I have been away from home most of the day. I began the day with a bit of a to-do-list, and somewhere along the way, I sort of lost it. I didn’t do anything of what I was going to do. And while this will have implications for later in the week, for the most part I don’t imagine I’ll suffer any lingering ill effects for not having crossed very many items off. Too often it’s easy to get caught in the trap of measuring “success” or “failure” by what I didn’t do rather than what I did. So while I didn’t accomplish a number of things I wrote on my weekend to-do list, I want to focus for a moment on what I actually did do.
I spent the day at my sister’s house. I was helping her with a house project that she needs to complete by the Thanksgiving holiday. I had planned to be over at her house today anyway, but went unusually early when she told me that she was out of coffee and asked if I could bring some over. As a fellow coffee drinker (I start my day each morning with a healthy dose of “quarter caff”–a concoction of decaffeinated coffee and half-caff), I knew there wasn’t a moment to lose. Grabbing Honor’s travel bag (with a water bowl, extra leash, refuse bags and travel “bed”) we swung past the Dunkin’ Donuts to grab a bag of coffee and some donut holes before heading over to save the day. Throughout the course of the day, my sister and I made major progress on her project. It was one of those clutter-clearing, dejunking, rearranging activities in which you have to create a bigger mess in order to tackle the primary issue. We were quite successful in creating the bigger mess, and I hope we made sufficient enough progress on the primary objective for my sister to feel good about what we accomplished. We capped it off with dinner, prepared by her daughter, before Honnie and I rode off into the sunset, our work for the day finished.
I am grateful to have been able to spend the day doing exactly what I did. I can recall many days when I was packing up my house in California when I felt overwhelmed at the enormity of the task. I undertook and completed the vast majority of the work by myself. It was long, difficult, and often discouraging. Wading through half-packed boxes and bags for trash, recycling, and giveaway items, at one point there was literally no room in the house (except perhaps for the bathrooms) where there wasn’t massive clutter everywhere. I’m still amazed, thinking back on it, at how much I was able to accomplish singlehandedly, with only my dog and several hours worth of audiobooks for company. It was good to be able to pitch in to help my sister. She’s certainly helped me out a great deal since I moved here last year, so it’s a pleasure to return the favor in whatever ways I can.
Nope, today didn’t go as I’d planned. But letting go of the plan and rolling with whatever the day brought worked as well. I still have a little bit of evening left, so perhaps I can get on with accomplishing a thing or two from my to-do list. If not, it will still have been a day well spent. And for that I am quite pleasantly grateful.
