There Is No Beginning

I did not get the cleaning done yesterday that I wanted to, but I did get several errands done, including getting the dog groomed. That was a biggie because she had begun to stink. And they were errands that I would have put off until “tomorrow,” or the next day or…… if I had sat down at my computer. So it was still a productive day in terms of the daily living of life chores that I find so difficult to accomplish now-a-days.

One of my more pleasurable errands took me into Target which, believe it or not, I find relaxing. Even if I am there to buy practical things, as I was yesterday, there are always pretty things to look at: makeup, clothes, jewelry. And that always relaxes me.

I had paused to look at some necklaces, when two of them in the locked up case struck me. They were small, and probably aimed at the pre-teen set, but it was their very delicacy that had first attracted me. Each one was affixed to a card to better display it, and had a nugget of wisdom written at the bottom. The two that I kept starting at were an infinity symbol and a very small solid heart. The infinity necklace had written below it, as best as my memory can recall, “There is no beginning and no end. Just life lived with infinite passion.” And displayed very close to it, the card for the small heat said something like “Small acts done with a great heart.”

Taken together, they are a pretty good description of what I strive for. My “infinite” passion certainly feels less than it once was. In fact, even thinking about infinite makes me tired. Truly. I can no longer sing, or play with my grandchild with the same energy that I once had. It is hard to live completely in the moment, when chronic fatigue dogs my every step and I frequently find myself wondering, no matter how much I am enjoying something, “How long before I can lie down?”

But I think that I can do small acts with a big heart. Sometimes it’s smiling at someone as I pass. Or maybe it’s putting away the dishes in the dishwasher so my husband doesn’t have to do it, even though it takes the last bit of energy I have. Sometimes it’s staying in bed even though I don’t want to, so that I don’t further exhausted myself and thus increase the work my husband has to do. I can no longer measure my life by the things I can accomplish. Right now I cannot teach a class of fifth graders, and I don’t think I’ll be hiking to 10,000 feet anytime soon. (And yes, I am still super proud that I did that!) But I’m not going to give up on living. I’m just not. And I can do things with a big heart. And with as much infinite passion as I now posses, which means that it is, for me, right now, still infinite.