleep.
There’ll be no final project, no diploma, no final publication, no honors. It is and will be a dance, a ceremony of daily life, at once the rehearsal and the closing night. Waking and dressing, holding and comforting, trying and failing, making and unmaking, breathing and waiting.
And when I can stretch out into this joy, I am completely at peace.
What an awesome way to look at the world. I wish so many people would take the time to do exactly that.