Griffin is up and getting ready to head out to walk to the bus stop. Greg doesn't have a period one class this semester, and so he's not giving Griffin a ride to school. Griffin tells me he stayed up until midnight reading his book (Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson). Pam and I spent years throwing books at Griffin and missing and along comes Ms. Gance, nailing him in one shot. I tell Griffin I'm giving him a ride.
7:05 am: First lesson of the day.
Even if you aren't going anywhere, wipe that pile of snow off of your windshield, because if you don't it will freeze in the sun there, and when it's time to take Griffin to school the following morning, you will be faced with trying to remove and de-ice those shenanigans without the aid of an ice scraper, because you gave that to Rowan.
I start the car and put the defrost on full blast, find an old license plate under my workbench and proceed to scrape the crustified snow off. I come into the kitchen and Griffin is just standing there.
"What are you doing?" I ask him. "You could at least be making your lunch." He points to the teapot.
"I"m making hot water to pour on the windshield." Smart kid. Griffin pours the tea water on the windshield, works like a charm, and we're out.
People are too busy and in too much of a hurry. As I'm driving back from Griffin's school, this guy pulls around me fast to cut back in right in front of me so that he could turn right in just a few hundred feet. I swear he saved .001 of a second doing that, and I know he felt like an idiot because he kind of waved sheepishly at me after having done it. I avoid my impulse to pull into the King Soopers parking lot after him to inquire as to the nature of his problem, choosing instead to ruminate on it myself.
My favorite thing about studying Japanese were the written characters. It's pretty complex, having three separate character sets - hiragana, katakana, and kanji - but also really cool. The kanji are pictorial characters that came from Chinese, and you can sometimes see in them their etymological origins. The Japanese character (kanji) for "busy" is isogashii. When you look at its component characters, isogashii literally means "to lose one's heart." When I'm busy, I lose my heart. Boom. Right?
So I try to bear that in mind. I make time to take Griffin to school if I can, and when I come home, I take some time to make Rowan and I some eggs and toast. When Berit wakes up late in the morning and I'm here working, I stop for a few to talk or stretch with her. I'm grateful to my company for allowing me to work from home. They've made this possible for me to do my job and still be present for the kids. That's my real work. I also prioritize things like exercise, meditation, and yeah, writing. This is how I'm taking care of myself, and today I'm recommitting to daily writing. We'll see how it goes.
