Month: January 2023

After Christmastime, the church enters what’s known as Ordinary Time, and I feel like my own life this month has entered a kind of “ordinary time” that is very welcome after the ordeals of Christmas and New Year’s.

I don’t mean the normal busy flurry of activity that precedes Christmas or the merriment and unstructured time of the Christmas Octave. I mean my personal ordeals, which included catching a cold that then led to a wicked cough, which then led to back pain and sciatica in my right leg and a stint in the emergency room, and an MRI, and a spinal injection to help ease the pain, and now here I am on nerve medicine, muscle relaxers, and ibuprofen trying to manage the pain and get on with life.

And I am getting on with life. On these days when the kids are all in school, and I can sit at my desk and work, and the house is (relatively) in order, and I know what needs to be done and I have time (and health, enough) to do it, I am content. This is that ordinary time I referenced above, that time when the days pass uneventfully but with satisfaction: a day well done, a life unremarkable but nevertheless joyful.

Weirdly, despite my continued leg pain, I am joyful. I don’t know if it’s the effects of my new Panda Planner (which I can’t believe I’ve become a “planner person,” but I must say, having used the Panda Planner for almost three weeks, I can feel a difference in my organization, productivity, and well-being), or if my joy comes from facing so much physical pain that I’ve had to cling to whatever happiness and peace I can muster in order to stay sane and not despair, or maybe it’s just the medicines I’m taking that are blissing me out, but whatever the cause of the joy, I am here for it.

Maybe it’s the fact that for the past two and a half weeks, I’ve been awake at 6:30 a.m. due to the leg pain, and I’ve used those early morning hours to walk slowly around the house and listen to the Liturgy of the Hours. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time someone has found joy in early morning prayer. Saints and monks can testify to that.

I don’t know if it’s a middle-age thing (since I am officially middle-aged), but I can’t get over how grateful I am for the experience of “ordinary time.” Habit, predictability, the incremental everyday work that builds into satisfying accomplishment: I like the rhythm of it. I like that things seem ordered. Yes, of course, I still have the chaos that comes with raising happy, wild, volatile young children, but that chaos is mitigated by the ordinary beats of ordinary time. There are no big events or holidays ahead, no trips or happenings to plan for. Yes, I still have deadlines and stress, but for this brief respite in January, I can just let myself settle into the regularities of ordinary life.

It’s the ebb and flow. I love the excitement of Christmastime, but now I love the quiet of Ordinary. We need both to have a balanced life.