Balancing Acts

Life gets out of balance.  Not enough sleep.  Traffic jams.  Coffee spilled on the shirt right before the client meeting.  The two-year-old decides to throw a tantrum in the checkout line.  The sixteen-year-old decides you were born in the eighteenth century. The spouse decides to blow the budget on a new gadget.  Even positive events can cause stress and varying degrees of anxiety.  That’s why everyone needs a realignment day from time-to-time.

Today is mine (and I think Luci’s as well).  I began the day with one item on my agenda: mow the lawn.  That’s it.  And since, for me, mowing the lawn is akin to meditative yoga, it only serves to help put things back in their proper place.

After spending the morning with Luci on a pleasant trek to Barnes and Nobles to pick up a couple of books (a novel by David Foster Wallace -  Oblivion – and another by Rebecca  Goldstein), we stopped by Basic Foods to load up on my latest obsession:  organic, non-homogenized milk from grass-fed cows.  I’ll give you the next few seconds to laugh.  Finished?  Thank you.  By the way, ten years after you’re dead, I’ll still be drinking the stuff.

Back home.

Luci leaves for an errand or two while I practice Zen And The Art Of Mowing Grass (I wasn’t kidding it’s like meditation), water the annuals, shrubs and Luci’s vegetable plants, splash Miracle-Gro on the lucky ones and clean everything up.

Luci returns, we both head indoors and begin an afternoon of puttering.  She lights up the Ipod dock and sounds across the last forty years begin to fill the house.  The Eagles, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Chicago, The Avett Brothers, Dawes, BNL, a good cross-section of tunes work their magic to help reset the psyche, restore the balance that daily life knocks out of kilter.

Luci settles into making a new batch of sugar scrub for her lovelies - scents of lavender and mint waft through the house – and I pour myself a generous glass of 2009 J. Lohr, putter on the computer and inhale the mood.

The afternoon floats by like a cool, slow ride in an inner tube on the Guadalupe.  On a weekday.  Without the weekend crowd and the coolers tethered to sun-burned ankles. 

I drink in the calm and it tastes like a cold Seven-Up on an August day.  Good.  Refreshing. 

We’re hungry now and a huge salad of spinach, arugula, roasted turkey, blueberries, feta cheese and hazelnut vinaigrette, along with a second glass of J. Lohr does wonders at tugging the bits and pieces of life back into their rightful slots.

The sun slides towards the horizon, Enya sings the lyrical beauty of Storms In Africa and Orinoco Flow as the day winds down and equilibrium completes its cycle.

As if to say that all if well again, the calm restored, the scales of life re-balanced and ready for whatever tomorrow might bring, Euge Groove begins a jazz rift, its pleasant energy a foretaste of the morrow’s tasks.

Ahh.  I exhale and enjoy.