Walking the line

I'm a planner. I'm a super, mega, anal, OCD, planner of everything. I have binders in every room of the house containing daily to-do lists for the next week, savings schedules for this year, grocery lists, weekly menus, gifts to buy for the next decade...you get the picture.

I wasn't always this way and had you asked me five years ago whether or not I would own ten notebooks of purposefully varying sizes and colors for specific cataloguing of daily activities, I would have looked at you like you were mad and screamed something about never turning into my mother. But in this way, I very much have. And for the most part, I cringe to admit, it is highly effective and makes parts of my life a cinch.

What it doesn't do is nurture the freckle faced twenty-something that I have hidden inside. She yearns to break free and leave town on a whim, belting out her favorite song through the sunroof while the wind tangles her hair. She wants to leave fertility treatments and pest control appointments in the back of her mind and focus on the way things feel, taste, sound and look.

There are people (I know there are as I have blog stalked them) that take off unexpectedly to go on trips. Maybe they decide to go to an amusement park for the weekend, or maybe they quit their jobs and travel through Europe, staying in hostels for a year. I LOVE these people. And even more so, I want to BE these people. I want to wake up Saturday morning, throw an extra pair of jeans and my toothbrush in a bag and take the boy and his dog to the beach. I want to take ten grand out of our savings account and head for Bora Bora just because we can. I want to go to the airport and get on the next flight, no matter where it's bound.

Sometimes, generally in the foggy haze between asleep and awake, I convince myself that I can be this person. In a split second I assure my conscious self that I am capable of throwing my notebook out the window and going wherever the wind takes us. Then slowly, I feel the cloud lift and reality settle with great density upon my shoulders. Sometimes I even go so far as to make a list of places we could go spontaneously. Then I realize the irony of my actions, ball the paper up into my palm, and open my small brown binder to focus on the tasks for the day.

Very recently, a man I went to high school with passed away. I wasn't close with him, then or now, but that doesn't mean that his death didn't impact me. The fact is that he died of natural causes, as ridiculous as that feels to say about a 28 year old. His lovely wife is having to endure not only his loss, but also the loss of both of her parents in the last year as well. It sounds like a movie you'd never want to watch, and it brings me physical pain that all anyone can do for her now is pray. And as I pray for her I think about what she must miss about her husband and what she must wish they had done with the time they didn't know was dwindling away. I'm certain she doesn't long for more time to do laundry, or wish that the house was cleaner that week. I doubt she yearns for time to move backwards so they could put more money in savings or succeed in more lucrative careers.

If I were her I would long for more weekends on the beach, doing nothing. I would wish we'd used up the forty days of vacation time the boy has. I would thirst to get the time back spent scrubbing muddy paw prints off the microfiber sofa and instead go outside and play with the dog in the rain.

I made several resolutions this year, all catalogued neatly in the blue folder on the kitchen island, but there is one predominant one that I'm adding to the list: "To Identify the Line".

The line between too perfectionistic and too apathetic. Between laundry washed, dried, folded, starched and hung according to color, and piled up in the corner to petrify. Between never taking vacation time and going AWOL to live off the grid in Brazil. Between putting every penny in savings for some yet-to-be-named emergency and blowing it all on Jimmy Choos and mint condition Nintendo NES games. Somewhere between those poles there is a vast gray line with a little less structure and pattern and a little more complexity and delicious chaos.

I want to walk that line.