I was standing at the kitchen sink, scraping cheese off a plate. I think my youngest made nachos or something. There’s a thought that runs through my head with all the craze of a streaker at a football game: I should be working on something else.
Okay, maybe the thought isn’t quite so dramatic as the way I portrayed it, but it is persistent. It hums there everyday in my already over-busy brain. There were emails in my inbox, projects waiting, bills on the counter, weeds in the yard. Washing dishes didn’t feel like progress. It felt like stalling. It probably is stalling. My mind kept wandering toward tomorrow, and the day after, as if the simple act of getting cheese off a plate wasn’t enough to justify the time.
That’s when a phrase from the Gospel of Matthew came to mind: “Be not therefore anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
I’ve never been entirely sure what that last line means. But when I hear it, I think of endurance but also paying attention to what’s right in front of you. Don’t spend the day trying to outrun tomorrow.
For me, that’s not easy. Maybe it’s not easy for any of us.
The world makes it almost impossible. Notifications don’t stop. News cycles reset every hour. Work asks for just a little more — always a little more. Even at home, the unfinished chores trail behind like persistent shadows. Every spare moment tries to slip into planning, calculating, worrying.
And yet, the minutes keep passing whether I fill them with worry or not.
I notice this most on Friday nights with my youngest son. For nearly six years, we’ve had what we call Party Night. Ninety minutes carved out for just the two of us, doing whatever he wants. Basketball in the basement because a windstorm ruined both of our outside hoops. Making “Animal Talk” videos for his small but loyal YouTube following. Competing in GeoGuessr, clicking around satellite maps trying to guess where in the world we’ve landed. Sometimes just talking.
When we started, he was four years old. Now he’s ten. In the meantime, two of his older siblings have already moved out. Another is getting ready to leave for college. The time feels different now. Minutes somehow don’t hold as much as they used to. I joke with myself that a minute has only 37 seconds these days. Something has sped up, though the clocks still insist on sixty ticks.
The screens don’t help. The digital fog gets thicker every year, pulling attention in a thousand directions at once. As I sit here, five different screens glow around me. Five. Each one with its own reasons to demand attention, its own small urgencies. The constant switching erases things I want to remember. I sometimes wonder if our brains were ever built for this.
Which is why the phrase lingers with me: Sufficient unto the day.
Maybe it means the day already has enough to hold. Enough trouble. Enough joy. Enough work and enough rest. Maybe it’s less about squeezing something extraordinary into every twenty-four hours, and more about noticing the ordinary things that already fill it.
Like folding laundry.
Like rinsing a plate.
Like listening to your child explain why their YouTube channel deserves more subscribers or the new D&D-themed videos he’s exploring.
These are the hours that repeat. They don’t always look impressive. They don’t post well on social media. They vanish from memory almost as quickly as they happen. But they are what a life is made of.
For a long time, I thought I needed to fight that. That real life was somewhere just ahead, waiting for me if I worked fast enough, dreamed big enough, chased hard enough. But the longer I live, the more I think real life is here already. In the basket of clean laundry. In the driveway weeds. In the sound of my youngest daughter coming home at 1:30 am on a Sunday morning after babysitting my sister’s kids.
The voice in my head still argues. This isn’t enough. You should be doing more. You’re wasting time. But when I hold the plate in my hands, scrub away a bit of cheese, and put it in the dishwasher, another thought rises: This is the work too.
Not every day is transformative. Not every hour leads to growth. Some days are just days. And letting them be days — showing up, paying attention, washing dishes, folding laundry, laughing with your son — is the work.
It may not look like much. But when I step back, I can see it’s shaping me anyway.
And that is enough.
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