Day 5: The Elephant in This Blog

Oy. I checked the headlines yesterday — big mistake. Omicron, inflation, Roe is dead, murder rates skyrocket. 

So, this brings me to the elephant in this particular room: COVID. As I undertake to change my life for the better — to actualize some part of myself that has long been latent — the entire world is in the midst of extreme upheaval. 

I once read that a long human life spans only about 650,000 hours. This number absolutely stunned me because, as a number, I can conceive of it. I can easily imagine adding up ones, tens, hundreds and 24s — days, weeks, months and years — to equal this number. 

It reminds me to check myself and how I spend my all-too-finite hours.

How many of these hours have I spent rocking my babies to sleep or tucking them in like pastel burritos? How many hours reading bedtime stories or cooking dinner? 

How many spent scrolling social media late at night (isn’t there a term for this?) Or watching The Bachelorette — episodes of which clock in at two hours apiece or three for the finale (trust me, I know.) 

How many hours in a day, a week, a lifetime, do I spend cuddling my favorite cat, walking and talking with my favorite people, exercising? And most importantly, do these meet my ideal numbers? 

How many hours do I spend at work or thinking about work? Do those meet my ideal numbers?

So, the pandemic — the deaths and brushes with death it brought to my life, the constant adjustments and overwhelming grief, both for people who have died and for the life we all had before —  have informed this blog.  

This blog also celebrates an important year for me. This year I turned 36, which in Jewish tradition means double chai — to life, to life. 

Notably, since beginning this challenge I have had far less brain space for the knucklehead stuff. 

For example, my children always use the bathroom hand towel to dry their hands, removing it from the hook and then leaving it in the sink! I could write an entire other post about this — multiple, even — because it peeves me so! Why can’t they just put the towel back on the rack? It ends up wet and nasty in just a few days. Plus, hygiene! 

But, for the last five days, what with dedicating one hour or more per day to writing, I simply cannot be bothered to care about it anymore. 

And I wonder if that might not be a bad thing. 

The urgent/important matrix, developed by Eisenhower and popularized by Stephen Covey,  reserves the final quadrant, number 4, for non-urgent, non-important things. 

When I sit down to plan my schedule or do a brain dump (also, a post for another day), I rarely have anything to write in this column. But, perhaps Covey means things like this. The minutes spent calling one small person or another back over to replace the hand towel on the rack, the hours and hours of my wild, precious life spent scouring a kitchen counter when a crumbly one will do just fine. 

Certainly different things matter to different people, but for me — a person on a mission who feels so energized by this challenge — I have no time left for these tasks. 

Hopefully, these tasks and others like them will be naturally eliminated from my life as I place my priorities and devote my hours intentionally where I want them to go: taking care of my family, taking care of myself, excelling at work, and now, pursuing this challenge. 

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s how this blog serves as my slice of the great resignation. I seek to live my life to its fullest and take advantage of my 650,000 hours — G-d willing I get that many -- by doing something just for me. 

And as for all the other bullshit — pet peeves, housework that needn’t get done, and definitely allowing politeness to prevent me from speaking my truth — I f***ing quit.