Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?
And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
your life—
what would do for you?
— Mary Oliver, To Begin With, the Sweet Grass

Plotting our next adventure in a faraway place, we went out for breakfast to dance with the hopefulness of scheduled enchantment. We ran into a woman we know, who once was married and then she wasn’t, but she never accepted that she wasn’t and retreated into herself and the rituals of the church and suddenly twenty years later she’s still the same shell of a person she was then but older and more insulated from the world. She might have gone with us on our adventure, or perhaps one of her own, had she only gotten out of her own way.

She made me wonder—what rituals of routine are getting in my own way? If the opposite of boredom is engagement and being captivated by the world around us, why do we settle for something less? What lingers just outside the box of our identity? Why is that so frightening? To live in fear of the world is to never be alive.

As this is published it’s the first Monday in March. March was once the first month of the original Roman calendar. If you think about it, the calendar is arbitrary and nothing but a shared belief that keeps this whole game going. We can’t very well change the calendar and function in a society that works off of it, but we can use it as a reminder to ourselves that we can change things when we find our routine isn’t working for us any more. It’s like adding two months to a year our ancestors thought they had figured out. It turns out the extra two months made it better. Imagine what we can make better if we changed too?

A few days ago we had a leap day on that 12-month calendar, tacked on to the end of a month that once didn’t exist in the minds of mankind. It was a bonus day and a chance to do something truly different. Most of us went about our lives as we did the day before or the days since. It was sort of like New Year’s Day in this way, where we might think up all sorts of ways we may break out of the box but end up right back in our ritual of routine. Imagining our possibility is easier than actually living it. We forget that we don’t have to leap, we could simply step out of the box and close the door behind us.