how we spend our days

It’s Wednesday morning, after a pseudo holiday yesterday, on Remembrance Day, and in going through my 111 emails this morning (yikes) I came across this quote by Annie Dillard:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

What I love most about this quote is the “of course” because, truly, how can we not know this? And yet when I think about myself most of the time, it’s probably far more in the realm of who I want to be — or, unfortunately, who I’ve been – rather than who I am right this second.

Yesterday I took some time to go through my new office (which my lovely husband made for me, complete with a dreamed-about wall of books) and clean out boxes of miscellany. Among the things I stumbled across, which included cassette tapes of interviews with EA executives, old photographs of old lives, and a thousand non-functional pens, were old diaries and notebooks. In total, now that my husband has organized my things, I must have 35 or 40 of the things, with terrible poems, half-written song lyrics, and all the angst of 37 years. Going through them, I noticed two things: first, I annoyingly wrote for far too long about feelings, responses, reactions, omitting the actual meat of things — the facts of the matter, details about what the hell was actually going on. Infuriating. Second, I still for the most part sound like I sound in my head. Even at 21, when things were too dramatic for words, there’s a nugget there that I know. And not just because I remember it. Mostly I don’t. Mostly reading these old diaries is like reading those of a stranger. Sometimes fascinating, sometimes dull as stone. On the whole, though, I’ve spent a lot of days in interesting ways — and they do add up.