I was roller skating through a park and at was marvelous. I was swaying and grooving, doing turns, and moving my skated feet in fancy moves. To the left, I saw a panther or a mountain lion, a very large cat. He was crouched low preparing for a sprint, looking for a chase. I picked up speed as the path curved this way and that way. Then I saw another panther crouched in a tree up ahead of me. I skated past as he leaped from the branch. Now I had two large cats chasing me as I continued down the path. I started to seeing more mountain lions and panthers crouching under bushes, near trees, in trees and all of them joined the first two so that now I had a herd of large cats chasing me through the park. Even though I had picked up my pace and was staying ahead of all the big cats, I was still swaying and grooving, doing an occasional turn and moving my skated feet in fancy moves.

I have gotten into the habit of sitting down on Sunday mornings and filling out a calendar for the week. This was a practice I started doing way before the pandemic. It got put on pause for a while because of the pandemic. Now that I have figured out a way to live a life during a pandemic, I have picked up the habit again. I write down what exercises I am doing on what days. I schedule the dog walks and my yoga time, what days I am in the office. I write in meeting times and seminar times and COVID testing times. Somewhere in the margins, I write down a couple of personal goals for the week. Things are written in different colors. Gray for exercise. Orange for work. Purple for all the other stuff because I like purple. I write all of these things down and then I never look at it again.

Not once during the week do I open up this calendar and review the things to be done or check off things that have been accomplished. It seems that just the act of writing it all down is enough. Some of the things on the calendar are just things that I do anyway. There isn’t even really any reason to write them down. It’s like one of Chris’s daily lists that included things like ‘take shower’ and ‘brush teeth’. The exercise. The dog walks. Those are things I just get up and do. I don’t need to write in a yoga time because I just always make space for my practice. That work meeting I have every other Thursday? I have to write that down because I forget about it every time. I cannot commit to daily journaling or a traditional meditation practice, even though both of those things have made an appearance in the ‘personal goals’ section of my calendar. This Sunday morning practice of writing down what I should expect for the week seems to be something I can commit to doing. It is something that makes me feel more focused for the week ahead. It establishes my intentions for myself for the week to come. Even if it is the same intentions from the week before and the week before that.

I believe it is this simple act of weekly planning that keeps me skating ahead of the large cats. I believe that in time, I will not just be skating ahead of the panthers and mountain lions. I will be skating backwards while I take pictures of those beast chasing me.