The 10-Day New Year's Journaling Challenge - Day 2

 January 2. Living with Purpose, by Briana Nicole Henry

Your prompt:
Write about living with purpose. Write about the ways you do already, and the ways you hope to in the days, weeks, months, and years to come.

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Look at me showing up for day two like a reliable adult human capable of committing to things, says the person who is on day 660 of a Duolingo streak and has done yoga every day since January 1, 2018.  I'm not sure if that shows my ability to commit or my tendency to do things obsessively, but either way, the outcome is the same, isn't it?

In some ways, I think that might also be part of my purpose in life.  Being the steady, stable person who quietly shows up and tries to do the right thing.  How boring, right?  But the world needs people like that.  We can't all be the wild, fun one.  Sure, that person is entertaining, but are they reliable?  Do they make you feel safe?  Bad things can happen when you're having too much fun.  

Last night, I heard a noise on the street that sounded like a dumpster being dropped to the ground after it's emptied.  I glanced out the window and didn't see anything amiss, so I went back to sleep.  What could have been hours or minutes later, we were awakened by flashing lights outside our bedroom window.  I thought it was the street light malfunctioning and was about to get pissed that it would bother us all night.  

I lifted a slat in the blinds and instead saw two police cars and a flatbed tow truck blocking the street.  A couple cars that had been parked on the opposite side of the street were smashed up.  Two houses north on our side, almost out of view from that window, an SUV was flipped over on the sidewalk.  "Oh, SHIT!" I whispered to Andy.  "You gotta see this!"   

The Jeep was empty, save for the inflated airbags.  We never saw or heard an ambulance, which leads me to suspect that the driver crawled out and ran away.  We live on a relatively quiet, narrow street.  The speed limit is 25.  To jackhammer two cars and then roll over on the opposite sidewalk must have taken some serious effort.  That driver was having too much fun.  Bad things can happen when you're having too much fun.

Last week, we were playing a game of Mexican Train dominoes with our family.*  I was giving my liver the night off and was completely sober, but everyone else was...decidedly not.  The game was getting about as raucous as a game of dominoes can get (which is not very, unless you consider talking very loud and threatening people not to be playin' on your train to be raucous).  As everyone fumbled and yelled and kept drawing tile after tile, I was slowly expending all of mine.  When I was down to two tiles compared to everyone else's handful or more, everyone finally noticed that I was stealthily about to win.  Andy looked at me  and said, "Look at Katie, just over there quietly doing the right thing when no one is paying attention."  

And I won.  Good things can happen when you're quietly doing the right thing.

*I don't owe anyone an explanation, but I need the record to show that we all quietly did the right thing by isolating for 14 days and getting negative tests before gathering.