Luke 12:48

From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

Good Thing I Don't Like Dull

Good Thing I Don't Like Dull
Life is what you make of it. Always has been, always will be.- Grandma Moses

Monday, April 2, 2012

And the Days Go By....


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.

5 comments:

  1. Beautifully written. I have those "how did I get here?" moments too. Sometimes i feel a big fog over periods of my life and I have to stop and concentrate on what really happened.

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  2. Ya know, I heard this story once a long time ago. A friend told it to me. A very good friend at the time. It goes: There once was this guy. And, he lived on one side of a wall. And he spent his whole life convinced that everything good in life was on the other side of that wall. His side of the wall had plenty of sunshine and green grass. But, he never really appreciated it. He spent most of his days trying to figure out how to get to that other side. He was convinced that everything good lay over there. Every day he would try an break through that wall. He'd run straight into it. Just trying to knock through to the other side. Well, after many years of trying, one day he just sat back on his green grass in the sunlight, and thought to himself... Maybe this is the side of the wall I'm better off on.

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  3. Really well written. when is the book coming out?

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  4. this reminds me of a poem

    IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN WORSE
    Sometimes I pause and sadly think
    Of the things that might have been,
    Of the golden chances I let slip by,
    And which never returned again
    Think of the joys that might have been mine;
    The prizes i almost won,
    The goals i missed by a hairs breadth
    And the things i might have done

    It fills me with gloom when i ponder thus,
    Till i look on the OTHER side
    How i might have been completely engulfed
    By MISFORTUNES SURGING TIDE

    The unknown dangers lurking about
    which i passed SAFELY through
    The EVILS and SORROWS that i''have been spared
    Pass plainly now in review.
    So when i am downcast and feeling sad
    I repeat OVER N OVER again,
    Things are far from being bad
    AS THEY EASILY MIGHT HAVE BEEN

    G.J. Russel

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  5. Look how BEAUTIFUL AND WONDERFUL YOU TURNED OUT TO BE!!!!!

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