May our days be as dynamic as a shuffled playlist

Monday morning, dark and crisp.  Crisp like a new unused two-dollar bill and, with a light dusting of frost on the trees along my route in, a similar shade of white-gray-muted green.  The first challenge was getting up our hill, which has never unfrozen from last week's snow and ice.  The Miata is rear-wheel drive, but does have winter tires (not studded).  The tricky part is that from our driveway we have to pull out and turn left up the hill, and that turning uphill on a sheet of ice can be, quite literally, a non-starter. I turned off the slip-control (which, in a case like this, would only cut power to the driving wheels if they slipped, resulting in no-go), and left it in first.  Slow and steady does the trick, as the old saying goes.  Once over the hill, the roads were pretty much dry and bare the rest of the way in.

Today is a first, several times over.  First workday of the new year, first full work week in a few, first day of classes for winter quarter (at our college), and the first day for our college's new president.  We celebrate the passing of an old year and the start of a new year, though we really only move one day forward at a time. We can just as easily celebrate the small firsts and beginnings along the way. I am reminded, though I can't quite put my finger on why, of the poem How Things Work by Gary Soto:

Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.

Each quarter I feel the same way, it is good to see the campus coming back to life as the students return.  Yes we have lost much of our state funding over the past three years, and yes we are overcrowded with record numbers of students seeking to accomplish their educational goals, but like a large family that sometimes feels too noisy, too crowded, or too much trouble, I still love it.  Things change and we experience firsts and new, but would we really rather have the static alternative?  Not for this little gray duck; I'm glad things are starting back up today and looking forward to see what happens next.

Speaking of starting back up, it is time to document another short playlist of randomly shuffle-selected tunes from this morning's commute:

 - Brian Withycombe: My Heart Will Go On

 - Electric Light Orchestra: The Whale

 - Annie Lennox: Sing (Full Length)

 - Bob Dylan: Gotta serve somebody

At the start of a new year, though, it seems relevant to ask myself why I bother doing this every work-day morning.  Viewed against the long-view passage of time, this post and this small list of tunes and musicians is totally inconsequential. These musings are, after all, very finite.  Like Douglas Adams' total perspective annihilator, this comparison only highlights the insignificance of the minutia of our lives. 

Maybe no one other than myself sees most (all?) of these morning jottings, but the exercise of recording them and starting each day thinking about, at the very least, music and the day ahead, is a purpose in and of itself. It creates a way to start the day not caught immediately up in the mechanics of another just-like-yesterday-and-just-like-the-day-before-and-so-on..., and I think this is an important perspective-granting action. Music as catalyst of thoughts beyond the task-list for the day, hopefully just a dynamic as a shuffled playlist.