The Life You Want Is Mostly Wednesdays

I have spent a surprising amount of my life assuming that the good part was coming later.

After the problem was solved, the decision was made, work calmed down, the house was finished, and I finally knew what was happening next.

Last week I wrote about being done living in the waiting room. Which sounded excellent. Very decisive. Possibly even mature.

Unfortunately, that raised another question.

If I’m not waiting anymore, what exactly am I supposed to be doing instead?

Apparently the answer is mostly… Wednesday.

Not vacation Wednesday. Not the Wednesday where somebody hands you a plane ticket and announces that your responsibilities have been temporarily reassigned to a highly competent adult.

Just regular Wednesday.

You get up. Feed whoever needs feeding. Make coffee. Answer emails. Walk the dog. Figure out what’s for dinner. Maybe exercise. Maybe don’t. Somebody needs something. Something in the house needs attention. The weather does something inconvenient. And then, somehow, the day is over.

I think I kept expecting my life to eventually feel more important than that. More cinematic. There would be a clear beginning to the next chapter, flattering lighting and possibly a soundtrack.

Instead, the next chapter appears to contain a lot of laundry.

This week alone I have worked, fed an unreasonable number of animals, prepared the yard for a nor’easter, watched said nor’easter relocate half the Atlantic Ocean onto my shoreline, made dinner, cleaned things, worried about people I love and repeatedly forgotten why I walked into the kitchen.

Not exactly Eat Pray Love.

But I’m beginning to think this is the point.

The life we keep saying we want is not mostly made out of extraordinary days. It is mostly made out of Wednesdays.

Which means waiting for some future version of life to finally become worth enjoying is a fairly terrible system. Because even if everything works out beautifully — whatever that means — I’m still going to wake up on a Wednesday. There will still be dishes. The dog will still need to go out. Somebody will still send an email I don’t particularly want to answer.

So maybe the goal isn’t to construct a life where every day feels extraordinary. Maybe it’s to build ordinary days I actually want to be in.

That feels different.

Less dramatic, certainly. But also considerably more useful.

Maybe the questions are simpler than I’ve been making them. Do I like where I wake up? Are there people I want to talk to? Can my body still do most of the things I ask of it? Am I interested in something? Do I laugh? Is there something I’m building or learning or looking forward to?

And, perhaps most ambitiously, can I sit down for ten minutes without immediately thinking of six things I should be doing instead?

That one remains under investigation.

None of this means we’re supposed to appreciate every second. Some Wednesdays are objectively garbage. People get sick. Work is exhausting. Money is stressful. Families are complicated. Sometimes the dog throws up at three in the morning and absolutely nobody needs to find a lesson in it.

But I’m trying to stop treating the ordinary days like filler.

Because there are only so many of them.

If I’m lucky enough to be here twenty years from now, I’ll be 76. Hopefully still complaining about something completely unnecessary. Hopefully still curious. Hopefully still able to walk somewhere beautiful, start something new, make plans, change my mind and have people around me who make me laugh.

Hopefully still having Wednesdays.

And I guess that’s the question I can’t stop thinking about now.

What do I want those Wednesdays to look like?

I have no idea what 70 — or 76 — is going to look like.

But I’m starting to think I’d like to arrive with options.

Upward-ish.