the view from sunday

A boy gave me flowers. His name is Trader Joe.

Did you ever read the E. L. Konigsburg book The View from Saturday? I loved it in grade school, feeling that it was clever and brilliant and loving how it taught me that posh once was an acronym for "port outward, starboard home." Right now, I'm remembering all these books I loved as a little precocious reader because I have a little precocious reader in my first grade class.

I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the vastness of my to-do list (which could span a dozen pages, at least) and the importance of most of it. Some of it is only reading for classes, but I also have a number of things for my teaching certification. My lifetime, will-I-graduate-and-be-able-to-teach-and-be-a-successful-adult things. So this Sunday I am trying to clamber to the top of my to do list and feel like I'm staying afloat, instead of slowly drifting to the bottom of the pool.

Today is a day for buying a delicious cup of coffee, grateful for kind friends and gift cards. It's a day for walking around in the grey mistiness.  It's a day for getting one thing at a time done. It's a day for lighting a candle and breathing in the sweet smell of evaporating stress to the tune of Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday. It's a day to think of picking up writing and creating again.

It's also a day for lesson planning and for slowly ticking off things I need to do, for making beans and tea and feeling like my budget will survive this moment. When those things, the practical things of my life, are paired with calm, I feel less like crumbling into a mess of worry.

It is easy for me to pretend that next week, next month, next year, will usher in a season of my life that will be easier to handle. But living in the future will not help me with the very real here and now. Here and now, I have a life, a good life, full of joy and wonder, if I can only stop long enough to see it. Yes, it is on a strict budget. Yes, it's full of things to do and complete and finish. Yes, it's busier than I would like. But it's also more fulfilling than anything I have ever done before in my life.

The view from Sunday is not as bleak as it may have seemed Saturday night or Thursday morning. The view from Sunday demands taking a deep breath and accepting this here, this now. This is my life now, and from Sunday, the view is pretty spectacular.