One morning last year I went downstairs to get myself a cup of coffee. On the counter, someone had placed a pie plate with an apple in the middle of it. Naturally, I knew my husband had put it there and exactly what he’d meant by it, but I joked with him that the message, if there were one, was too subtle and that I couldn’t imagine what it meant.
I didn’t tell him so, but I thought I would make the requested apple pie, just not that very day. The pie plate sat on the counter for a while, but then it got shifted to the table, where it sat forgotten and not rediscovered until we were frantically Christmas-cleaning. The apple had started to go bad–a sad but unsurprising end.
There is a moral to this story. We always have good intentions, but we do not always follow through. If each of our thoughts of “things we should do” were a drop of water, we would drown in the sea of our wishful intent. I don’t like living this way, always pushing things off, never actually getting to the “someday” when we thought we’d do all the things. We are ever getting older and closer to the ultimate deadline. So, in this new year, let’s intend less and do more.