down day (2)

Today the stars have aligned: Caroline is entertaining herself, Daniel is entertaining Christopher, and I have been able to take the day off. So far, I've read 50 pages of my book, taken a nap for an hour, and eaten too many (special delivery from TJ's) peanut butter cups. The question, as always, is whether this is self-indulgent sloth or much-needed self-care. In the middle, I suppose, is that it's much-needed recovery time from a state of self-indulgent anxiety? In any case, I'm enjoying it.

My book is a biography of Hannah Arendt. I'm trying to read books more actively so I don't get to the end quickly and then spend hours searching in vain for that one passage that struck me as cool somewhere a few hundred pages back, so I started sticking those little post-it bookmark thingys on pages I liked, but now there's a post-it bookmark thingy on every other page. Might have to order this one so I can go through it with a highlighter. 

Die Stunden verrinnen,
die Tage vergehen,
es bleibt ein Gewinnen
das bloße Bestehen.

(Something like: The hours flow on / the days are flying / the only success / is just surviving)

captures my feeling these days nicely. Arendt wrote that when she was a student just pushing twenty and not intellectually challenged enough, not a housewife perched precariously before the second half of her forties and not intellectually challenged enough, but I'll allow myself the comparison. I know something more interesting is coming. I hope something more interesting is coming. I am relatively sure that the Something requires that I myself change (and of course it's only ever possible to change ourselves). But I am also relatively sure that the Something requires one or more partners in crime, and I am desperate to find (recognize?) them.

Because. Yesterday no one came to playgroup, so I sat around and looked at my phone a lot and fussed about. And ran across one of my very favorite illustrative metaphors from church, this amazing laminated (!) sheet depicting which dishtowels and cleaning rags belong in which church kitchen / cleaning cart.

That's right - we don't just wash the dish towels and distribute them willy-nilly as if a dish towel were a dish towel. Can you imagine the chaos that might ensue?

When I first started work at Pfarrei Heilig Kreuz, we had playgroup in the Partyraum, and one day there were no dish towels in the drawer there. So I summoned all my courage and went down to ask the lady who works in the Beizli if she could give me one. No, she said flatly, and sent me down to the laundry to find clean ones, which I did, but I took the wrong clean ones, all hell broke loose, and now the Partyraum towels are individually marked with a red thread so that such an infarction never happens again.

Confession: The room in which we now have playgroup is not depicted here, so lately I've been stealing towels out of the central kitchen to use for my dish- and hand-wiping needs. One of these days the household manager is going to discover this shocking breach of protocol and then THERE WILL BE STRONGLY-WORDED NOTES.

Maybe, just maybe, our priorities are out of order and we need to spend far less time and energy focused inward?

Says the person who is taking the day off.