When I was a little girl and small for my age, the doctor told my mother to not worry, I just had one of those metabolisms that didn't stop. He told her that she might want to speed herself up a little so that she could keep up with the spinning top she had given birth to, but he had no advice for me.
I try to do nothing sometimes, I really do, but even when I am sitting very still with my eyes closed, my mind is thinking of time wasting. So today I really was going to do nothing.
I started doing nothing by reading a new book while I sipped my cinnamon flavored tea and nibbled banana nut bread, all three of which came my way during the Christmas holidays last week. The first sentence in the book read something like this: "He positioned the camera so that it touched upon the shadows in the corners of the attic."
My camera needed new batteries, so before I forgot it, I grabbed it and ran to the drawer which holds things like batteries and other necessary items of similar usage. I found what I needed and decided to upload the pictures in the camera to my iphoto program since I had it in hand anyway. With that done, plus a little photo editing, I pushed the camera and the computer aside, and sat back down to my new book, my tea and my banana nut bread and read another sentence: "Dust had accumulated in the shadows of the attic, along with the debris of time."
I glanced around my den. There were dust particles dancing in the rays of the morning sun. And not only were there dancing dust particles, but there were a few dangling cobwebs as well.
An hour or two later, my house glistened in the rays of the morning sun, and my tea was cold. I washed my tea cup, placed the banana nut bread back in the fridge, and put the book back in a bookcase, since it obviously was the cause of my failure to follow my plan to do nothing today. I sat back down to do nothing again.
This time, I leaned back in the recliner. I even closed my eyes. Just as my lashes closed over the scene above me, I saw one small reindeer, a Christmas decor leftover, about 8 feet above my head. I sprang from my chair with amazing speed, and ran to the garage to get the ladder. In no time I grasped the leftover reindeer and bounced down the ladder to the ringing of the phone.
"Would you happen to be going to the grocery today? I really need some milk, and I could do with some bread as well. You know I don't drive well when snow is on the streets," said my neighbor friend.
I had a quick shower, donned my clothes, wrapped myself in appropriate knitted garments guaranteed to keep the cold out, wrestled the snow off my car, and drove carefully on slick roads to the grocery. About an hour and $75 dollars later, I delivered milk and bread to my neighbor and brought my own groceries home to be put away. Somehow the day was dying and streaks of a setting sun cast pinkish shadows through the windows of my house. The snow too, what little there was left of it, had a rosy glow.
I baked a pan of cornbread, no sugar of course, and ate it with a bowl of leftover vegetable soup, while I read again from the book I'd started this morning: "He left the camera, turned slightly and placed his right foot on the top rung of the ladder."
Good grief! It was the camera and the ladder again, but I'd already explored both subjects in great detail on this do nothing day. I'd come full circle and I was afraid to read anymore, I don't need to climb up into my attic, and I surely don't need to return to the grocery. What I need to do is nothing!
And I think I need to find another book.
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