For much of my life, Thursday night was my favorite night of the week. Everyone else usually picked Friday or Saturday, no one picked Monday, and my choice was, looking back on it, a reflection of my enjoyment of the anticipation and planning. I’ve spent the last year or so altering that take, finally realizing that in placing my enjoyment on the anticipatory time, I was sacrificing the real moments of life, and at those times when I was supposed to be enjoying things, my mind was already racing ahead to the next event or party. Many times I would find myself in the midst of a celebration or milestone event, after weeks and sometimes months of planning, and rather than inhabiting the moment, I was lamenting the passing of it, my head already working on the next thing, already living in the future. And that’s no way to live, to be present, to be mindful.
On this Friday night, I embrace the freedom, the way the weekend unfurls before us, even if it’s a frigid one in early February. Inhabiting this very moment, I pause and take in a deep breath, letting it slowly out as I release a work-week of the typical stresses that an average 45-year-old feels: the worries over aging parents, the concerns of work responsibilities, the bowl of chocolates that should have lasted five days but was finished in five hours. I breathe in and out again, releasing the realization that we are going on almost a year of pandemic social isolation, a year of this altered existence where seeing people interact in close proximity to each other on television now feels dangerous and foreign – and I wonder what that does to someone who has already had issues with social anxiety, and whether it will be easier or more difficult if and when we ever return to the state of normal we once had. Acknowledging those struggles, and nodding as they pass through my head, I breathe slowly in and slowly out, knowing that there is no wrong, and there is no right, in how we each choose to deal with this strange, weird, wild and wonderful world.
On the window, the reflection of a candle hovers as if suspended from the snow-laden branches of a Chinese dogwood tree. Winter magic mingled with vague thoughts of spring blooms…
