Another Week Begins

It's late o'clock, I'm tired, and I'm finally finished with all my work that is due tomorrow, but I find myself wanting to stay up just a little bit later. Why? Partly because I have been wanting for the past day or two to publish something here. Largely because I love listening to the Xtension Chords and was not ready for the song to end.

I was reading Zen Habits today and came across the classic question of what if you only had X time to live? It was certainly not the first time I had heard the question but I thought about it for longer than I probably ever have before. In the end, I didn't have an answer, but I had a question of my own. Lying on my bed, I tilted my head back and saw my closet. Thinking about what really matters, I asked myself how much of my closet I would really care about losing. Or to invert that, what would I truly want to save if I had to watch everything else go up in flames? What would I want to save if I lost everything on that wall? In my room? In the end I decided there were two things I owned here that I would need to save. There are only two things that really, really matter.

As I thought about why these things were important to me, I was amused to realize just how long and how clearly I had already known about the bigger priorities in my life that they represent. I hadn't made a startling new insight so much as an affirmation of something I had already known. But perhaps that is exactly the point of this kind of exercise. The question of what is really important to us isn't supposed to be difficult. It is supposed to be a reminder. And remind me it did. I am happy to report I made time for both of my priorities today. In other words, I did things that really mattered.

And now for the $64,000 question: what were my two things?