Day One of unemployment began with a spin class and a nice long cup of coffee. And now, I sit staring at my to-do list and battling the urge to justify my time off by accomplishing great things in the world, or at least small things like making eye appointments for me and The Husband, or baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies, or updating my CPR certification.

So, instead, I do the thing that is the antidote to my self-driven sense of urgency, the panacea for my hereditary state of anxiety. I grab my heaviest book  and that coffee and a steaming bowl of grits and head to the sunroom. I read, and I listen, and I battle other urges, like the urge to waste time on people.com and Gawker, and I try to be still instead. And sidle up close to that thin veil between earth and eternity, between my perception and what’s Real.

I’ve always wanted time off, and in some ways my move to New York was a form of escape that answered the stirrings within my heart for more than school and my backyard. I never backpacked in Europe or herded cattle out West, and while I know that makes me like just about every other non-independently wealthy person on earth, I did feel the years of school and studying pile upon my shoulders, and my entry into the Real World of working began two short weeks after I received my final educational certificate. I spent so many years educating myself that I never had the luxury of Finding Myself, and twenty-eight years devoid of self-awareness and any sense of irony testify to that. Then New York happened, and TH happened, and old jobs were replaced with new ones, and I landed in a new life in a new city with the old drill in my hand.

Now, the drill and the open-mouthed kids are on an unplanned hiatus, and as my fingers find keys instead of cavities, I am learning to see (once again) the gift of the unplanned. The upside of unemployment. The way prayers are answered with a sense of humor on the side–I thought you always wanted a break?–and how silly it looks to search frantically for ways to replace what may have been removed purposely, by grace. And, at the end of all that, to still admit that the bottom line is always this: my best guess of what Now is supposed to look like is more similar to a child’s stick-figure, crayon-rendered self-portrait than anything da Vinci ever achieved.

And that leaves me with prayer.

TH and I taped and scrubbed walls yesterday, and then he spent the afternoon turning lavender walls blue, and when I ventured upstairs in brief visits with my shirt over my nose, I was amazed at the transformation he was rendering with his roller. Amazed and humbled. And this morning, after the coffee was drained and the reading was done, I felt the urge to return to that room now called Nursery and do something my old schedule wouldn’t have permitted: sit on the floor and be still, and cover The Kid’s room with prayers. From my perch on the floor, at the height of a child, I looked around at the plastic and paint cans and brushes, at the work space that will be a living space; I marveled at the promises that fill it, promises already kept and new promises that wait to be made. Endings that become beginnings and paths that open up to new roads. The most honest and elaborate prayer I can offer is, as always, thank you. For unplanned holes in time that can suddenly seem so full; for Woeful Uncertainty renamed Beautiful Mystery; for partially-finished, debris-strewn rooms becoming temples.