The Life of a Day

"Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don't want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn't one I've been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night's meandering skunk."
Tom Hennen The Life of a Day


What I love about this little piece by Tom Hennen is his description of a perfectly well-adjusted day. It includes some lovely images, but it also includes the 'faint odor of last night's meandering skunk'. That sounds good to me. Life needs a bit of skunk to keep it interesting. Besides it's inevitable we are all eventually going to get a full body spraying anyway, so we might as well prepare by acquainting ourselves with the smell. Moms are good at doing that. They can walk in a room and tell you right away whose teeshirt cannot go another day without washing (or it's occupant) and where that plate of week old pizza was left. These are important talents everyone needs to cultivate. They can also tell who isn't feeling well or hiding the truth. These are even more important skills to learn when it comes to dealing with skunks in life.

Yes, most days do roll along with a degree of monotony. With jobs and responsibilities it's easy to be seduced by all the 'what's next' going on. Time does seem to move faster and faster even though the sun rises each day and moves across the earth as it always has. The stars come out at night and make what the eastern world calls 'the floor of heaven'. Perhaps what is happening is we have allowed ourselves to believe what is ahead has to be better than what is now and we devote all our energies to get there as soon as we can in order to possess it. We disconnect ourselves from our well adjusted place in time and become kidnapped by the passage of time because we have convinced ourselves we need to be elsewhere.

There is a natural place in life for dreaming and anticipating, looking ahead. It's all bound up in our hopefulness about ourselves and our world. Those are some of the wonderful parts of our humanity. But there is also a great longing in many people to feel their lives have more meaning, or their accomplishments are more worthy. Somewhere along the way we have shortened our list of what we believe those to be. Our definitions of success, and accomplishment and goals have dwindled into expectations that aren't connected to the deeper soulful part of living. We focus our gaze ahead, waiting for our life to start 'for real', to measure up to an artificially created scale, and refuse to acknowledge the enormous value of what we are doing now.

When you begin to observe the natural world with any thoughtfulness, you will soon learn how important every part of it is to the overall health of everything else. Everything is needed and everything is constantly changing to adjust to the needs of the moment. Nature plans ahead, but it's her energies in the now, that ensure it's arrival. Maybe that is something to think about.

"What we live for, hope for, pray for, comes as a gift."