I am a planning addict. I have my desk calendar, the fridge calendar, the calendar app on my phone, the weekly calendar sheet that I carry in my bag. And then there is the “bible.” The giant, hardback, yearly planner that goes with me EVERYWHERE. “If it isn’t in the bible, then it isn’t happening.”
This planner lists our entire lives. Birthdays, vacations, meetings, doctor’s appointments, bills that are due, chores that need doing, and meal plans. Everyone in the family has a different color assigned to them and everything is color-coded. I have spent hours of my life filling these planners with things to remember, places to go, activities to do. I can comb over my old planners and recollect everything we were doing. They are like windows into our past years.
But now….
These days, the white-out is getting used more than the fancy-colored pens. Now the blank pages of the calendar are glaringly white. Every day I get another email that requires me to get out the white-out and flip further and further through the book. All that organizing, budgeting and dreaming–crossed out. My plans deleted.
The erasing breaks my heart. The eighth-grade trip. Two proms. Mountain CON. Teaching in RE. Church auction events. A cruise. LEAF festival. The eighth-grade dance. OWL class. Graduations. A trip to New York City. Each time I scratch out these words, I realize how important these things were to us. Sometimes it seemed like we were too busy and had too much going on. But they were GOOD things. They were valuable to us, so we gave our time and money towards them. And now they are just gone….
But there is something valuable about these blank pages, too. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, we are connecting more as a family. Instead of running around all over town on the weekends, we watch documentaries and play board games. My teens are home with me and there are no arguments about curfews or friends coming over or me dragging them to do things they don’t feel like doing. Life has become simple. My meditation practice exists again. My husband is working on a project in the yard. I’ve baked desserts and read whole books. The boys play basketball together every evening.
We have been given a chance to live in the present instead of planning out the future. I know I will be scribbling away in my planner again one day, filling up all these calendars with a million places to go. For now, I’ll hang out with my kids, do some jigsaw puzzles, and deep-clean my house. I will try to see the gift in the grief. There are spiritual lessons everywhere. It’s nice to have a chance to slow down enough to find them.
Mariah Wright, Board of Trustees