Unless I get creamed by some clueless driver checking Facebook on their phone behind the wheel (a not entirely unlikely scenario, all things considered), I probably have on the order of a thousand more Thursday nights to spend in my life.
Seems like a lot.
On the other hand, (especially as the numbers diminish), each one is precious, and deserves to be spent thoughtfully—or at least not squandered in questionable pursuits like sitting on the couch scrolling through Reddit feeds or watching sports you don’t really care about because “hey the new season!” or prepping for the courses you’ll be teaching this fall quarter when, seriously, there’s still two weeks until classes start, let’s be real, right?
With this in mind, I will count the most recent Thursday evening’s expenditure time well spent, including, as it did, many of the hyphenated components that make several hours of one’s lifetime so full of life. There was tunnel-yelling and back-floating and story-telling and beer-drinking; there was bike-riding and bar-hopping and friend-shipping and night-swimming, along with weed-smoking, tequila-shooting, booze-vaping, and star-gazing.
Google Maps was our virtual Joeball, (how he is missed!) directing us to yet another semi-secret waterfront pocket park, this one facing west so that immersion was achieved by Civil Twilight under a sky striated by bands of orange, pink, and purple with a waxing gibbous moon rising behind a pane of frosted glass to the southeast.
In her widely anthologized, “The Summer Day,” poet Mary Oliver reflects, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” And she asks us, in closing, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”
“To be idle and blessed” is her suggestion of what we ought to be doing all day.
Seems legit.
And I’ll take that as guidance as well for how to spend the hours of an evening: so much blessed idling out on two wheels, so wild, so precious, and so alive.
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