We spent tonight wasting fuel.
It was late, we had just finished a day of our usual where we added activity after activity. Neither of us slept very well the night prior on account of staying up too long. We had played with nieces and nephews, run errands, attended a birthday party where we played with said nieces and nephews again (the three-year-old was very fond of putting us in the office, which he made into a jail), went to an escape room where we finished in record time, grabbed food, and just started driving out on the highway into the great nowhere.
Wow. That’s a paragraph that me a year ago wouldn’t have ever expected to write. But here I am. Up late. Writing this post. Why?
Because somewhere on that drive we stopped just to look at a buffalo on the side of the road.
We weren’t going anywhere. We were driving to drive. We talked about life. Future plans. The new apartment we’re signing on. The fact it has a dog washing station for the dog we might get. How the day went. Our gym plans for tomorrow. If you’d rather fight 1 bear-sized ant or 1000 ant-sized bears, discounting the fact that the ant doesn’t have lungs and couldn’t breathe. The usual. And we stopped to look at a buffalo.
We talked about him. About how the face really does kind of look like a cow, if you look past the fur. About if he has friends. How the mating goals of the park might be going. If we think he would move if a hiker came down the very human path he was walking on. This made me pause and take this in. We discussed an animal on the side of the road, on a drive we did not need to be on, and yet I found myself not wanting to go back to get anything done. Not for lack of things to do, but for what a good time we were having doing nothing at all.
I did not “accomplish” anything today. It was a rest day, and I did not work, or learn anything officially. But I chalk it up as one of my best days, and more and more days look like this as time goes on. And for once in my life, I am ok with that. I accomplished living today, and I loved every second of that late-night drive that burned gas.