The entire morning has drifted away from me without a single accomplishment. I did manage to get dressed, but I don’t consider that to be something worth bragging about. I’m just trying to hold onto a small thread of personal dignity.

I can honestly say, other than a handful of sick days, that I have never let a day pass without getting dressed. When I retired I half-heartedly challenged myself to spend an entire day in my PJs, but I couldn’t do it. Lounging around is not in my blood.

From my seat on the back porch I can hear a lawn mower running. Now, there’s something I could do with my time that would make me feel like I’m doing something worthwhile with myself. But my grass doesn’t need mowing. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

What I really mean is that if I wait long enough, fall will come. The humidity will fade away. The heat index will become tolerable. I can breathe freely outside in the elements. And that, I’m sure you’ll agree, will be the best time to work in the yard. If I wait until November the first frost will hit, and the next time I mow will be the last time I’ll have to mow.

You see, early September is really a lot like the leftovers of August. When we turn the calendar on the 9th month, we tell ourselves that we have made it over the hump. Fall is just around the next bend. But every time the thermometer creeps up into the 90s, we quietly curse the false indicators of the approaching season.

Take this morning for example. There is actually a bit of a cool breeze flowing through the screens on the porch. The wind chimes woke me from my unscheduled nap and in the drunken stupor of my slumbering senses, I thought to myself, “It feels a little like Fall.”

That is the sinister lie of September.

One of the reasons I’m not accomplishing anything productive is that I am trying to write. As is often the case, I don’t have anything much going on inside my head that is chomping at the bit to get on the blank page in front of me. The little ticker in the lower lefthand corner of my laptop that counts the number of words typed says zero, and I’ve been at it for two hours.

Thus, I took to reading a book. Thus I ended up with slobber running down my chin. Thus the wind chimes woke me up.

No surprise, the cool overcast morning has given way to sunshine. I can still feel the breeze, but I can tell the day is beginning to heat up.

Outside the porch there are two hummingbirds fighting over the last of the sugar water in the feeder. Normally, there would be a half-dozen or more, but I’m guessing that most of their friends got fooled by the appearance of September. They have set off for the trip south. These two stragglers, like me, seem to know that cold weather is nowhere in sight. They are in no rush to leave town.

I wonder. What does a hummingbird accomplish with his life? Mowing the grass and painting the house is not on his “to do” list. He doesn’t feel the pressure of being productive. He’s not worried about job performance. He doesn’t have to meet quarterly sales goals. He’s not saving up for retirement. He doesn’t accomplish anything by the standards we humans use to gauge the value of a life.

Which, actually, makes me quite jealous. I’ll bet he doesn’t have friends who call him at 10am and who ask in sarcastic tones if they woke him up from a nap. He never puts on clothes. He flits around all day, drinking copious amounts of fake nectar, soaking up the praises of all who admire him.

He just is. No PJs to take off. No list of chores waiting on him. No worries about the things he may or may not get done on any given day. His job is to be a hummingbird. That is accomplishment enough.

In my dad’s later years he would often reflect back on the accomplishments of his life with somewhat of a negative assessment of himself. His intent, I think, was to inspire me to do something more with my life. And he would do this by saying, “I ain’t never really done anything with my life but breathe up a bunch of air.”

And I suppose that if you stacked his life up against some pretty hard core metrics of success, there would be some who might say he was right. He had no college degree. He never made president of the company he worked for. He never lived in a mansion or drove a new car. He raised cattle just so he could pay the property tax on the farm. He worked 48 years in the dirt and heat of the foundry and ended up with a handful of diamond-studded, gold tie pins for his faithful service.

But if you knew him, you would say that he was dead wrong in his assessment. He was the kind of guy who would mow grass all summer long for a neighbor who had a broken leg and couldn’t do it for himself. He was the one who sat by the bedside of a friend dying with cancer, telling him jokes to help him forget. He was the one who would hide a little folding money in the palm of his hand before he’d shake the hand of someone he knew who could use it more than he needed it.

I saw him do those things and a thousand other things just like them. That, to me, is what he did with his life. He was who God made him to be. A neighbor to everyone he met. The job. The farm. The other markers of a man’s life were just window dressing. What he really accomplished were not the things that can be summarized in a set of plaques on the wall. That’s not who he was.

He invested in people. He invested in his family. He invested in eternity.

I don’t know that I’ll accomplish much today. It finally looks like I might get this story written, for whatever that is worth. I can tell you this much. It’s getting too hot to stay out on this porch much longer.

Look. We all have that feeling from time to time of not being very productive. We feel the pressure of getting things done. And there’s room for that. I do need to mow the grass before November gets here.

But more than that, I need to be a neighbor to someone. There are things I can do that cost me nothing but a little bit of my time and my willingness to bring a little kindness into somebody else’s life.

Life is not about all the accomplishments we can string together. It is about how much of ourselves we can give away.

Story over, this would be a good time for me to start.