Afraid of Blank Space on My Calendar

Bloganuary writing prompt

What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?

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I have a friend who walked into Lake Michigan on New Year’s Day because it was on his bucket list. Before that he’d jumped out of a plane, but one that flew much higher than the plane he jumped out of in Vietnam. He’s ticking off things he’s scared to do, although as a combat medic, I can’t imagine there’s much he would be scared to do. Still.

Me? I’m in the secretary class. I don’t jump out of planes or climb mountains in foreign countries although twice I walked sixty miles in three days (yes, twenty miles a day) but it was fraught with difficulties and other blisters. Although I was glad I did it, I was struck by the nonsense of it. So many granola bars and string cheeses. If you’ve done a race or marathon, you know what I’m talking about. That stuff provides occasions to stop walking, but it stuffs you up, big time. You heard it here.

At the moment, what I’m most scared of is an empty calendar. I hunger for days when I have no meetings or obligations and then, when they pop up, I wring my hands at the thought that I’m disengaged, irrelevant, sidelined, sitting in the vast parking lot of life next to a shuttered K-Mart.

It’s grim. And also a little preposterous and precious. Really? What I’m afraid of is having no meetings? Lordy.

People knit and have lunch and paint their cupboards a beautiful goldenrod to remember old times. They sit on the back porch after riding their bikes and read books while it’s still daylight instead of waiting until going to bed. I am not like them. I don’t know why.

When I was growing up, our family owned a Ben Franklin store. The store was open six days a week, but then my father started to ruminate on how K-Mart was beating his time by being open on Sunday which meant he could no longer relax and play croquet in the backyard or wash his car on Sunday listening to the Detroit Tigers on the radio, he really had to open the store, but just 10-6. So, he did, and it made him feel so much better.

Makes sense to me.