On The Docket

What’s on your docket today?

We were sitting outside finishing breakfast the other day when my husband asked me that question.

Docket commonly refers to the calendar or schedule for pending cases in a court of law. Since I’m neither a judge nor an attorney, what he was really asking me was, “What is on your agenda for the day?”

Something about the question didn’t sit right with me.

We often tell each other the anticipated goings on of our days, share our to-do lists, and look at our calendars together. I’m good with that. There is an administrative element to sharing life with someone that helps things run more smoothly, and keeps life on track.

Knowing him as I do, his question wasn’t a way to dodge a deeper dive into matters of the heart. He’s more than willing to swim in the emotional waters that are part of any relationship. However, lately it felt like the question most often asked. It was transactional, not relational, an exchange of information rather than an expression of connection.

We talked about it the next day. His question was a wakeup call. A reminder of how easily we can slide into a pattern of simply making it through our days and checking things off of our lists. Whatever else might be on our docket, checking in on how we are doing on any given day matters a whole lot more than what we are going to get done.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Showing Up

Tonight there is a community conversation centered around my book BLUSH: Women & Wine. In that book, I suggest that we all have our coping mechanisms of choice. Those ways in which we hide from our own lives, and distance ourselves from the things we’d rather not face, the feelings we’d rather not experience, and the parts of ourselves that we try to keep under lock and key. As I say in BLUSH,Wine has been my “thing”. For others, it may stake no claim, and I raise my glass to them. But. Something does. Whether addiction to our smart phones or binge watching the latest hit series, smoking pot or online shopping, perfectionism or endless productivity, serving others so that we can ignore ourselves, nightly cocktails or an overflowing social calendar, excessive exercise or a fist full of peanut butter cups, a common thread in the fabric of the human soul is the temptation to avoid pain and discomfort. But hiding from our life today only means running back into it again tomorrow, and the truth of the matter is, it takes so much more energy to run away from our life than to show up for it.

Rather than what is so often cast as a “book talk” byShowing the author, this one is a place to be in conversation with one another. A safe space in which to wonder together, what does it mean to show up fully for the life that is ours, and what prevents us from doing that? Our questions are our own to live. But there is something good that happens when we choose to live them together. There is safety in numbers. Going it together reminds us that we are not alone in our efforts to make sense of things.

So, tonight we will gather together, over glasses of wine (yep…still love the stuff) and share our stories. We are story tellers at heart, and we see ourselves in one another’s stories. My plan is to go first because someone has to. And I’ve learned that if I am willing to tell my story, it can give others the courage to do the same.

Let’s show up for life and tell our stories!

Cheers.

The Arcs of Our Histories

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” 

Theodore Parker                                                                                                                                       (Unitarian Minister and abolitionist. This quote is an excerpt from a sermon he delivered in 1853.)

My husband Tom and I arrived last night at the home of our dear friend, Birthe, in Lindum, a village in Denmark that dates back 2500 years. The family home, which was built in the 1800s, sits across the street from the village blacksmith shop, and in the shadow of the village church that was constructed in 12th century.

Next to the house, and behind the church, is the village cemetery.

From her kitchen window, our friend is able to see the stone, found in her garden, that marks the grave of her husband, Niels, also Tom’s host brother when he was here in 1965 as a high school foreign exchange student. 

We slept upstairs in one of the many bedrooms in this house that has been home to the same family for five generations. 

Before a new day dawned, the small house next door burned down. 

As we sit over coffee this morning, smoke still hanging in the air from the fire, and the church bells ringing in a new day, as they have every morning for generations, I can’t help but be struck by both the shortness of a life span, and the long arc of the history of this place. 

The tension between the two is worthy of our consideration.

Towards what do the long arcs of our own short histories bend?

Written with gratitude to Birthe, and in memory of Niels.