The Measure of our Days

I spent Valentine's Day in the simple state of being. No reading. No writing. No client projects. No head bowed down toward work. Taking a small holiday for the mind and not stopping to count (as is my habit) just what I was achieving, not regretting that which I was not striking from my have-to-do-that list. There are no measures for the well-lived day. There are, instead, encounters—with old high-school friends, with the chocolate man at the farmer's market, with a father over lunch, with the waitress who remembers that you like your tuna rare, with a friend's long laughter on the phone, with the son who texts you from the heat of a college basketball game: Hey. Mom. We're winning.

Late in the afternoon we watched a movie. Dusk was falling when the opening credits rolled in and it was dark as the film slipped away. In between something had happened to the world outside—it had gone white and showy with enormous floating flakes, and there was a glow on those flakes, as if they were lit from below, as if the earth in winter is still somehow radiant. There was so much snow, and it fell so fast, and the flakes were so fat, and it was all so thick with beauty. I stood and I watched it coming. I took no photographs. Joy was the measure of my day.