Building a Day Instead of A Year

 

“I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's.”

~Henry Moore

Years ago, while attending a family education session at the Mayo Clinic on helping loved ones manage chronic pain, we learned the importance of “building a day”.  The practice honors the reality that strength comes in limited quantities, that energies are rapidly dissipated, and that without intentional planning, physical resources can easily be scattered among the “pebbles” rather than leveraged on the “big rocks.”  Little things, often extraneous things, get accomplished while leaving little stamina available for more consequential concerns.  “Build the day,” the doctors taught us, by thinking through at breakfast time what the priorities will be for that day – in truth, the ONE priority for that day – and privileging that highest value in how the day gets organized and used. Depending on one’s situation, that might simply be dressing oneself, or it might be getting to the store to gather groceries for the evening meal.  The one thing – or maybe two.  

 

“This I will get done today.”

 

I recall that wisdom today, New Year’s Day, all these years later,  echoing the practice of Henry Moore cited above.  Today.  I’ve never been that interested in New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s not that I’m never successful with them.  I have, as resolved, written all my holiday thank-you notes by Epiphany.  I have established new exercise regimens and work habits, and managed to sustain them over time.  I have checked some resolution boxes through the years.  I like the sound of the annualized idea, and am certainly in favor of setting goals.  But my resolutions rarely seem to rise to the profundity or significance the word suggests.  There is, after all, an inevitable downward pressure applied to the resolving when the main objective is accomplishing it.  Make them smaller and smaller.  Lighter and lighter.  In order to succeed.  But that which takes little effort or comes to little consequence doesn’t really demand much resolve.  And those aspirations that run counter to this downward pressure tend so toward the grandiose and abstract that the vagaries and vicissitudes of time and opaqueness of circumstance easily and almost inevitably puncture and deflate them.

 

The reality is that I do not know what this nascent year will come to birth, in the

course of its months, or bury.  I have no idea what obstacles it will impose or opportunities it will occasion.  A calendar with its pre-inserted special days is a delusional seduction.  I am not, after all, delivered a year in a package already populated with “givens”, and invited to fill in the available spaces.  And while it is similarly true that neither am I delivered an entire day, a single day is closer and more promisingly within my reach.  

 

And so how will I build it?  What are the one or two “big rocks” I want to make sure I lift?  That, but since a day well-built is as much about growing as accomplishing – life being more, after all, than mere utility – how will I intentionally feed and frame this day?  How will I curate what goes into my mind and soul, and in what order and proportion?  What are the spiritually signifying and animating frames I want to maintain in good repair, and what are the disciplines that contribute to such sturdiness?  And since I am a whole being with mind and spirit, yes, but also a body, how will I move in ways that honor and tone my physicality?  

 

All that, but still more.  How will I reverently pay attention?  It’s snowing outside just now, and science has taught us that water molecules that form the flakes are not new, but have been part of Creation’s respiration since the origin of time and matter – descending as precipitation, ascending as evaporation; endlessly, constantly coming and going, singing “hello,” whispering “goodbye.”  Where all have they gone; who all have they touched; what thirsts have they slaked; what fingers have they bitten with frost; what river banks have they filled – or overflowed?  And how will they wet me on this particular day, these holy tears of sometime sorrow, sometime joy?  

I want to pay attention to such facts and fascinations - the snowflakes and their reincarnations; the subterranean conversations constantly underway among trees through their roots; the alchemical magic within leaves to convert light into life; nature's perennial conversion of waste into fertility.  And wonder how I might participate in it all.

 

More presently, then, than the year’s resolutions, how will I use wisely and well this particular 1/365^th of it?  

 

And then the next similar fraction?  

 

This smaller piece, it seems to me, is the larger question as I finish my breakfast, as the snow falls and fills this day that, in some manner, will become tomorrow and all those others that will become the fullness of 2022.  This year, in other words, I resolve to live each day.