I’m sitting at my desk writing my post in my home office for the first time in a good 30 or 40 nights. The rain is pattering off the windows and I can hear the distant hum of air conditioner fans working too hard on a night they shouldn’t. My thoughts are in New York with my friend Dwight and his wife and his life. I was a good friend once, but now I’ve become quite lazy and self absorbed in my own personal and professional nonsense. I have business cards and I haven’t called my best male friend in 4 months. It can be that easy to get lost in the everyday, especially when you don’t allow room in the everyday for originality and exploration. It all becomes a carbon copy of the night before and you start to define your week by signifiers:
- On Saturday the kids play sports.
- Sunday is for football until it isn’t, and then Sunday doesn’t much matter anymore.
- Monday is when you go back to work. Pause. Reflect on Monday night. Hang out with the friends that make you happy.
… it goes on, stretching into a calendar of printed events of points of interest that together chart the constellation of our lives. Tuesday is game night and we three boys and one man-child gather around the LCD and might shoot things or fall into the carefree competition of Wii U or perhaps use our hands and try our minds with a game of pokemon or even beyblade, but don’t think too hard because science and discovery happens mostly on Thursdays after wednesday has seen me teaching from the sun’s first peek at the sky till it winks goodbye and I can pause. Reflect. Work on my novel. Decide what science the kids ought to learn this evening and my body is run down and craves a moment at the gym to build a stamina to this nothing to change the direction of consumption and no time spent burning what is consumed. My wife says, “You ought to come to the gym with me.”
I nod and flash a false smile, hoping she realizes that someone has to watch the kids and spend time with them in that way they are accustomed to and enjoy. They don’t want more daycare. They want us. So I buy weights and promise myself I’ll be that guy who lifts at home–during commercials when I take a moment to breathe and try to relax–but it turns out I’m not that guy. I’m the other guy, the one who buys weights and says he is going to use them but doesn’t, so the kids push them around the house, another toy added to the pile another pile of dollars lost to the possibility of health and happiness. Maybe there will be time on friday.
But there isn’t because there is writing, and grading, and once in a while there are video games to be played so the brain can rest and the heart can leap at the sight of small victories. Maybe I can turn all that off and go to the gym and be the guy who pours himself into a workout, but then I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t have words that call out from the page to touch the minds of people I’ve never met. I’d be a different person–the guy who leaves work and turns that off and falls gracefully into the routine of life, who looks forward to saturday because next is sunday and then monday. The guy who slides through tuesday to stand in the hallway making jokes about hump day and how eager he is to see friday. The man who forgets that thursday can be an opportunity to be a part of a universe that is beautiful and thinks friday’s are supposed to be one thing or another.
I want to be a man who recognizes that each day is a chance to love yourself and to live for yourself and to be someone greater, more meaningful, or just plain different than yesterday. I am the man that smiles and nods when he hears Samuel Jackson channelling Neruda’s rant about monday mornings. And it so happens that I am tired too and I am pushed into certain corners and there are mirrors in which I see myself and I smile, because I know tomorrow can always change everything.
One day it will.