A peculiar thing happens to me from time to time; sometimes for no reason at all, and sometimes very clearly because I am two cups into my morning coffee and the caffeine has just kicked in.
I get a sudden rush and a sense of the wide possibilities open to me in the day. A sudden feeling that I could tackle any task I wanted to, and all I have to do is find a place to sit down and get started on it.
(You see why I associate it with coffee.)
But today it didn’t come from my morning coffee; I was driving home midafternoon from an orthopedics appointment for Leo, an appointment that was over quickly and left us with a little extra time in our day. The sky over the highway was an amazing clear blue, and as I was admiring the sky, I felt that caffeinated rush of the possibilities that still remained.
Generally when I get that rush (especially in the morning, when it shows up on schedule at the bottom of the second cup of coffee) I move immediately to using it. That’s when I grab my notebook and start making a to-do list. Or I consider some project I have been meaning to do and begin planning next steps. Or I look around and see what needs to be done, leap up, and get started.
I can be remarkably productive, sailing along on the crest of the wave of ambition, or executive function, or whatever you should call it. Even if I’m driving, I can start mentally arranging things in my head, and when I get home, I’ll walk in with purpose and (provided I’m not distracted and the wave persists a bit) start getting things done.
Today, though, I had a sudden impulse not to do anything with it but instead to just experience it—to enjoy it.
And… I did! I took a breath, gripped the steering wheel, and declined to open the Notes pad in my head. I admired the clear blue sky and the skyline of downtown Minneapolis swinging into view as I rounded the bend in the highway. I felt the sense of possibilities for the future, and power over it, a sense of choice and openness, wash over me. It felt like an opening up or blossoming somewhere in my chest, a real and pleasurable sensation, a mood that I felt physically in my body, my breath, the sense of my hands on the steering wheel. I didn’t use it. I just felt it, and lived it.
It felt good! I was happy, excited even, as if I was looking forward to something, but without having committed to anything.
And I thought to myself how many times we are reminded that there is joy in ordinary things; that one of the secrets of living a good, happy, rich life is to fully enter into the tasks and sights and sensations of the everyday, to appreciate them and to be grateful for them and experience them. And I thought: hey, I’ve just done that! It worked really well! And thinking that I’d successfully suppressed my internal urge to constantly be doing something useful made me even happier, because that lovely sense of possibilities was now tinged with both gratitude and satisfaction.
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And then I thought, “Ooh! I can blog this when I get home!” and that did maybe take just a wee bit of the shine off it, but I did look forward to doing the writing. And now that I’ve written it, I still feel pretty good, so I suspect that maybe I came out ahead.
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