No Lost Days
Photograph by the author.
This past Friday morning I met two friends at a coffee truck parked near a small lake not far from home. We walked the path around the water, cups in hand, talking about nothing important and everything that mattered.
Afterward we stopped at the library. I'd gotten a card number online but still needed the physical thing. While we were there, one of the librarians noticed my Michigan cap and asked where I was from. We ended up in a small impromptu conversation about towns and landmarks we all knew. A brief, warm exchange with strangers that wouldn't have happened if I'd been anywhere else, doing anything else.
It was a good morning. I was fully present through all of it.
The guilt came later.
Not about the morning itself — I couldn't find anything wrong with it if I tried. But I hadn't touched any of my art projects, and I knew the weekend was coming, which I always keep free for activities with Kenn and other friends. The math was simple and uncomfortable: this one day of not making anything was going to stretch through the weekend. And my art projects would sit waiting. And I'd feel guilty for not having made progress.
I'm not behind on a deadline. There is no deadline. What I'm chasing is a future version of myself — someone with a body of work, a clearer sense of what I'm drawn to, proof that when I say I'm an artist I mean something real by it. I have projects underway that I'm itching to push further, and some days the impatience to get there is its own kind of pressure. Every day I don't work feels like a day that person has to wait a little longer.
I know how that sounds. I also know it's exactly how it feels.
Friends here, people who've made this same adjustment before me, tell me it takes time. Family says the same. I believe them. I repeat it to myself on mornings like the one after Friday, when the guilt shows up. It takes time. You have the rest of your life. Both true. Neither fully baked in yet.
What I'm starting to understand is that I'm still carrying an old reflex. For a long time, output was how I proved my value. Deliverables, decisions, things made and handed over. That's a hard metric to unlearn, and apparently it doesn't unlearn just because the context changes. It packed itself up and came with me into this new life, and now it applies the same standard to sketchbooks and watercolors and mornings at a coffee truck by a lake.
There are no lost days. Not when the day had a lake and two friends and a stranger in a library who knew the same Michigan towns I did. Not when I was present, connected, alive in the hours as they passed.
I didn't lose Friday. I lived it.
The art will still be there Monday.
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