I’m baking bread today and thinking about how, if I could, I would freeze time right here and now. These are long days and trying times and good gracious, some days I’m up to my elbows in throw up and poop and tears, but I’d rather be here than there.
There is closer than I like to believe. There is right next door to teenagers and licenses and proms and graduations. There is where so many of my friends are this week, staring down eighteen years that have given them a capped and gowned child who is now so much more than just their baby.
So today I’m baking bread and forcing the act of slow. Life wasn’t meant to be a hurry. Today I’m freezing time a bit in my own way. I’m giving myself permission to slow down.
Because when I forget to be slow, I overschedule and overbook and overrun my life with all good things, but there’s little time to enjoy. There’s little time to just be.
I want to remember when it seems all I’m doing is the work of folding the laundry and washing the dishes and reading the books and combing the tangles and wiping the floor and driving the car, that life’s not meant to be lived in a hurry. It’s not supposed to be tedious and draining and fleeting.
There’s a point in the slow working, in the rhythmic kneading of bread, and the constant reading of Seuss, and the never-ending stacking of shirts. These moments are the work that helps me build my children’s childhood.
These are the moments that will get us from here to there. These moments are our daily bread.
Lindsey P. Brackett 