Squandered

It was one of those days that I truly wasted - no motivation to bring to the many to-do's that are looming large. I felt the need to vacuum at one point, but sat quietly until the urge passed. My guilt requires I admit I let my son watch way too much tv today, even if it was PBS. Some days are about recharging. By the end of mine, I was reminded why...

Many tales of loss today - jobs, friendships, lovers taken away without warning. Although none of them affected me directly, they left people I love in a world of hurt. And it is a curse of the empathetic: to know the extent of pain but still be incapable of actually of doing anything at all to make it better.

Having looked over my day, I don't feel much like writing. It doesn't take much of a dose of reality to remind me that this is a vanity project and there are much more worthwhile pursuits. But I am nearly 1/3 of the way through this year, and although I haven't exactly had huge revelations or leaps of personal growth worth writing about, I need to continue. Follow through has never been a strong suit of mine. Baby steps...

I had a neat experience a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference that was actually worth my while. (I am racking up continuing education hours for my license renewal, which is both tedious and expensive.) I wandered in, took an aisle seat, got settled. I know I'm not interested or energetic enough to stay on task for a 7 hour conference complete with PowerPoint and bad coffee - so I brought some quilting piecework to do. It's an adult learner thing; multi-tasking actually helps me pay attention. I struck up a conversation with a lovely lady behind me and she really is a gem - painfully candid, from Iowa, very funny - and has dedicated her life to running a city mental health center for the past 28 years. She is both a cat lady and a collector of antiques, and we commiserated about the quantities of stuff that take over while your priorities are elsewhere. Over lunch she told me about an experience several years ago when she ordered some books on antique toys and wound up getting a box full of quilting books instead. She sorted things out with the bookseller, and they told her they'd send the correct ones and she could keep the others. So for a few years, she's had these great books on quilting just sitting around, but she knew she'd find the home for them eventually. Last week, I got the box of them in the mail. They are really nice and I need to write her a thank you instead of blog-blabbing... anyways, I had a point. It's so easy to be in communities of interest these days, that it's kind of fun to be open to happenstance where you have all the elements and need to find the connections. We're all just folks, and everyone has a story. When we don't take the opportunity to connect, that's truly wasteful.