Always with the daily tasks of life! How they do bog us down and keep us from soaring up to the higher realms of thought!

For me these tasks include: 

(1) Inspecting my toenails to make sure they haven’t yet starting turning into hawk’s talons as they show every sign of trying to do. 

2) Putting my contacts in, never an easy chore since I need to be able to SEE my eyes to do that and how can I see them since without having them in I’m like one of those giant eyeless worms that live in deep undersea caverns? 

(3) Taking my contacts OUT again and doing it before 10pm. After that hour they seem to get velcroed by teensy invisible loops to  – what? – a series of teensy invisible hooks living on my eyes?  But if I give up on the task it will only be to wake three hours into Dreamtime clawing at my eyes like poor old Oedipus clawed at his upon learning that all this time that foxy chick he’d been sleeping was actually his mom.

So yes, it can be hard to keep up with the quotidian nature of our lives – unless, and this is a big unless…. you can figure out how to take pleasure in tracking them.

Me, I love to record my daily tasks. Give me a planner and I am one happy camper.

Here’s my planner for the week of the great freeze, which in our part of New England came accompanied with a whole lot of wind-borne snow. Look at those cancellations, ah! If there’s anything more fun than scheduling a task it’s discovering you don’t have to execute it!

Then, once you have a few things in your planner you are ready to make your list. Here’s a list I made just last Sunday:

Surprisingly I was able to actually DO all these jobs, right down to scoring some edamame at the Chinese restaurant without succumbing to the temptation of also ordering any of the ridiculously high-calorie Orange Chicken ‘n Cashew Shimmy. Even down to buying the forgivingly sized pants that I’ll need this week when I have two nasty-looking growths removed from the part of my back where my waistbands all hit.

The final satisfaction, of course, is writing down what you have done in a journal or a diary so that you can look back over time and be amazed at how much more productive you were in your 40s (or 30s, or 20s) than you are now.

This entry comes from the week of that great cold and as I reread it here I see that I am now making entries quite different in kind from the entries I made in my diaries of yore, diaries I first began keeping the year I turned nine.

Ah but the tale of those diaries will have to be a tale for another day I fear, as it is now time to approach the highly magnified mirror I keep in the bathroom, face the music and tweeze out these two new comical chin hairs.:-)