Every day is a fresh start.
That’s what the front cover of my at-home planner says. It’s a sturdy, hard-bound book with pages for goal setting, cutesy stickers, and sections for end-of–the-month reflections where you share your favorites including a check-in section where you write “One thing I will let go of from this month” and “One thing I will embrace next month.”
Sigh.
I don’t actually use the goal setting pages the right way. I have three months of blank reflection pages for the first three months of this year, and the stickers that came along with it are mostly still attached to the sheets. Sometimes I’ll think to use one. “My Favorite!” is meant to be placed on a day when something wonderful happened. Or there are stickers that say “Messy Bun and Getting Stuff Done” or simply, “Yay!”
Yay!
Yay, yay, yay.
In spite of my crabbiness, I like this planner. It’s the second year I’ve bought it. Maybe I don’t use it the right way, but the way the days are laid out has been helpful for me. Also, the reminder that “every day is a fresh start” is a golden one. I need this daily reminder, because the days lately have been rough. One of the first things I usually do when I wake up is read my New York Times (NYT) daily email, “The Morning.” It is rare that there is not something in this that makes me want to cry. This morning’s pleasant factoids: “The Trump administration, as part of an effort to revive capital punishment, will reinstitute firing squads as an allowed form of execution.” And the acting attorney general will start pushing investigations into Trump’s adversaries “in an attempt to win his job permanently.”
Yay!
Yay, yay, yay.
Here is what I need to remember, especially when I didn’t sleep well the night before. Every day truly is a fresh start. My Apple Watch has a supposedly helpful sleep tracker, but it also sometimes can be a bit of a bully. The other night it scolded me because I went to bed too late and woke up a few times. Its verdict: I only slept “OK,” instead of “High” or “Very High” and might not have gotten the rest I needed. On a morning after a night of poor sleep, it’s important to realize that it was just one night, and tonight will be a new night for sleep. Every day is a fresh start, and every night is, too.
Also, the reminder that “every day is a fresh start” helps me in weeks when I haven’t written much. A little daily writing is good for me, for my mental and emotional health. This is one area where I’ve thankfully grown past needing to grade my daily attempts (and I’m glad my Apple Watch doesn’t evaluate me in this area!) The point with my writing is just to show up and get something on the page. There is no good or awesome or terrible or failure. Showing up is the only thing that matters.
This week, though? My daughter has been home, and when my daughter is home, my priorities shift. I still need to work, so I am away from home for large parts of the day, but when I finally get home at day’s end, I want to be with her. We go for a last walk with Biscuit, fix supper, watch something on Netflix, challenge each other to Crossplay, a new NYT Scrabble-like game, where she has consistently bested me. This time is precious. I might manage to check in with my online writing group or spit out a couple of words here or there, but it’s not where I focus.
We went to the coast last weekend and had a marvelous time spying harbor seals at MacKerricher State Park and watching for whales at a picnic table in front of the Pt. Cabrillo Light Station. We also made it to the Mendocino Botanical Garden, where the rhododendrons are blooming. Some of them are as big as trees. Saturdays are when I usually sit to write and post a blog entry and a Substack newsletter with links to the post. That did not happen last week. I think now you understand why.
This Saturday morning as I am writing this, she is down in Sacramento visiting a friend from college. Not many of her high school or college friends have stayed in this area. It’s a treat for her to reconnect with them. Since she was gone, I sat down at the kitchen table with my laptop and cup of tea and thought I should probably try to write something but also was dreading it, feeling pretty sure that all was lost, that nothing would show up this time.
But then I glanced at my hardbound daily planner and remembered that “every day is a fresh start”—even though I didn’t sleep great last night, and my anemia is not improving as quickly as I would like, and the iron pills I was taking seem to have affected my digestive system in an unpleasant way, and Trump and his cronies are still glorying in all kinds of evil, and my daughter will be leaving for her summer job in Alaska next Wednesday.
Even with all of this? This morning gave me a fresh start, and I am here, and I wrote something, and also (miraculously!) you are still here, too. Soon my daughter will drive home and I’ll head to the kitchen and make a pot of cheeseburger soup (a NYT cooking recipe) to share with friends tonight. We’ll have dinner together and play games.
For all this, and for this intermittently sunny and occasionally cloudy and possibly even a little rainy day? I am grateful.
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