And Daniel, choosing — over and over, in small ways that compounded — to be on the same side of the problem as me.
That last part is the one that mattered most. The rest was logistics.
I live in my house. The cumin is where it belongs. My husband stirs his coffee three times in the morning and when it’s two or four I ask him what’s on his mind, and he usually tells me.
These are not grand things. They are the things that, added together, constitute a life that is genuinely mine.
That is enough.
The Week Before the Walk
There were ten days between the Sunday dish conversation and the Saturday morning walk, and I want to tell you about them because they were not inert days. They were the days in which I was deciding something, even though at the time I would not have called it deciding.
I was doing what I often do when I am processing something I have not yet named: I was very productive at work. I delivered the Monday project deliverable on time. I joined two additional calls I had not originally been scheduled for, because the extra calls gave me something specific to focus on and something specific to point to at the end of each day as evidence that I had not wasted it.
This is not a healthy coping mechanism exactly, but it is mine, and I note it because the productivity during those ten days was inversely proportional to the conversation I needed to have and had not yet had.