“The height of my ambition at the moment is to make it into bed.” -Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows

                I read somewhere that snoozing in the morning doesn’t actually help you get up more rested. I can’t remember the source (probably somewhere I wandered online, and probably not reliable), but the idea was that slipping in and out of sleep doesn’t bring you into REM for that deep rest. So I set out to stop snoozing in the morning. To get up as soon as I woke up. A few years later that changing habit came up in a conversation with my therapist, who said, “Well, but I love that time in the morning. Especially with my partner.” And I was like, huh. I love that time too. The warmth. The skin. The half-awake togetherness, dreams messing around nearby like kids who know it’s time to stop playing but also know it’s still time for playing.
                So I like Katherine Addison’s play with ambition. The ambition to make it into bed. To stay there for a good long time. My to-do list for tomorrow is long-ish, and today’s was long-ish, but maybe I’ll add in a “height of ambition” that’s playing veo veo with my partner (“I spy with my little eye,” in Spanish) or saying hello to the bushes I hurried by today. Touching their textures. Ambitions of a moment, an hour, an afternoon. Some friends and I once spent several years compiling a list of words that are animals and actions (fly, of course, and badger, ferret, duck, ram, wolf—horse if you allow “horse around,” and we disagreed on “shark”). We could’ve googled it but that’s cheating. What a lovely ambition of the moment that was.