Sunday, September 11, 2011

Life's too short

Last Monday I set out on an expedition to visit as many friends as I could between here and Chicago.

After months of being overworked and overstressed at my job, this week was my chance to escape, to do something actually worthwhile: spend time with the people I love. I even went so far as completely deactivating my work email account on my computer so I wasn't ever tempted to read those messages during the week.

All told I visited 12 friends in person and had phone dates while I was driving with 3 more. The drives were long, but worth every minute. During this week, my various friends and I:
  • ate many meals together
  • played guitar
  • went on walks
  • picked vegetables
  • attended Greek class at Seminary
  • went to a concert by The Giving Tree Band
  • drank wine* and watched a bunch of episodes of Robin Hood (2006)
  • had wonderful conversations
Given my lack of real planning in advance, I'm amazed all these schedules coordinated so well. I think it was a God-thing (some of you reading will nod your heads, others I know will shake them; that's fine). Literally, though, everything just fell into place for me. Everyone was free at exactly the right times and it "just worked". Beautiful.

I've pondered how to say what I want to say here, and nothing good is coming to me. I've been thinking a lot about death and dying lately, and so going into this trip I treated it with this mindset: "if I only had months to live, how would I want to spend them?"

My last week was a perfect answer.



* I'm kind of ridiculously happy that my wine-loving friends enjoyed the wine I brought (my new favorite), even going so far as to say, and I quote, "This wine was soooooo good."

2 comments:

Dolores said...

sweet.. glad you had fun! glad you relaxed!

Lynnea said...

You and Jessie and I need to have a weekend together again soon. With good wine.