This week is my “day off week”.

I am very excited.

I’m so excited that I lose track of time….Tuesday feels like it should be Friday, Wednesday feels like it should be Friday…you can only imagine what Thursday must feel like.

There are happy storm clouds rumbling off the coast of Pleasure Island…and I can hear the approaching day off like it was…. only days away.

So, yes….I am excited.

I woke up this morning thinking that I was hearing someone whisper my name, but when I opened my eyes saying, “What?!”, everyone in the room was asleep.

That was pretty weird..but I’d overslept by about an hour, so I considered it provident and jumped quietly out of bed to throw my clothes on and start writing this blog.

Some of these weeks that have a day off waiting at the end of them make me feel like I’m pulling boats to get to them…dragging all the days that are in between “what I do all the time” and “what I think that I want to do when I’m not doing what I do all the time”.

Pulling these boats…straining through the water…not looking back….making it through to the other side.

I wonder what I’m missing just looking forward?

That’s the way a person lives to be successful, though, right? Plow on…push forward…eye on the prize. You have to be “goal oriented”…you have to rush forwards towards the carrot or you won’t get anywhere. You won’t “arrive”.

You won’t be a winner.

But where do all those days go that are in between what you rush towards and what you’re doing “right now”?

What happens to them?

Do you get so fixated on the boats you’re pulling that you don’t even notice the water you’re swimming in?

Or, if you notice the water at all, you curse it because it’s the thing that lies between what “is” and what “should be”?

My waiting for a rare Saturday isn’t some kind of existential emergency. I’m not overwrought about much these days….and I enjoy most of what leads up to the “fun stuff”.

I’m not in such a hurry that I don’t enjoy things.

Why, just the other day, I went to a store we have in our town that’s kind of a “liquidation center” where they sell damaged freight and store pulls, etc. and bought ten dollars and fifty-six cents worth of candy. They sell candy bars 5 for a dollar…so it was ….lets see….a bunch of candy bars. It was bags of candy.

Don’t tell me that I don’t live in the moment. I know how to have a good time.

(What would Jack LaLanne say about all that candy?)

But the day off dangling ahead of me is just another day…the icing on a big cake. I love not doing what I have to do sometimes. I like it when I can get close to doing what I choose to do.

Who doesn’t like that? That’s a “no brainer”…not a blog topic.

But I’ll keep pulling these boats…sure that there is a reason for the things at the end of the rope that slow my swim to Pleasure Island…pushing through this water and missing things along the journey.

It’s, after all, what I do.