The size of one day

"So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." — Psalm 90:12

I do not number my days. I have never once sat down and worked out how many I have had or how many are likely left, and I am not going to start, and I want to say why, because that verse gets used on people in a way I have come to mind.

It gets used to frighten. Number your days — meaning you have fewer than you think, so hurry, so get right, so make it count. I have heard it preached that way and I have watched it land on people who were already frightened, and it did not make them wise. It made them tired.

Here is what I think the numbering is, at seventy-seven, having had a good many of them.

I know what a day is. That is the whole of it. I know what one day can hold and what it cannot. I know a day holds a walk down the road with a slow dog, and the list at the table, and something put in the ground or taken out of it, and a phone call or the absence of a phone call, and one hard thing usually. That is a day. It will not hold nine hard things. It will not hold a repaired daughter. It will not hold you deciding to be a different woman than you were on Thursday.

A young woman does not know that. I did not. I was thirty-four and I thought a day was a container you could keep loading. I would put in the children and the house and the church thing I had said yes to and something for Earl and something for my mother, and then I would lie there at eleven at night going over the part I had not gotten to, and I called that being responsible.

Numbering your days is not counting how many are left. It is learning the size of one.

And the size of one is small. That is the wisdom part, and it is not a frightening thing at all, it is a relief so large I can hardly say it. This day is small. I am to do this day. Not the whole remainder. Not the arithmetic. Today, which will hold a walk, and the list, and the tomatoes I am still not pulling, and the one hard thing, which there always is.

That is a full day. I have not got room for anything else, and I have stopped apologizing for it.

Teach me the size of one day, Lord, and let that be enough of a lesson for a Friday.