There’s a little game we ought to play with ourselves every now and then.
It’s called:
“When was the last time?”
And it primarily involves asking yourself, when was the last time you did the little things in life? I hate that we’re calling them the little things because they’re actually very big. They should be, to you, personally.
When was the last time you ate breakfast for breakfast and lunch and then dinner?
Because you couldn’t care less about cooking balanced meals.
It’s about the whipped cream on the pancake and the sensation that it’s coming every few hours.
When was the last time you watched “Gilmore Girls” on loop with your mother?
Despite all the intellectually charged stuff available for viewing, did you manage a few laughs watching this very ordinary show that glaringly mirrors your own relationship with your mother and hers with hers?
When was the last time you peeled an orange or a banana and thought far too caringly about how it feels being peeled like that, all the time? (This is not crazy, this is the feeling that fruits must be felt for. Why, with all of us, whacky humans and animals stealing their skin for ours to glow.)
Please continue playing even if you thought the question above is entirely round the bend.
When was the last time you breezed through a book because it was an easy, breezy, no-brainer read and not a detailed chronology of human civilization and science or a deeply serious analysis of history or the economy?
When was the last time you played a game of chess with your elder brother, who you are certain will beat you to it, but you love the false sense of competition and the true sense of sibling rivalry that you take into it?
When was the last time you ate a piece of cake because eating a piece of cake is a piece of cake?
And every day IS your birthday.
When was the last time you napped from mid-morning to mid-afternoon because you simply napped or needed a nap or wanted to nap?
Can we stop criminalizing naps? They’re necessary!
When was the last time you cuddled your pillows like they were people?
Because they make the bed warmer and softer and the nap longer.
When was the last time you thought about marine life or spoke to a bird on your window sill about the issues that fish are having in the sea?
The sky and the sea may be far from one another but they are not distant.
When was the last time you did something just to feel closer to yourself?
When was the last time you just lost a day?
And it didn’t mean a thing.
Because it doesn’t in fact mean a thing.
It doesn’t make a big difference to the world; to the general functioning of the world.
It goes on without us.
We aren’t so important, really.
Nobody is.
We can take out time for ourselves.
We can simply do nothing and be. Or do something and yet, just be.
We don’t have to walk out onto the road and own it or run the day every day.
The road will live. It will run. Things will run on it.
And you’ll live a bit more, if you don’t have to constantly own it, if you don’t have to constantly run on it.
When was the last time…?
And if the answer is a long time ago or never,
You know you’ve been getting it wrong for far too long.
Go grab the little things.
They run out faster than you think.
And to you, for you, they will always be big.
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