It’s been one of those weeks. The kind where you have concert tickets for Sunday night, and you do not realize until Wednesday morning that you did not go to said concert. You stayed in town expressly for the purpose of going to the concert, you had it written on the calendar on your computer that you look at regularly, you reminded your hunky husband so that you would both have it on your radar, and Sunday came and went with you spending your evening watching a football game and eating lamb burgers and catching up on work and not leaving the couch.
And Monday and Tuesday with all their craziness sped on past, and it didn’t dawn on you until Wednesday morning when you were combing email and saw a notice about a friend who was going to be in town for a concert in December and you thought, I should get tickets for that. Tickets? Don’t I have tickets? To a concert? Wasn’t that Sunday? Check calendar. Yep. It was.
And you laugh because it’s just a concert, and you thought you were having an unusually busy week/month/semester, but now you know that you were right. You were right. That’s a win.
And you smile again because your life is busy, and you didn’t miss the concert because you were in traction or shoveling 22 feet of snow or caring for a puking dog. You just missed it because your life was full and exploding at the seams and your brain was following suit.
And then you cry a little, because you are tired, and you feel stupid, and you have no idea how your life got this way. You remember the days when the only thing on the calendar was that concert. And it had a big red star drawn around it, and you had been talking about it for days, and you had your cute hat and crazy horse purple Doc Martens ready to go the day before. And you were pumped.
And you feel anything but pumped. In fact the word pump doesn’t even conjure up excitement anymore. It makes you think of gas prices or milk or your spinning class when you almost fell off your bike because your legs weren’t pumping like they used to when you were more…how shall we say…pumped.
We all have those weeks. The weeks where you feel like the coffee cup in the picture above. There are so many reasons that life gets busy. I used to think it would never happen to me. And then for a while I thought it was just me. And then one day I finally looked up, and I realized that everyone else was busy too. Some people are busy climbing ladders or making deals. Some are busy chasing a little mini-me or four around playgrounds and making lunches, while others are busy wading through disappointments or riding the waves of unexpected victories. Some people are busy remembering to put one foot in front of the other, and others are busy serving the busy people around them.
Lately my busy has been trying to survive the final moments of graduate school, serving on a board with a group of women that I really enjoy working with, making baked goods that travel well in napkins so that we don’t starve when we pop in and out of our house like people who hardly live there, writing copy for a client, and very occasionally doing things like laundry or running a brush around the toilet bowl so we don’t have to add dysentery to our list of busy. I have to remind myself that this week/month/semester is not forever. Even when it feels like it might be.
I also have to remind myself that it’s ok to be tired. It’s ok to rest. It’s ok to collapse into the moment and laugh or cry or do whatever I need to do to survive.
So I’m just stopping by here in here in the middle of my piling up edits and my tire with a slow leak and my ever-looming deadlines to say hello, and I hope you are well, and no matter what your busy is right now in this moment, you are not alone.