Every day I sit down with my lined journal, write the date in pretty lettering, and reflect in tidy cursive script, with a fountain pen, on what’s happening with me. Some days it’s harder than others to come up with something, but I have only about 16 entries to go before I have written every day for a year, which was the goal.

Yesterday, I realized as I was reflecting on what to write, I basically did nothing.

All I did was:

• do housework (dishes, laundry, sweeping, scraping cat litter)
• read (finished one book, started another, read some of a third, took notes, read a friend’s email twice, scanned my Mastodon feed and the Reddit feed)
• write (every day I write in my journal and write a blog post. Yesterday I wrote a couple of posts on other accounts)
• do homework (French sentences, in tidy print with my Apple Pencil on my iPad)
• take a nice walk (down past the Fan Fest under construction that’s going to hold my neighborhood hostage starting Thursday, then I walked up the hill and took the bus home)
• make meals (today is the third day of a nice salad with chicken in it, and I don’t know how people feed themselves regularly because it’s a strain on my nerves to plan meals; I am the kind of person who has a couple of cheese bites and a handful of crackers standing up when I get hungry.)
• stack six cases of cat food cans on the windowsill because the order came earlier in the week.
• take a nap, with the cat, in my recliner, like a retired person, which I am.
• prepare a clothing donation, three cartons, to be put out on the front step for pickup
• chat with neighbors, text with my kid (I quoted Yeats’ “Second Coming” to them and they laughed), text with a friend, talk to another friend (I told her that a sudden overwhelming urge to sell their house and buy a new one was fine, but they should consider what they are avoiding, because I’ve been there; I spent the entire last months of my husband’s life wanting to move to a smaller house as soon as he was dead. They call that desire the yearning for a “geographic cure” in AA.).
• do my stretches and bodyweight exercises (no planks or pushups; I’m doing crunches and sit-ups and can’t wait to see how I injure myself with those).
• wash my hair and part it on the opposite side, as an adventure
• watch a baseball game (Phillies won 5-2 against the Blue Jays)
• wait for a delivery (the driver walked past my house with a cart in early afternoon but didn’t deliver my order until the second time she came through, which she realized she had done when she saw me and I told her it was fine).
• reflect that I’m glad to be alive after all, and glad that I am retired so I can finally get all the important things achieved.

Oh, there were other things I did yesterday, of course. Petting the cat and telling him it’s not actually time to eat yet and he’s going to have to wait for another four hours is one heck of an accomplishment, let me tell you. And I spent a goodly amount of time realizing that since I stopped doing pushups and planks, my shoulder is finally not a hollow ball of fire and maybe I don’t have to go get an X-ray after all. Also, I noticed that the nerve problem in my hip seems to be subsiding, ever since I got a new mattress.

So nothing. And that, I tell myself firmly, is all right. I have done enough.

Today will be a little busier; I have French class, and I go to a Zoom meeting on Tuesday nights. And do a few other things in between, of course, so basically nothing.