Christopher Doesn't Do Countdowns

I’ve spent this whole week doing the thing I do before anything big. Checking things that don’t need checking. Refreshing screens that haven’t changed since the last time I looked at them. Asking myself if I’m ready roughly forty times a day, as if the answer might be different by the fortieth time.

Christopher has watched all of this happen from various strategic napping locations around the house, and he has not once seemed impressed.

He doesn’t do countdowns. There’s no version of Christopher pacing by the door because something’s arriving in four days instead of five. Time, as far as I can tell, is not a thing he tracks. There’s now, and there’s not-now, and he seems to trust that whatever’s supposed to happen will happen, and he’ll be there for it when it does, probably from a couch, probably mid-stretch.

I used to think that was just because he’s a dog. Lower stakes. Nothing riding on it. But I’ve started to wonder if it’s actually the opposite. Maybe he doesn’t need a countdown because he’s not trying to control the waiting. He’s just in it.

I’ve been trying that on this week, with mixed results. There’s still a part of me doing math I don’t need to do, counting days like they’re going to arrive faster if I keep track of them. But there’s another part, a newer part, that’s starting to understand what Christopher’s known all along. The waiting doesn’t need to be managed. It just needs to be lived in, same as any other stretch of time.

So today, no countdown. Just a Friday, a dog who refuses to be rushed, and whatever’s coming, coming exactly when it’s going to come.

Happy Friday. Christopher says hello, from the couch, unbothered as always.