What Do You Do With Your Days?

Yesterday, I was walking with a friend on a forested trail on the island where I live. He brought a small dog named Shiloh, a lively little girl who was busy sniffing and marking brush, tree trunks, and assorted off-trail delights. I was lost in the beauty of enormous trees and spring-green ferns when my friend suddenly asked me a question that made me stumble. “What do you do with your days?”

I paused, knowing it wasn’t enough to say I made meals, washed dishes, did laundry, vacuumed, watched endless cable series, and so on. That didn’t constitute the kind of “doing” that he was asking me about. I had just written a short essay, my first return to writing in a long while, so I said, “I read and write.” This was almost half-true. After several years of caring for a partner with Alzheimer’s who had died a few months back, I realized the only doing I’d become accustomed to was taking care of someone else’s needs. I had been pressed into service by love and a relentless sense of duty. And along the way, I suspended moving forward in my own life.

I’m no martyr. Somehow, I believed that after my partner’s suffering ended, I’d simply pick up the threads of my creative life. When that time came, visits with friends filled some of the void. Gazing out my window at a green expanse, punctuated by rounds of deer, crows, robins, and eagles also helped. And walks. And an occasional cocktail with my best island friend. Sounds nice, yes? Yes. Very nice. But hardly the return I imagined.

For months, I had skipped going to play with clay at a local studio, where I still paid a monthly membership fee in order to hold my place and where kiln-fired bowls sat on my shelf still unglazed. And it had been more than a year since I returned to an intimate, amazing writing group to discuss and critique our in-progress works. I really didn’t know if I was saying hello or goodbye to these meaningful pleasures. And maybe, most of all, I wondered if I still had the juice to resume “making.”

I began an inventory of things set aside, avoided, yearned for. There were two half-finished novels, works that would require me to summon the three gods of creativity: focus, concentration, and persistence. For now, it seems short forms like essays, stories, and poems could be my ladder to return to a more ambitious work. Or not. Do I have a schedule in mind? Seems like the short time I may have in this life needs to be treasured, meted out for things that matter. Even though it has become such a ubiquitous quote, often found inside greeting cards, poet Mary Oliver’s line, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” applies. Although it isn’t far from the less poetic thing my friend asked, “What do you do with your days?” When a woman is seventy-eight, both questions are clarion calls. I feel the grinding of rusty gears when I look for an answer.

On a different level, but still important, lurking throughout my home is the thing most dreaded: cleaning out my partner’s vast collection of stuff, which includes endless CDs and DVDs; books on math, athletics, business, and racism; T-shirts; a hidden cache of porn; gadgets and doodads from tech companies he worked with, and much more. Plus, I can’t deny there’s a measure of my own stored, unused things to sort through. I have really resisted the Scandinavian “death cleaning” experience. And Marie Kondo can persuade others to wistfully say goodbye to belongings, but not me. Not yet.

Entering every new stage in my life takes a bite into that precious time I want to hoard. But like so many of the things I’ve collected, stored, and ceased using, time shouldn’t be wasted. Time is never static, even though some of the dramas in my life have made me feel as if time stood still. That simple question, posed by my friend on our walk, “What do you do with your days?” keeps looping through my mind. It’s as insistent as an ear worm that repeats and repeats a song. Now I’m stuck with finding an answer. However, the answer is bending toward the present and the near future. What will I do with my days?

I don’t reject the quotidian things I’ve been doing. After all, beds need making, clothes need washing, food needs cooking before rot sets in. In my six months of mourning, I’ve done a great job with household chores. My house loves me. I’ve also spent more time connecting and reconnecting with friends. Socializing scores big on charts that measure emotional health, so good grades there. I have stacks of books I finally have time to read. Even with my reduced attention span, I’m marching through them, looking for the spark that once egged me on to write.

I used to practice another kind of hoarding. Every poem I published, every essay, every story that I completed was a deposit in the bank of self. What’s more, over time these became as valuable as old merit badges collecting dust, signifying actions frozen in the past. And one more thing. While I savored the doing and the accomplishing as I wrote back then, I took for granted my muse. Surely inspiration would always be within reach.

Like I said, the gears are rusty. Today I am an audience of one to whatever stories I will tell. I promise myself I will spend more words on writing, rather than crosswords. I will fire up my computer to do more than help me pay bills online and watch YouTube videos about how to clean the screen on my faucet’s spigot. I won’t allow myself the luxury of following every Facebook post from friends and acquaintances who are making things, traveling, and sending political rants. (Of the latter, I have enough of my own rants to contend with.)

I give silent thanks to the friend who has asked me the hardest, but most important question to answer: What do you do with your days?

END

Editor’s Note: Marlene Blessing is an author, poet, and fine essayist as you have just read. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various publications. She was the originating editor for the anthology, A Road of Her Own: Women’s Journeys in the West. She is now retired from book publishing where she worked as an editor, and living on an island in her native Pacific Northwest.

If you would like to contact Marlene and do not have her phone or email, send me a quick note at alanbearstark@gmail.com and I’ll send you her email. This is the first of what I hope will be a good number of essays from Marlene here on Mountain Passages. That is until she starts her own Substack newsletter. She would very much like to hear from you.

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I’m alanstark1@substack.com. Thank you for reading Mountain Pasages.