Don’t Wish Away the Days

Calendars can be a useful tool and an onerous burden. At least that has been my experience for the last 56 odd years. They not only mark the passage of time but, in a work-a-day world, they also categorize and chronicle the future. I remember days devoid of scheduled items as being both a blessing and a curse…usually existing on a relative scale based on the level of busyness on preceding days. If I had a stretch of blank squares on the calendar, boredom would set in and I’d wish Friday would hurry up and arrive. If the opposite presented itself and those daily squares filled with chronological chaos, I’d still find myself wishing for the weekend.

I don’t remember who first uttered the phrase in my presence or how often it was repeated. I suppose it could have been an elder relative, perhaps when I was a child and pining for the days of winter break from school to hurry up and pass on by so we could get to Christmas and any number of packaged surprises. Or it could have been a parent type as I recounted some harried morning with my own infant children.

One thing is for certain, I’ve heard numerous times in the span of my years: “Don’t wish away the days.”

 Six-year-old me would have thought that to be a load of malarkey. Fifty-six year-old me understands now what a precious gift each day is. Even the crappy ones, if only to serve as a barometer to lend scale for how good the good days really are … if you’re into placing each day in some sort of ranking system.

Of my roughly 20,500 days on this planet, I can easily point to a half dozen that changed the course of my existence through either luck or choice: the day I met my wife, the days our children were born, the day I walked away from a crumpled car with its wheels pointed at the sky. There were many more days when I wore a uniform and badge where my path intersected with someone else who was too hostile, unstable, or inebriated and easily could have gone a different direction or ended succinctly. There has to be another half dozen where I bore first-hand witness to the course of someone else’s path being permanently changed for better or worse. Or, tragically, where their path ended and those around them were forced to change their days of their own calendars forever.

I’m currently experiencing a “calendric” renaissance of Gregorian proportions in that there are enough days with blank spaces that I more frequently wonder what day it actually is. The path to getting here has been dotted with some pretty neat experiences. For example, a week spent on the gulf coast provided nothing in the way of Snapgram worthy photography on my camera roll. And yet it has to be one of the highlights of my first six months of “nomadic” existence purely for the uniqueness of location and experience in that card catalog of days. And then there’s the week spent in southwestern Arizona where humanity is somehow managing a thriving agricultural existence in what might otherwise be described as a Martian landscape. Consider me significantly mind blown and at the same time ready to move on once the dry heat pushes the thermometer over 100 at the end of our visit.

Though I’ve already periscoped the forecast in our next stop and see a blissful reprieve from the heat, the one thing I’m not doing is wishing away the days. The daytime activity for now may curtail itself into air-conditioned pursuits but sitting outside last night in a camp chair and reading a book under the stars was a beautiful and peaceful counterpoint.

It was easy to lose the perspective of busy vs boring days during the average work week … especially when family, home, or hobby filled the off hours. Like so many others, when a vacation presented our family with a break in the action, we’d cram more than enough activity into each day to justify the expense of time and money. I can’t count the number of times we came home exhausted saying we need a vacation after our vacation.

The steady march of time will continue regardless of whether it’s viewed through the eyes of a six-year-old or 56-year-old. But age and experiences directly, and mysteriously, affect the speed of the hands on a clock. Certainly, the seemingly infinite building blocks of youth bounded by parental rules and societal expectations make it feel like lunch or recess will never get here soon enough. And somehow, life, filled with jobs and family, keeps upping the list of responsibilities and you find yourself doing adult things before anyone tells you you’re an adult.

I will forever remember an afternoon spent on a boat, fishing with a pastor friend of mine. Both in our early 30s and talking about where our life course had brought us and how complicated things had become. We were trying to discover when we actually were considered adults and what that really meant. We pondered the paradoxical questions of “What are you going to do when you grow up?” “What happens if they figure out I’m not an adult?” Was it about the use of our time and layered responsibilities or the thankfulness for each experience? We didn’t solve it that day as we were distracted by measuring the lunkers we hauled in the boat.

For now I’m thankful for each and every experience, realizing that the amazing life experiences might just be in the classes before and after lunch/recess.  I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up but, for now, I’m going to do what I’m doing as I grow older. And you can be certain, I won’t be wishing away the days.