Have you ever stopped, looked around and said to yourself, "How the hell did I get here?" Sometimes I'm like the Talking Heads song.."This is not my beautiful house..this is not my beautiful wife." OK, so not wife, but you get what I mean. There's days where I feel that way in the best of ways. I'll be sitting on my porch, sipping a cup of coffee, looking out at my garden with the sun warming my bare toes and the breeze tinkling the wind chimes softly, and I think, "Wow, who has it better than I?"
Sometimes, as I'm driving in rush-hour traffic with 5 fighting kids, I really cannot, for the life of me, figure out how I ended up there. I tell myself it's a blessing even while I feel like it's some sort of punishment, or perhaps my mother's ultimate revenge manifesting right before my eyes ("I hope you have kids JUST LIKE YOU!").
Is it just me or are you where you thought you'd be at this point in your life? I can tell you that never in a million years did I think that at 35 years old, or ever for that matter, would I be a mother of 5 kids and make my meager living by teaching adults how to touch their toes and saying things like, "Be mindful of your breath and breathe into your belly. Feel it filling like a pink balloon." (yes, I really do get paid to say these things) or in my kids classes blowing bubbles and singing, "The Itsy Bitsy Spider". Sometimes in the middle of a spirited rendition of, "The Noble Duke of York" I have a real "wtf?" moment.
Or when I'm in the middle of an indoor water park in March watching the kiddies and I'm making mental shopping notes when I see certain skirted tankinis and feeling grateful that I didn't get that tribal tattoo and I wonder how it's possible to actually be having this internal conversation.
Do you know who I was supposed to be? I certainly thought I knew the answer to that when I was an 18 year old girl. I graduated in the top 5 of my high school class. I was 5'10" and about 120 lbs. I was going to college on a hefty scholarship and was going to study law. No, not just law, ENVIRONMENTAL LAW. I was going to be a lawyer and save the earth at the same time and look great in a power suit. After saving the earth I was going to write a novel and retire off of the royalties from my memoirs. If a husband and kids followed, that would be gravy.
So what happened? Well, here's where it gets a little complicated. Isn't this where we started? How the?..... Well, I can say that I made certain decisions that greatly altered my original plan. Or, I can say that certain situations presented themselves into my life without my input and I dealt with them as gracefully as I could. My personal favorite, is that I had a plan and God had another plan altogether. Sometimes I really believe that. I feel it in my core, that I am living the life that God had planned for me all along. Sometimes, I feel like I took God's plan for me and threw my will into it and it resulted in this life of mine that can be so difficult, sometimes beautiful, yet so hard I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. Was it supposed to be this hard? Was it supposed to be this beautiful?
So why is it that some days I feel like I'm trying to jam that proverbial square peg into the round hole and others I feel like my life fits me like a glove? Maybe there are more than one direction our life is supposed to take when our bodies are being knitted together and our souls know this. Then at some point in our life we come to a "crossroads" of sorts and we make a decision and our life heads in one of many potential directions. Leaving behind all of the other possibilities that once were.
Maybe it's as simple as having a tough day and letting your ego tell you that you're somehow better than suffering the mundane trials of life and all you really need to do is suck it up, find some gratitude and thank the Lord above for the life you have.
