Days of our lives

Someone (Annie Dillard?) once said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.   This either haunts me (why am i on facebook right now!?) or deeply relieves me, depending on the day.  A lot of my days lately have felt... mundane.  You know when you're in high school and college how summer means road trips, traveling to new countries, exploring new internships, new places to live, new room mates, new people to meet (new boys to have crushes on), new ways to make coffee...  Well.  That's what I subconsciously long for in the summer.  And yet this summer, this season, my life is the same as it was spring, winter, fall, the previous summer...  I take a shower in the same shower.  I make coffee the same way.  I go to the same (wonderful) farmer's market.  I wake up in the same (not so wonderful) bed with the same (most-of-the-time wonderful) guy.  Except when we get adventurous and sleep in the guest room because unfolded clean laundry has taken over our bedroom and refuses to put itself away.  

I digress.

The point is, I find myself aching for adventure.  For mountains and beaches and sunsets over unfamiliar landscape.  

But.

My suspicion is that I am living some of the best days of my life right now.  As bored as I feel sometimes, when I stop and notice my toddler exploring the boundary of our nearby pond with her toes, tracing the reflections of clouds in the water with her fingers and watching them dissolve into ripples,  surrendering to her request that I, too, dip my feet in the fishy water.  I imagine I will look back on that moment with such delight and jealousy of my past self.  

I have never actually been happier in my life. 

And I know this. I just keep forgetting.  In fact, I'm wondering, as I type this, if I have not typed almost exactly the same post before.  Several times.  I'm afraid to check.

The problem with memory, like the telephone game, is that you can keep repeating things over and over, but eventually the message gets distorted.  Over time, you have less and less connection at all to the resolve and inspiration and clarity of past moments.  We only really have access to the people and ponds that our feet are dipped in currently.  There is only now.

Which is why I will probably keep on posting the same thing again and again.  Because I have to discover it all over again every day.   

Here's the rest of Annie's quote.  

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern. 

So here I am.  In my little mock up of reason and order.  Blogging.  Working.  Raising a tiny wild little bear.  Falling more and more in love with an even wilder bear.  And following the mysterious trail of the holy.