Over and Over

When I stopped working 6 days a week I thought "finally I will have time to do all of the things I have been putting off for the last year!". I would go to the optometrist and file my taxes before April. I would make my bed every morning, and promptly answer my e-mails.  And, when I got all that done - with a clear mine and a clear schedule - I would sit down to write.

But, in my first month with free-time, I wrote more on my to-do list than I did with my typewriter because the daily work is never done. When I returned home after a busy day, I folded my clean laundry, closed my computer, and crawled into my freshly made bed. "So this is what it feels like to be a person who has it together!" 

The next morning, my once empty basket held my dirty pajama shirt, my inbox was full with replies, and my bed was ruffled from sleeping in it.  All the things I did had become undone, and I restarted the cycle. 

I began to feel like Sisyphus -   sentenced to roll a boulder up hill, only to have it roll back down, and have the task start anew, each day. Everything meant nothing (I guess I'm proof that housework can bring on an existential crisis.)

On Friday, I had a mini-meltdown over this. I actually cried about how futile washing the dishes felt, knowing they were just going to be used for dinner that night. In an effort to restore my sanity before my boyfriend got home, I took a walk. (Portland, miraculously, saw the sun for three days while the rest of the country experienced a blizzard.) In an abandoned dirt heap on a back alley I spotted the beginnings of a daffodil pushing through the surface. I walked back home and grabbed my trowel, dug deep to get the flower's bulb, and replanted it in the small terracotta pots I keep on my counter.

When I woke up the next morning, and peered into my kitchen, dirty from cooking the night before, I looked at that flower pot. And I felt accomplished.

It occurred to me there is a difference between doing and creating. When you create something, it's valuable not because it's done, but because you did it. So, after a flower blooms and is eventually cut back for another season - I wont feel like it was pointless, because the end wasn't the point at all. The action itself was joyful.

Creating doesn't have to mean painting or sculpting - it simply means making something that wasn't there when you woke up this morning.  It means doing something spontaneous, and unassigned. Maybe someday I will reach transcendence and can feel this way about sweeping the floor. But, until then I will challenge myself to be creative - something that can't be added to a to-do list.