How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
I was teaching one of my zoom classes to older teens at the beginning of April and asked what they had done on the weekend. Some had no idea. They had started to lose awareness of what they were doing for large blocks of time at home. The days started to meld into one long Groundhog Day.
Ugh. We can’t sleep walk through life, just waiting. Take stock. Be in your body and feel your moments at least. The best thing right now is that we can choose how we want to live through this experience.
For me, I like to be wide awake.
I immediately came up with this idea for a day tracker. This one was mine for April. According to my husband, I am quite good at compartmentalizing so I decided to categorize my actions throughout my day instead of writing down hour by hour what I am doing.
(If you have no idea what you are doing, as some of the teens told me, then you have to start with itemizing hour-by-hour what it is in fact you “do” all day and then you can categorize.)
The black line above denotes the time I wake up and the black line at the end of the column shows the time I sleep. I rarely sleep past 9:30pm and I wake up on average between 4-5:30am and rarely wake up past 6:00am. It’s an interesting way to be aware of how we are spending our days in this strange time.
I had to add “family talk” category late in the month because there was so much of that going on during the evening because we have no internet and that’s all we do as dinner is being made and prepped. We are all congregated around the island just chatting about everything.
Here is my new May tracker:
This tracker seems like it could kill spontaneity when it fact it makes me welcome it and enjoy how life unfolds to expand time. It feels like such a paradox – the more I keep track of the blocks of time, the more time I have. I stumble upon open spans and my to-do lists are checked. Time is a solid companion that allows me to do everything that I love. It also allows me to see the type of life I am crafting.
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