Taxes and Tulips and Sadness

Today I went to a tax accountant for the first time. As I was driving home in the dismal rain and reflecting on the thousands of dollars I owe the government (yikes), I remembered a Bible verse I think I learned when I was 13– “the peace of God will guard your heart.” I repeated it to myself and felt a mini soul exhale. Sometimes I surprise myself in my moments of rare equanimity, but my hunch is that when I get the most super–duper stressed out is just when all my mechanisms of denial operate at their best. So driving home and reflecting calmly on the 2493 dollars I don’t have that Mr. Sam is waiting for, I was either practicing a measure of surprising faith or just deciding I didn’t really feel like dealing too much with reality today.

Then, since it was such a rainy day, I went to the supermarket for soup. As I always do, I hung out in the flower section for a while perusing all the bouquets. I am usually just a window shopper when it comes to flowers, since they don’t make the budget of necessities. But, today the yellow and orange tipped tulips tempted me too much. And I bought them. I felt terribly guilty for spending 7 dollars on a bouquet of flowers and every step of the way home I vacillated on the foolishness of my splurge. But, I wanted to protest, it is such a dreary day and…I want to remember Spring is on its way…and who else was going to give me flowers…and isn’t this soul care to attend to beauty and invest in tulips for your kitchen counter? My pep talk didn’t work very well, though, because by the time I got home, I think I felt more stressed out and had more knots and fears in my stomach over a bouquet of tulips than thousands of dollars in taxes. Such is the brilliance of my system of worrying, in that I can project all fear onto 7 dollars just to forget 2, 493 dollars.

When I got home, I got a phone call. A friend of a friend– a thirty something woman– had gotten a headache this afternoon. She suffered a brain aneurysm and is now at Harborview with a prognosis without much hope.

So, now I am sitting here, aching and looking at tulips and praying. I am feeling how much of our lives get sold to moments of worries and fears and worries and fears that are such a foolish waste, because every day– every morning and afternoon and evening and friendship and birthday party and dance and song and loved one and flower bouquet and raindrop is always, always a gift. Life is so ridiculously precious. Why does it take tragedy to jolt that into me? I don't get this. Why do I pretend life is about so many things when it might just be about noticing we are alive and are receiving something so fragile and mysterious and exquisite that most of the time we just glimpse the gift we are living and breathing in?