Simple Living | When Life Is Real
It wasn’t until yesterday that I took my own advice, when, in the muddle of a full work day, I began my fall home edit: pulling open doors and drawers, purging, sorting, straightening, settling.
Life can be beautiful, peaceful, and shining. It can also be hard, confusing, and stressful, not to mention completely inconsiderate of your intentions and plans. You look up with a start as your suddenly maniacal life shoves by, gleefully smashing your carefully laid like they don’t even matter. Then, as if that weren’t enough, it fast-balls gnarly bumps into your road, just for fun. By the time you turn around, more than a month has passed since you announced your rosy idea of scheduling time for going drawer by drawer, and you’ve yet to open a single one.
Anyone?
Here, life is real and raw and beautiful. And not at all perfect. It’s expectations and reality, all mis-matched. It’s misunderstandings, miscues, missed opportunities, and messy grace. It’s the scary side of dreams. It’s wrestling and releasing. It’s belief and disbelieving. It’s rubber meets the road. It’s knowing joy because you’ve known sorrow; knowing calm because you’ve known chaos. And somehow, somehow, somehow, in the wallop of it all, it’s unconditional love.
For those particular days?
Maybe this: go for a walk, have a good cry, eat French toast for dinner (that your husband, wonderful, wonderful man, made so you didn’t have to), regroup. Then, mentally and physically set aside the things on the list that seem more important, and open a drawer. It’ll do you good, this methodical sorting out, this tending that’s somehow tending more. In the end, life might still be acting crazy over there, but here, your drawers are (finally) settled.
And today? That’s everything.