Sometimes “The Secret Language of Birthdays” from which I pull these titles and quotes is indeed bafflingly secret.

If I read the two-page analysis of the day perhaps I could pull these pieces (theme & meditation) together, but that is not the point of using this book—it’s a jumping-off point, not something to dive into. They’re just words. I could have as easily opened a dictionary or used a random word generator as inspiration, but as this is a birthday project for my birthday month, the birthday book seemed…decided.

There’s something in the grammar of the epigraph/meditation that’s frustrating me. I almost want to write “(sic)” after it. It’s resigned and exhausted. Starting with “and”—as if this is yet another of many realizations made about the fruitlessness of tradition or change—then trudging through unnecessary commas, the sentence makes me slow down and pay attention to its belabored obviousness. And this, apparently, I do not want to do.

I wanted to hold yesterday in my hands and just pet it—rub it up against my cheek and hear it purr. If yesterday was a cat, today is a turtle—slow, timid, hard, cold. Old and wrinkly. It’s 6:30 am, and I’m already done with today. Yes, it will pass, but first, I have to stay with it. I understand why Rabbit took a nap during the race—it wasn’t hubris, it was boredom at the prospect of waiting the whole day for Turtle to finish.

Instead of napping, I am running. It won’t get me out of today any faster, but at least, it will allow me to move through today’s long, cold, trail of oblique, and unnecessary, pauses.