Remembering: What Matters

My speaking voice has been gone all week, a good seque to me finding my literary voice, as I revise and re-revise my writing sample and my novel (going off to a tell-it-like-it-is editor in one week--good Lord, so much to do before then).

Today, here is what I remember:

Under the sun, geckos dart around my feet, and I think about the things that matter. What they are. What they are not.

I think they’re not budget reports and filing piles. They are not dinners with peers strategizing nor blank-faced TV programs where hours pass, uncounted. They are not a blur of drunken vomiting and strangers kissed each weekend to fill the unfulfilled. They are not when days knit together, undulating grumpily until there are two parts of one life—the minutes spent anticipating and the minutes spent reminiscing. They are not go go go and yoga merely purposed to un-hunch shoulders, praying only when things are bad because we wish them to be good, breathing merely to dissipate emotion and apologies to get our way.

They are, instead, sadness at stopping and finally seeing what we have wasted our time and energy on. They are finding the right in saving ourselves from ourselves, and our own distractions. They are realized the moment we inhale cut grass and understand that living is anything we make of it, sure, but more, we hold a choice in our balled hands. That choice is to make it good, make it count, and be free or to bow to impositions, cower under the difficulties of waking each morning and to let anything move us instead of moving it ourselves.

I think a popsicle and open sky and two fully-formed feet are incredible gifts once I unfurl my heart. I think what matters is being thankful and being forgiving and forgiven.