What seemed like simply being wiped out on Friday evening announced itself—by an hour and a half nap (so very unlike me) Saturday morning—as something a tiny bit more than exhaustion. It was low-grade, a little headachy, feverish, nothing big ticket, yet enough to make my legs feel cooked noodle useless (Saskia, during her recent illness, demonstrates kind of how I was feeling).
I watched my big weekend with excellent plans disintegrate (the plans) and I spent almost all of Saturday (although I’d woken up and with full good intention baked something for the birthday boy whose party we were headed to before my collapse) in that plane of solitude called bed. I spent a bit less of Sunday there than maybe I should have, caring for the gal (and grocery shopping together), a quick shuttle of the tween, some lunch making for the Monday back-to-school rush. For all I missed, and I really sorely missed, I read most of a book—Lisa Napoli’s memoir of travel to Bhutan, Radio Shangri-La—played a lot of Yahtzee (of course) and spent an hour of Sunday on my back porch with my kids and hubby and friend taking in the sunshine—till it got too hot—and the shade.
That is to say, rather than dwell on the disappointments, I let the pleasures—and even the exhaustion—be okay, even more than okay. I tried to drink in what felt good: the sun on my shoulders, the fact that my kids like us and our friends, the tween’s cheerfulness after a “really fun” bar mitzvah with pals from the new school, the incredible empty house with book, bed and frozen yogurt on Saturday early evening, the light golden tinged peach around me. Not feeling great isn’t the best. I did my best to mine the pleasure from even that—and it wasn’t hard to find it, amazingly.
I sat with Lisa Napoli’s incredible gratitude for landing in Bhutan, the idea that life isn’t what you think it’s going to be and so often for the better. I thought to myself if life amongst the shaggy, fabulous children and amazingly steady, funny and smart man I am surrounded by overtook my ability to find some professional marker I can’t quite name how terrible would it really be? The truth is, I’m way in it all—the family, the community, the work. I am as engaged as I’d ever want to be.
There are the worse things, the wars that seem unending and unstoppable—what does it mean that Bin Laden is proof-positive gone anyway, toward the goal of conflict ending or at least our getting out I wonder—or the blind awful plagues, from poverty to cancer to radiation in Japan or oil in the Gulf. The calendar turned May and instantly, I thought of a dear old friend lost to a brain tumor, whose birthday comes along with these bursts of May flowers and how I miss him and how full his too-short life was and how much he left the people who love him. Be here now is not perfect and glorious only. It is something else. It is to love what you love, whole heart. Somehow, your presence makes it so you love that much more. Why is that? I think it’s because you slow down enough to let yourself. I think if you let yourself it turns out to be so much more than you imagined.
