It’s 5pm on Sunday night, the only day I have no work this week. For so long, I thought I should be working more. Or working for pay more often. Now I’m working more, diversifying, switching things up, seeing what works.
What works now: I really need that day off to feed me.
I was fed today by walking along the waterfront near downtown Seattle with Chris and Liz. We saw seals and a sea lion, birds, dogs and people.
Chris wanted to hear the silence of no more aurora bridge. So we walked into our city. Our city that has been wholly remade, it seems, since I arrived here in 1994. How proud I was when I navigated the city on my own, found the Kinko’s and copied my resume so I could apply to every publishing house in the city.
Kinko’s. Publishing houses.
Now we are the city of Amazon.
And the independent bookstore.
And the city that I still love to explore. I can go to a park that sits next to downtown and see Elliot Bay up close and hear the conveyor belt churn as it moves the grain onto the container ship.
I really want to read “Ways of Seeing” again. What will jump out at me 30 years later? How do I see differently now from when I was 18 years old?
Night is falling into the day. The light hangs on to the horizon line outside my bedroom window. My oldest is at her leadership camp that sits on the western edge of an island near Seattle. I just spent time reading the book she bought me for Christmas. Her favorite book from roughly 6th grade: “Every Soul A Star.”
I have been busy lately figuring out how to get excited about life as my kids need me less and less. It’s an age-old story. It’s my story. More work. More adventures. More marveling at the sea life in this beautiful city I moved to at age 24. More helping my kids when they ask me to help them leap out of the nest that Chris and I built for them.
There’s still light in the sky as I type this. I am filling myself up on my day off.