Today I woke early. I drove north and met my friend J in a pre-agreed parking lot. We left one car behind and drove north over the Golden Gate to the calm bay waters of Sausalito.
We took a standup paddleboard yoga class, ate brunch in the sun next to a pier, walked by the water, went for a hike. The weather was uncharacteristically and wonderfully warm: over seventy degrees, and note that today is still March. I’d been worried it would rain – it was raining last week. But it didn’t rain. It was perfect. Now I’m sitting in a coffee shop in an unusually sunny San Francisco, writing this while I wait to meet another friend for dinner. I feel pleasantly tired and totally content.
It’s so easy to feel like life is a blur; it’s so easy to feel like I’ll take a break as soon as things calm down. But things never do calm down, and anyway I thoroughly enjoy most of the not-calm. I just want days like today also.
And so I’m grateful for J, who has a similar willingness to take days off in the middle of the week, and a similar love of spending time by the water, combined with the good sense to mark those days off on our work calendars two months ahead of time, thereby ensuring we can actually make them happen.
That’s right, my Wednesday off from work was planned two months ago. Not the specifics – we just figured out a day that we thought would work, far enough ahead that there were no critical work things booked on it yet. Then we blocked it on Calendar, and as far as I know both promptly forgot about it until it got much much closer. Then we said, hey, can we still do this? And turned out we could, because we’d already blocked the time.
Magic.
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