Making the most

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day: the sun was shining, the sky was blue and it was even actually warm. Sandwiched between dull, damp days either side it felt even more precious and needed to be savoured.

Long before some other major event was scheduled for this weekend, it was the date set for the Birmingham half-marathon and 10k run: I was very glad, for their sake that it fell on the dry day ... for many people it looked quite painful enough without any rainstorms to negotiate! Matthew, who lives on the route, had invited a few of us over for a front garden barbecue to take advantage of the road closures. I wonder what our communities would look like if traffic noise and fumes didn't mostly prevent us from gathering in front of where we live? But I digress. It was my first barbecue of the season and good food and good company out in the sunshine made it a most enjoyable way to spend a few hours. 

The previous day I had been due to take some of the families I work with to the Coronation Celebrations in the city centre. This had been quite some dilemma for me in the run-up ... I will surprise no-one by saying I am no monarchist and not in favour of all this royal nonsense. But if I could park the cause behind it, it was going to be a family-friendly festival of live music and entertainment and it felt more wrong to stand on my principles to a point of depriving people far less privileged than me the chance to be part of something fun. But then rain stopped play because no-one bar hardcore royalists could have been tempted to an outdoor party in pouring rain! 

Having worked out the timings, I figured I could comfortably fit cheering on the runners and an early-lunchtime barbecue and still take the families down to the city centre in the late afternoon sunshine. I arrived to find some of the kids already dressed-up in their party clothes and from the handful waiting at the door for me to arrive I had gathered up over thirty people by the time we set off. I did, really, very little: simply coming together with them to an open, public space: but while one or two might have done, the majority wouldn't have had the confidence (or the bus money) to get there without being accompanied. I later joked with colleagues that spending an afternoon face-painting union flags possibly counts as my most serious act of commitment to any job ever! The gratitude expressed suggests it was absolutely the right call.  

I regularly remind myself that I really enjoy walking,  so partly prompted by road closures and tempted by the sunshine, I strung the whole day together by walking between the various locations. I was able to do so mostly along quiet backstreets and canal towpaths. I really enjoy walking and chatting with friends, but I also very much enjoy the quiet solitude of walking alone, consciously being present to the physical world around me. It meant getting up and going and out a bit earlier than I might have done otherwise, but it meant that rather than being dead time in between nice things the travel became very much a nice thing in and of itself. I think I'd covered just over ten miles by the time I got back home.

When I got home it was after seven but still bright and warm, something which, after the short dark days of the winter I am determined to always remember to appreciate! So I did a job I had been on my to do list for quite some time. I'd had a few pots of daffodil bulbs on my door step, from which the flowers had long since faded. Yesterday evening I planted the bulbs into the border under the hedge at the front of my house. It remains to be seen whether or not they'll come up next spring, but despite being well aware there's a very good chance they may not, whatever, there is something inherently positive about putting your hands in soil and there is something about planting things into the land which feels like a gesture of belonging, of (literally) putting down roots, here in this place. 

None of this is a judgement: on myself or anyone else for the times when "making the most" of a day looks like not setting an alarm and doing very little, or looks like sitting in front of a computer cracking on with admin, or something else. At different times, "making the most of it" looks very different. Yesterday, for me, it looked like this.