Shawn Marie Graybeal-Sellers

The Season You’re In

Right now my life feels like a table covered in unfinished things. I’ve been thinking about priorities lately — or more honestly, about the impossibility of them.

There are revisions waiting on a novel manuscript. Notes scattered across legal pads for a nonfiction project that keeps growing every time I teach another lesson or stumble across another source I want to include. There are photographs waiting to become essays about New Mexico and landscape and history. There are blog posts half drafted in notebooks and folders full of ideas for future books. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I’m also trying to promote Anywhere But Here — learning, slowly, that writing a book is only half the job.

And then there are the quilts.

Earlier this year I decided I wanted to make a quilt for each of my grandchildren for their birthdays. It felt important in the way certain things do before you fully calculate the logistics of them. Handmade gifts carry something different inside them. Time. Attention. Care. They become physical evidence that someone stopped what they were doing long enough to make something entirely for you.

I finished the first quilt on time.

Right now I am two quilts behind with three more birthdays arriving in the next two weeks.

At the same time, the school year is winding toward its chaotic conclusion. Final grades. Senior events. Last-minute problems that somehow only appear in May. Graduation is a week from tomorrow, and I am helping pull the entire thing together. Education has always had seasons that feel exhausting, but May carries a particular kind of intensity. There is emotion layered over fatigue, trying to finish strong while already running on empty.

And somewhere inside all of that, I still want to make beautiful things.

I think that’s the part I’ve been struggling to explain, even to myself. None of these responsibilities feel meaningless. That would actually make prioritizing easier. The problem is that all of them matter to me. My students matter. Writing matters. Family matters. The quilts matter. The photographs matter.

The difficulty is not identifying what is important, but accepting that all of the important things need the same time.

For a long time, I thought prioritizing meant discovering the correct system. If I organized myself well enough, planned carefully enough, worked hard enough, I could somehow give equal attention to every meaningful part of my life at the same time. I’m beginning to realize that this is an illusion. Priorities are not really about what matters most. They are about what receives your attention during a particular season, knowing something else may have to wait its turn.

That waiting is uncomfortable for people who care deeply about their work.

Writers live surrounded by unfinished things. Teachers do too. There is always another lesson to improve, another manuscript to revise, another essay to finish, another creative project quietly waiting in the corner of the room, while the creative impulses in my head clamor for attention. The quilts have made that reality impossible for me to ignore because birthdays arrive whether you are ready or not. A novel draft can wait another month. A blog post can remain unpublished. But the quilts became tied to an idea I had about the kind of grandparent I wanted to be. Present. Intentional. Someone who makes things by hand because the people she loves are worth that kind of time.

The problem, of course, is that time still has to come from somewhere.

I suspect a lot of people are carrying versions of this same tension right now. Not necessarily quilts or manuscripts or graduation ceremonies, but the growing realization that adulthood often means trying to be fully present in multiple meaningful roles at the exact same time. Parent. Teacher. Artist. Partner. Caregiver. Friend. Creator. There are seasons where all of them seem to demand your full attention simultaneously.

Maybe balance was never really the goal.

Maybe the real challenge is learning how to carry meaningful things without letting them convince you that you are failing simply because you cannot do everything at once.

I’m trying to learn that unfinished does not mean unimportant. The quilts will get finished. The revisions will still be waiting after graduation. The mountains and old highways and stories I want to write about will still be there this summer. Meaningful work tends to remain patient. It follows you quietly until you are ready to return to it.

Right now the season is crowded. Full of deadlines and celebrations and exhaustion and fabric stacked beside student papers and social media drafts sitting next to graduation scripts.

And maybe that’s okay too.

Maybe a meaningful life does not always look balanced from the outside.

Maybe sometimes it just looks lived in.