I am fighting off the sniffles–I haven’t had a cold or any significant illness in over a year, not since I’ve lived on my own after the end of my relationship last winter. And this is only the sniffles. I have been fortunate to be relatively healthy and able bodied. Periodically as I am walking or running or turning a certain way, I am reminded not only about how fortunate I am to have the use of my limbs and to be in overall pretty good health, but also of how miraculous this body actually is. In the intricacies of structure and function, the delicate dance of interactions of chemistry, biology, physics and myriad other sciences, all coming together to produce movement, thought, speech, perception, and so forth. I am grateful and awed sometimes by the wonder of how it all manages to work.
Nevertheless, I don’t feel so great physically, so not sure how long I’m going to last here in the blogosphere. Today has been one of those relatively unproductive days. Mind you, productivity isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. My more meaningful moments of productivity often have more to do with getting my garden tilled, smoothed, planted and fenced or starting to put together lyrics and music and sticking with it until it becomes a song, or writing a few chapters in my novel as it does about attending a meeting, sending an email or writing a report. I have done all these things and many others and felt either more or less productive depending on my perspective at the time. I have a list of projects I’d like to be working on, mundane things I need to do like clean the clutter off my desk, bathe the dog, and get my brakes repaired, and stuff I’d like to do like read some of the books I’ve had in my library for years but only read parts of. I wonder what combination of these things I could do that would enable me to feel, be seen as, or be productive.
We shall see. I do know one thing I need to accomplish within the next 48 hours: finish and mail my income tax returns. This year for a variety of reasons I am later doing that than I have ever been. As I was unemployed for much of 2011 one might think that taxes would be relatively straightforward and simple, but no. I had a variety of complicating factors over the course of last year that are making have made it way more complex. Nevertheless, sniffles and all, I will sit down, pore over various figures and finally wave the white flag over them and hit the “finish” button. I’ll mail it out with a check–yes I owe–that will be a kind of down payment on the tax bill. Then I will get on with the rest of life.
I have another 90 minutes before I go pick up my son from work (he gets off at 11 p.m.) Hope I can fight off sleep and sniffles until we get home and I can crawl into bed. As always, I am grateful that I have a home to come to and a bed to crawl into. And I will trust this miraculous body to work on healing itself as I offer it rest and tea and perhaps some antihistamines. It’s all good.
