Catch Up with Yourself

February 27, 2024

Beloved:
          I make coffee and drink water with my medicine.  While the coffee brews I eat a banana.  Then drink coffee and read the news online.  I eat 2nd breakfast* with my next cup of coffee and then get on with the day.  I really do miss newspapers, but there’s so little to read in the local one I can’t justify the price, and certainly not the environmental impact of all that paper production.  So I read on my phone or computer.

          When my kids were young I didn’t have this same breathing room between getting up and work, unless I got up at 4 AM, which I was not willing to do.  I relish it now.  I feel more human, less like a cog in a massive machine going nowhere in particular.  Or maybe I just feel old, but I don’t think so.  I start out caught up with myself, rather than chasing myself all day.  Most days still seem too short, with too many items left on my list when quitting time rolls around.  Because I quit then too.  Because I’m tired, and working tired is a fool’s game, at least for me.  I make too many mistakes, for one thing, and grow an ornery attitude for two.  Birdy got a really long walk last evening for precisely that reason.  I was hungry and restless and irritable, so we walked pretty far into the adjacent neighborhood, and it was nearly dark when we got home.  Birdy was delighted and I was oodles more peaceful.

          All of which is to say that while those mornings of getting three kids up and on the school bus were also wonderful in their own way, I’m loving these mornings too.  Age sixty feels good on me.  I pray that however your days start, you find moments through the day to catch up with yourself and breathe, to be grateful for this life and all the goodness therein, and to know in your deepest self that you and what you do matters deeply.

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Breakfast lately

• ½ cup of frozen blueberries, mostly thawed
• 1 tbsp Trader Joe’s lemon curd 
• ½ cup granola
• 1 ½ cups plain greek yogurt