Lemme tell you - you haven't truly lived unless you've seen a group of hairy, awkward men wearing ill-fitting red dresses saunter down the street. There may have been a few red-clad women in there, too, but it was the men in flowy skirts and the men in the mini-skirts that caught my attention. I mean, who doesn't love hairy legs and chest hanging out of a red Hawaiian-print dress, amiright?
You also haven't lived until you've had a pair of big, serious, six-year-old blue eyes announce to you that they need to drink more water because they're "not hibernated enough." We then had to have a conversation about the difference between hibernation and hydration. Just sharing that may be enough living for some of you.
Today has been a day of ordinary interestingness, like so many others... Well, except for the army of men in dresses. But yeah, otherwise... Relatively ordinary. Filled with hours of mostly meaningless tasks, punctuated by moments of brilliance and beauty and laughter, beginning and ending neither high nor low - just in the that place of routine normalcy.
I love it.
I hate it.
I love the rhythm. I love the pace of the days, and the patterns the weeks follow - in many ways constant - like the stars moving across the night sky, just as they have for thousands of years. I love the establishment of home and chores and routine (As best as a person like me can have one... I still struggle with remembering the day-to-day things that some people could do in their sleep. But that's another post entirely! And anyway, I love the routine such as there is.)... I love the movement of the hours, one into the next, the flow of time like water from one thing to another and yet another after that. I love the way our days make quiet moments, and happy moments, and sweet ones, and how I've learned that through routine, even hard days can become easier.
I hate the quickness of it all. I want to squeeze the life out of every moment lived, and I feel like half of the moments are gone before I realize that I haven't really even touched them. I want to hold every laugh, every breath, every giggle and innocent smile, and NEVER let them go. I don't want to lose them, and I do. Every. Single. Day. I hate the monotony, and how I let the days slip into weeks and SO MANY things are left undone and Facebook has just sucked the life out of an afternoon and where the HELL did all that time go?!?! I hate the promise of "Not now, honey, dinner/laundry/dishes/shopping have to be done before I can play with you." I hate the years that have rushed by and not even stopped to ask me what I thought of it all. I hate the decade that I've spent not achieving some stupidly easy goals that I set at the beginning of this century. I hate the time and it's passage. I just want to freeze NOW. To taste it and savor it and breathe it and feel it and record it.
I definitely have a love/hate relationship with time. Like a lot of other things. I have a love/hate relationship with quite a few things, actually. Like food. And exercise (Although that's really mostly a hate relationship at this point.).
Although I will say I definitely have a love/love relationship with indoor plumbing. The toilet is my friend. As are running water and long hot showers. I was *not* made for the days of chamber pots, thankyouverymuch. Nevermind the fact that I would probably have been born as a hideously poor servant and would be the person who had to EMPTY the chamber pots. *Shudder* No. No thank you.
But anyway. I digress. I guess this whole post got started when I was thinking over the day - and most of the last week - and realized that there wasn't really anything that I felt was extraordinary enough to write about. It was mostly just... Ordinary. As KayKay likes to say, she has an "extra-ordinary" life. More ordinary than most. Ha! Although I must disagree with that... With her, nothing is simply ordinary.
But much of today felt peripheral, tastelessly normal. Like so much of my life, it feels. I love it; my heart often longs for more quiet and rhythm (Which we've had some of lately.) than we seem to get... I hate it; I don't catch hold of the moments and DO the things that I really want to do with those moments.
It's a dichotomy of longing and fulfillment, of want and reality, of truth and desire. And I guess, herein lies the moment where I can find grace. And choose to do *more* with the minutes and hours I am given tomorrow.
In the meantime, I'm going to leave off with a little gem the Ladybug threw out at me today:
We were in the car, on the way to the store to pick up a few things, and out of nowhere, the Ladybug says, "Mommy, the whole world is like a big puzzle game to God."
I responded, "Oh, really? Like how?" And she said, "I don't know, it just is. All the things that happen are like a puzzle and God is playing with the pieces." (That last sentence is a paraphrase, I can't remember exactly how she said it, but it was something very close to this.)
To which I said, "Are you sure it's not a puzzle for us people because maybe we need to figure it out and God already knows it?"
And she answered, "No, it's not for us. The pieces are too big for us to figure out."
And I... Yeah. Mind = Blown. Wisdom from a six-year-old mind. Beautiful.
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