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i don't know what was meant by the title of the michael jackson movie 'this is it', or the song or even if he was alive when it was all put together. i do know, however, that this past week, that phrase came into my mind as the best possible title of my current situation.

last week was jake's spring break and i got to spend three days with him and then the weekend. so what happens when a child of 8 who lives in a world of school and homework and bedtimes and his mother who lives in a world of working downtown and traffic and making dinner and yoga, simply put all of that down for a few days?

we drifted through each day and took the long way around. ate pizza Absolutely Every Single Day. lost and subsequently retrieved the dogs - twice. dinosaur world, reservoir park, yew dell gardens, newport aquarium, bass pro shop. walked to kroger and bought a cookie cake and brownie mix and had them Both. cleaned up the yard, played board games. got stuck in plastic handcuffs at the party store.. laughed about not knowing how to get out of them.

and through it all, the loveliness of not having anywhere to be, the question kept lingering in my mind - what else could there be?

'every day should be a good day to die.' says dave matthews, and according to my mother, long before him, american indians. morbidness aside, i try to keep that in my mind throughout my life, to make sure each day is the best it can be, to make sure i'm holding nothing out until tomorrow. but this week in particular, i did genuine justice to this phrase.

Us Americans, we're immersed in a culture where 'success' is 2.5 kids and a green lawn with a picket fence and an Acura, which a few trimmings in the form of technology, and who among us is strong enough to resist the materialistic cultural magnet pulling at us 100% of every day? We all trip on it here and there and that's fine. But anyone stumbling across my website intentionally knows, these things are not 'it'. We knew this already.

Time. Time seems closer to being 'it', because with it we feel freedom. If I just had time for the projects I want to do or the new hobby or the new career or to ride my bike instead of driving to get there faster.. And so time IS in fact closer to it, by far, than material things.

This week though I settled in to something I must have known all along, that's it not just ANY kind of time. It's time suspended from obligation. Time free of 'free time schedules', social events, anything requiring you to be somewhere. In this particular kind of time, we found solace. Real freedom. Ourselves. Where is a better place than with my loved ones? What is a better time than time that is truly yours? In this suspension of reality, everything negative that has floated about melted away, because where was it? How could it permeate our time? All the shackles that bind us to the routines of daily life fell off, and once free from them, well there was little else I could conclude.

This is it.