Wednesday - and I'm not sailing

I had good intentions. I even marked on my dateook, "sailing - take picnic lunch". But that memo was soon struck with a bold sharpie when meetings and deadlines took over. Over that sentiment is now, "meet with R at project, 5 PM".

As I dashed out of my house this morning - running late to meeting - I looked at my still water drenched garden and sighed. Such good intentions.

I soldiered on during the week, though. Even if I couldn't nurture myself with gardening and sailing, I could read about them. That's what well-intentioned people do when they are too busy to do the things they really want to do. Some read about relationships with their kids, some read about goals they should set. As I sat in my new coffee house haunt (where I had set intentions to write every day for 45 minutes before I started my day -- this is my first time), I lugged my "Fundamentals of Sailing". Whenever people asked about my weekend I would say (probably too loudly), "I WENT SAILING" to really impress people with how much time I had to do things like that.

I re-set the goal to go sailing. And therein lies the problem. Sailing - and gardening - -and other healing organic enterprises - cannot be neatly relagated to a calendar, squeezed between "take cleaning" and "pick up dog food". It is the meandering that counts, that really makes them do their magic. You bend over, you start weeding and three hours later you emerge with a dirty hands and a smile on your face.

My sailing instructor insists that sailing will add ten years to your life. He told us the story about a guy who had started sailing after a bad heart attack. Things looked pretty grim for him and doctors had little hope he'd really heal. After six months of sailing, he had lost weight and his life was returning.

I bet he wouldn't put off the picnic lunch for the meeting with R.