What do I do when presented with a few free hours alone on a rainy Saturday? As I get older I've gotten more critical about how I choose to spend my time, mainly because I've become keenly aware of the fact that we don't get an unlimited amount of it to spend. Reminders are all around me, so it would seem that the worst thing we can do is to waste our hours on things not really worth doing.
The picky eater can get too picky though - inadvertently starving himself in the process. I've been so worried about not wasting my time, that I've actually been wasting my time. For a while I've been troubled because I can't seem to find anything to get excited about, but I think I've just been searching at the wrong scale. I've been looking for excitement, enlightenment and fulfillment in massive doses, but often in life the most thrilling and fulfilling moments are the smallest and easiest to overlook.
When my youngest daughter and I rode bikes together "all the way" to her school this spring, she was completely thrilled. We had to take pictures. She ran into the school, interrupting a Girl Scouts meeting to tell my wife and her older sister that we were there. She sent a text message to my sister announcing the accomplishment. Three quarters of a mile meant the world to her. How in the world could I have missed that lesson?
Yesterday when confronted with 3-4 hours alone on a rainy Saturday I went back to the basics. Simple things. I grabbed the new camera and took a drive to a nearby church because the building is interesting and I thought it would make for a good place to practice shooting. Never mind that the rain was coming down in buckets and I couldn't even really get out of the car. I took the ride anyway and listened to music along the way. I tried some shots with the car window rolled down, but that really didn't work out. I stopped for coffee on the way back home. When the rain let up, I went out in the front yard and aimed the camera at the Japanese maple outside our front window (the picture up top). I played with the dog. When it got dark I went out for a while and took some night shots, doing the best I could in the light rain. I read more of a book that's been sitting in my Kindle half-read for a year now. Nothing worth making a movie about, but it was a good day and I'm happy with it.
As it turns out, a very large number of things are actually worth doing on a rainy Saturday. Lets see what we can find for a rainy Sunday.
