Day by day

LISTEN. Convalescence finds me on YouTube a bit more than usual, for better or worse. Yesterday I stumbled across a year-old School of Life piece that speaks pretty directly to my situation...

 

"Taking It One Day at a Time" for me, a week and a day after a second consecutive surgery to restore nerve function in the lower spine, means taking it slow and patiently. Baby steps. Up and down the drive, with a wooden third leg that used to give me a leg up the hill but now just helps keep me balanced and steady on the flat pavement. The last two days Younger Daughter's ferried me up the modest hill to the big church parking lot a stone's throw away, but which I'm ordered not to tackle. Another role-reversal: I used to drive her up there to practice riding bikes and skateboards and eventually the Corolla. Yesterday's triumph: four slow laps around the empty lot, almost twenty-five minutes. Paired with a couple of ten-minute stints at home, I wake today exhausted and sore but pleased with my modest achievement, and ready to face another healing day.

...Taking it day by day means reducing the degree of control we expect to be able to bring to bear on the uncertain future. It means recognising that we have no serious capacity to exercise our will on a span of years and should not therefore disdain a chance to secure one or two minor wins in the hours ahead of us. We should – from a new perspective – count ourselves immensely grateful if, by nightfall, there have been no further arguments and no more seizures, if the rain has let off and we have found one or two interesting pages to read.

As life as a whole grows more complicated, we can remember to unclench and smile a little along the way, rather than jealously husbanding our reserves of joy for a finale somewhere in the nebulous distance. Given the scale of what we are up against, knowing that perfection may never occur, and that far worse may be coming our way, we can stoop to accept with fresh gratitude a few of the minor gifts that are already within our grasp.

We might look with fresh energy at a cloud, a duck, a butterfly or a flower. At twenty-two, we might scoff at the suggestion – for there seem so many larger, grander things to hope for than these evanescent manifestations of nature...

And that's the point in the narration when Younger Daughter said "I feel attacked"--it was the second time yesterday some judgment had been cast in the direction of her cohort. But at every age we're prone to focus excessively on larger and grander things, and must constantly be reminded to stop and smell the flowers. "It’s normal enough to hold out for all that we want. Why would we celebrate hobbling, when we wish to run?" Or just walk a little more briskly.

But if we reach the end of the day and no one has died, no further limbs have broken, a few lines have been written and one or two encouraging and pleasant things have been said, then that is already an achievement worthy of a place at the altar of sanity. How natural and tempting to put one’s faith in the bountifulness of the years, but how much wiser it might be be to bring all one’s faculties of appreciation and love to bear on that most modest and most easily-dismissed of increments: the day already in hand. SoL

The days are gods. Not the god, as Bill Murray's Phil Connors says, but they're still capable of supporting exceptional growth, renewal, and recovery. If I can string together enough good modest days like yesterday, pretty soon I'll again be back in stride and echoing Henry (4.20.40): “An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”