Here's my day:

I read the newspaper at breakfast, watch the news at the gym, read a book over lunch, juggle 12 things at once at work, listen to This American Life while cooking dinner and watch Top Chef while eating it, flip through a magazine while talking on the phone to my mom back in Ohio (while feigning enthusiasm about her cat's latest antics), and fall asleep worrying about tomorrow.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Something needs to change here, wouldn't you say, faithful reader? Not the stuff of my life itself, necessarily, but the Me that lives in it. The things that are wonderful about my life are innumerable (plus a few oh-so-minor, trivial complications and confusions), but I haven't been fully living these wonderful things because I'm always mentally somewhere else. If you read my last post ("Home"), you might remember a catalog of people, places, and things that make my life here rich and meaningful: home. But where am I? Where is my attention? Somewhere else! I am always somewhere else!

Well. The times, they are a changin'.

These past few weeks I have been working on staying awake and paying attention. I am trying to stay here, now, and live for once in the Where I Am, not in the Where I Want To Be. I dreamt of moving to Germany; then I dreamt of law school and moving back to America. I edit, revise, form some new dreams, but always live in some future realization of things I think I need to achieve before I can give myself permission to relax and enjoy.

It's time to live now. Now. Now. Now. Here. Now. Feel of fingers on keyboard, morning light through the window, Vee's fresh-roasted coffee, quinoa breakfast porridge. Here I am, life, come and get me.

Today, I want to dream of Today. I want to drink my coffee while I'm drinking my coffee, feel my muscles groan and wheeze on my morning jog, give my full attention and effort to my job, even if it's not my dream job, eat lunch while I'm eating lunch (mindfully, savoring each spoonful of Nigella's carrot lentil soup), walk home and feel the sun on my skin, stop at the corner vegetable market, dress my salad while I'm dressing my salad, feel the soapy suds on my skin while I'm washing the dishes, fall asleep paying attention to the sweet heavy drowsiness casting its long shadow until I... (zzzzz...)

Because this - this very life, the moment of reading these words - (what are you doing? where are you? what kind of mood are you in? ) - these are the seconds of life, fleeting, grains falling, uncapturable, non-retainable! There it goes! and.... gone.

I'm trying to wake up.

Are you, too?