Working Weekend

“What’s the plan for the weekend,” my husband asked on Thursday evening. My husband likes to have a plan for every minute of every day of every week. Me, not so much. I knew what he was asking though. Are you coming to Oklahoma? Do I need to clean the house?

“I don’t have one,” I replied. It had been a busy week, and I was just looking forward to waking up on Saturday morning without any planned activities.

Friday was going to be an easy day. The only thing on my calendar that day was my Action Inquiry Group (AIG) call that afternoon, something I always enjoy. After that, a glass of wine and the weekend. I had read our assigned article about leading a life of inquiry, so I was feeling prepared for the AIG call. However, minutes into the call it became obvious that while I had remembered one of the assignments, I had completely forgotten another one – selecting a personal mindfulness practice.

Well crap.

I clearly remembered that I was going to do that after our last call, but that was a month ago, and I was on a work trip during that call, and the best intentions had gotten lost in the frenzy of work, travel, etc. You get the picture. I came clean to the group, and of course they reminded me that life is messy and chaotic and that they understood. I love those people!

By the end of the call, I felt like I always feel – energized, excited, and committed to select and start my mindfulness practice. I picked up my phone to download an app to get me started. Isn’t that what everyone does in this day and time? That’s when I saw the email from work. There was a problem and it needed immediate attention. Any non-plans that I had for the weekend were vanquished. I knew that I would spend the weekend working.

I had an initial moment of feeling anxious, but then I took a few deep breaths and began to feel calmer. Perhaps it was fortuitous that I had just finished the AIG call. The problem at work was not a new one. It had to do with some data reporting. We had discussed it in the past but had never adequately resolved the issue. I thought there were some discrepancies in the reporting. I called my Vice President, and we discussed ways to resolve the issue.

After we talked, he emailed me a tracking spreadsheet to compare data from previous years to the current one. I was grateful for his help. He’s very good at process improvement. My strengths lean more to the bigger picture stuff. The tracking spreadsheet was going to be helpful. I sent a text to one of our staff who keeps detailed activity reports each month and asked her to send me all of the reports from the past two years. I hated to have to do that. It was late on Friday afternoon, and I didn’t want to have to bother her. But as usual, she responded quickly and graciously. Have I mentioned that I also love our staff?!

I took a break from working on Saturday morning and went on a long walk. During my walk, I called my mother who asked me what I was doing for the weekend. I explained that I was working. Later that day, I got a text from my sister that said she had also talked to our mother who had told her that I was stressed because I was having to work through the weekend.

But I wasn’t stressed. This was a problem that needed to be fixed, and fixing it was long overdue. With each passing hour on Friday night and Saturday, as I compared the reports and entered data into the spreadsheet, a pattern began to emerge. On Saturday night, I sent the spreadsheet to my Vice President. I don’t think we have solved the issue yet. We will discuss it more next week, but I think we have a better idea about the discrepancies and are possibly closer to finding a solution.

On Sunday, I awoke and went for another long walk. I listened to an audio book. When I got home, I finally downloaded a meditation app and spent 15 minutes doing the first meditation. Then, I did something I’ve done only twice in the 5 years I’ve lived at this apartment. I put on a swimsuit and went to the pool.

When I got to the pool, there were several young women at the pool, probably all in their 20s. Their bodies were lean; their skin was tight. My body is no longer youthful. My skin is sun-damaged from too much time in the sun in my teens and 20s and too little sunscreen. But for the first time in a very long, I didn’t feel self-conscious or self-loathing. I sat in an Adirondack chair and splashed water across my arms and legs. I felt the heat from the sun. I smelled the chlorine in the pool and the scent of the sunscreen.

At one point, I got up from the chair, slid into the pool, and let the cool water wash over me. When I climbed out of the pool, I caught the eye of a young African American woman and she smiled at me. Not a judging smile, but one that was warm.

It’s been a good weekend. Maybe, I’m finally getting the hang of learning how to live mindfully.