Something is happening here on the second mountain of aging that hasn’t happened in 70 years: a blank day on the calendar. Something else is happening too: I’m OK with it.
After years priding myself on my productivity, facing an empty day without panic is a hard-won skill. There were all those years of rising to the occasion life relentlessly presents to us along the way. We complain about the length of our to-do lists, but they can keep us busy enough so that we have a degree of protection from issues of meaning that might otherwise inspire us to question the whole three-ring circus that describes most of our lives.
Then Sunday happened. There was going to be lunch with friends, but that was canceled just before we went to bed. It was at that moment that I realized that I had, despite the last 7 decades of busyness, managed to prepare myself to face emptiness without it becoming an abyss.
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