The 10-Day New Year's Challenge - Day 4

 January 4. A Day in the Life of My Dreams, by Hollye Jacobs

Your prompt for today:
Imagine yourself at some point in the future—maybe a year from now, maybe five, maybe ten—living the life of your dreams. This is a normal day, not a holiday or a special day; rather, it is a typical and perfect everyday. What do you see? What do you feel? What do you hear? What do you taste? Who is there with you in your dream day? Describe the day in present tense, from the moment you wake up to the moment that you go to sleep. Creation begins with imagination. 

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This is hard.  Admitting what I truly want means opening myself up for disappointment.  It means confronting the question of whether I'm too lazy or unqualified to achieve the things I want.  I learned a long time ago that the best way to avoid that is with defensive pessimism and settling for less.  If things work out better than I'd dared to hope, I'm pleasantly surprised.  If not, well, at least I was prepared.

A perfect day has more than 24 hours in it.  Perhaps the only area where I'm overly optimistic is in the realm of estimating how long a task will take, and assuming I won't get sidetracked.  

So let's say the perfect day lasts 30 hours.  Or I get better at time management.  I wake up early but rested, in time to enjoy the sunrise.  It's warm but not oppressive, so it's either late springtime or I live in some kind of paradise.  I do yoga on a deck that overlooks a body of water.  Birds are chirping and flowers are blooming, their smell drifting on a subtle breeze.  

After yoga, I go inside and feed the cats.  Andy is drinking coffee and reading before he starts his day in his woodworking shop.  He gets to do something dreamy, too, otherwise I'd just feel guilty about my own self-actualization and where's the perfection in that?  I fix myself a hot breakfast and read a book while I enjoy my oatmeal and coffee.  Then, I don't know, maybe I walk the dog?  Is there a dog in this fantasy?  Ok, sure, I walk Charlie, who has maintained his spunk over the years somehow, but has also been through some serious therapy that cured all his anxieties and he is now a joy to take out in public.  

Once everybody's morning rituals are handled, it's time to get to work.  I retreat to my workspace, which is a cozy library room filled with books and artwork, with windows overlooking the water.  I sit down at my desk, which is a huge butcher block table large enough to accommodate a writing area and a section for other creative work like drawing, painting, and making bizarre magazine cut-out collage greeting cards (a side hustle that I sell online when the spirit moves me).  I settle in at the writing end and open my laptop, which is conveniently not connected to the internet to avoid distractions.  I dive back in to work on my second book, a full length novel expanding on my favorite character from one of my short stories that was published in the New Yorker to great acclaim.  

After a few hours of productive writing, I push back from the desk and head into the kitchen.  Andy has his head in the freezer looking for something easy, but we're due for a grocery trip.  I suggest we go out for lunch instead, and we go for a walk to our favorite taco place.  We meander back home and spend time reading in our two-person hammock.  Inevitably, we fall asleep but wake up within a half hour feeling refreshed.  Nothing is worse than an unplanned nap that runs too long and leaves you disoriented.

By mid-afternoon, we're each back to work at our respective creative pursuits.  We're fairly compensated for our efforts and live comfortably.  Despite being self-employed, we don't have to worry about health insurance, because President Harris and Vice President Ocasio-Cortez enacted universal healthcare and a universal basic income so that everybody can live with dignity.  

I read through my writing from the morning and do some light editing.  It's not perfect but I'm happy with the progress.  Satisfied that I've done enough for the day, I close my laptop and go for a run on a path that follows the water.  I shower quickly and head downstairs to prepare a healthy dinner that Andy compliments by taking a heaping second serving and asking if he can have the leftovers for lunch the next day.  After dinner, we go for a walk together with magical fantasy Charlie, who only poops once instead of thrice.  We spend the rest of the night reading on the couch together.  When we are too tired to read another page, we go to bed with the windows open, listening to nature's white noise machine.