Sometimes a day well wasted is anything but a waste.
The other morning—it was a Sunday, and the previous week had been long and tiring—I overslept. Gloriously.
Saturday I had taken care of the yard work, and sold the used car we'd been trying to get rid of for a few weeks. Saturday night we'd had a nice dinner and walked the dogs 4 miles while looking at the stars and reading a book on astrophysics.
Our house was built 24 years ago by a now long out-of-business developer, so there's always a task list of things to take care of.
But this particular Sunday, I didn't really feel the need to accomplish or be accomplished.
I slowly got out of bed around the crack of noon, and stumbled downstairs. Luckily our daughter had let the dogs out already and fed them breakfast. I made a french press of coffee and put on the complete Mozart Flute Quartets.
Understand, I'm not a music snob. I listen to everything from hip-hop to reggae, to blues, to jazz, to classical, to rock, to enough Grateful Dead to drive the rest of my family over a cliff.
But there's something about the Mozart Flute Quartets as a background for a lazy Sunday morning. Perhaps it's early imprinting. My parents were musically educated, and they played music continuously. They would get up in the morning and put on a record while the coffee was brewing, and play straight through to when the last side finished after they'd gone to bed at night—mostly jazz and classical and some formative rock, like The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, CSNY, and lots and lots of The Who. My mother still does to this day, though her tastes have skewed more and more to just classical and baroque.
I have associations of sun streaming through the windows on a lazy late morning with the Mozart Flute Quartets playing—it's cheerful, relaxed, uplifting music that matches the mood of the day perfectly.
On this particular Sunday a couple of weeks ago, I brought a cup of coffee upstairs to my wife who was having her own well-deserved moment of slowly waking up. Then I told my "smart" speaker to play the music on the outdoor speakers, and carried my coffee out onto the deck, still in my pajamas. It was one of those mid September days, warm, but not hot with just the beginning hints of yellow to the leaves at our elevation and increasing orange and gold up the sides of the mountains. Light breezes, good coffee, warm deck under my bare feet, Beagles lying soaking up the sun. I wasted I don't know how much time just standing there, leaning on the deck rail, accomplishing nothing whatsoever
—except the rebuilding of my soul.
