Today is a good day to lay low. Last night I couldn’t seem to wind down toward sleep until midnight and I was on day four of my new earlier waking regimen, having decided that I need more time in my day and the best way to do that was to rise earlier. The trick is that I also need to get to sleep earlier so I am not a zombie during the day. I slept somewhat restlessly and woke at 4:55 a.m. As my alarm was set for 5:25 anyway, I decided to get up–particularly because I hadn’t been doing very well in my first three days of attempting to get up at 5:30 instead of my usual 5:45. Plus I had a major project I needed to complete for work this morning, so I wanted to get in early, which I did.
I am amazed and a little bit frightened that it is already mid-August. The summer, like the rest of the year, has flown by so fast I feel like I’ve barely had a chance to catch my breath. Each morning is a little bit darker when I wake up, especially now that I’m waking a little earlier. When I woke this morning at 5, I noticed that the night sounds of insects whirring and chirping had not yet given way to the morning songs of birds and the rumble of traffic on the street. Preseason football games are back on television, and the first regular season games are just around the corner in early September. The networks are advertising their new fall lineups of sitcoms, dramas, and gameshows. At work it is time to the students to return to campus: they begin moving in next week and classes start the following week. Where indeed does the time go?
But time, as they say, marches on, and I am again contemplating “what’s next” as I move toward winding down Lessons in Gratitude as a daily entity. I’m grateful to the faithful reader’s who’ve read every post since the beginning. Your dedication to reading it matched stride-for-stride my dedication to writing it. I am contemplating when to end the daily writing–at first I thought either on Day 777, because it’s a cool number, or Day 800 because it’s another century mark. Both of those seem rather arbitrary, and except on those days when I spin the Random Number Generator wheel to “pick” a post for a given evening, I try not to do much in an arbitrary manner. Part of me would like to end this blog in a similar way as I started it: quietly and without a whole lot of fanfare. Another part of me wants to celebrate the end of something special. I’m not yet sure which part of me is going to win. I reckon I won’t decide that until I’m ready to. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to keep writing.
I am grateful to be at the close of a productive but long day. Tomorrow is going to be more of the same, but it is Friday (as hard as that is to believe.) A full week has passed since I left the beach where I spent a few glorious days. It feels like my vacation was weeks ago not days ago, but I reckon that’s just how it goes. I am grateful for having had the break and the time on the beach. I still have the tan lines to prove I was indeed at the beach, grateful that they take longer to fade than the memories of the vacation do. Tomorrow, as Scarlett Ohara says, is another day. I am hoping I sleep better tonight than I did last night and awaken at my new time refreshed and ready to go. Maya Angelou said, “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.” And indeed, that is the way I will close out this evening as I have so many nights before. Until next time…
