Today’s challenge is the kind of challenge I enjoy when I am feeling overwhelmed. It seems like the rest of my universe has lots of Big Tasks to be completed. Big Tasks, comprised of tiny little tasks, some of which are in my head, some of them on scraps of paper, many of them on lists on my phone, on calendars with alarms attached, some of them existing only in my heart. Sometimes you need a simple directive.
Day 79: Become an expert on today. A quick trip to Wikipedia’s entry about the 22nd day of March has me feeling like I learned a fair amount. And isn’t that what qualifies a person as an expert these days? A quick google search on the subject?
In doing my research I got sidetracked, as one is apt to do… On March 22, 1978 Karl Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas died. He fell from a tight-rope.
If you weren’t raised in my house you probably didn’t think about the Flying Wallendas all that often. But we were big on the circus as kids, and even bigger on jumping out of trees in the back yard. I know I have asked Em to get down from somewhere, asking her if she “thinks she is one of the Flying Wallendas?”
I’m going to call it a day. If knowing that Karl Wallenda died on March 22 isn’t enough to make me an expert, then I don’t wanna be one.
On another day I might have kept reading… but I kinda feel like I have a lot of shit already figured out. I might not really be an expert on March 22. but I am an expert on crying. I am emotional, wildly so, some might say. And yesterday someone I love dearly had a moment in time where he realized, or perhaps only remembered, the tremendous joy that one can feel in just letting those big, fat tears roll down your face. And my heart was full and I felt like the smartest woman alive. Because I already knew that. It’s not fair to only let the tears escape when you can’t hold them in, when they are welling up deep from grief or despair. The sweetest tears are those that surprise you. The tears that come from a place of joy and of love. It’s easy to forget that these tears exist. And if you spend too long trying to contain your tears they are the first to elude you.
If this was handwritten there’d be big, fat splotches of tears on the page here. Because my life changed irrevocably on March 22nd, 2010. I don’t think it was an accident that I sat down to write this today. MQD, Em and I spent the first night in our home together on March 22. It was months before he proposed. And more than a year before we will be wed. But to me… and I believe to him… it was the no turning back moment. It was the day we became a family. Granted we are no family of flying Wallendas. But I think we bring a certain something to the party.
Excitement on the side 
That whole paragraph about crying? This is why I love you. Maybe you’re not an expert on March 22 historically speaking, but I think you are my defining expert on March 22 right now.
Aw, shucks. Not everyone appreciates my unabashed love of crying. :) I really hope we manage to be in the same place at the same time this century, Josh. I am certain I will shower you with tears.