Life (& Happiness) Happen When We Make Other Plans (& Stop Aiming for Perfection).
Well, today didn’t exactly go as planned.
My not-feeling-so-hot daughter stayed home from school this morning, nixing my own plans.
This isn’t the biggest deal. Rather, it’s more of a stringing series of happenings that seems to be building upon one another regularly—and haphazardly—much like the Legos that she and I played with yesterday.
(So, that happened.
It was awesome.
I digress.
Here’s what didn’t happen: a visit I was looking forward to, a yoga class my body needed—and that my spirit needed more—and, most importantly, a mother’s heart is never truly at ease when her child is out of sorts.
And yet.
And yet the two of us aren’t usually the kind to mope—or mope for too long.
Instead, we might be putting NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert out of business with our own Tiny Bathtub Concert series. We broke out the hairbrushes and the combs and, essentially, anything that could serve as water-friendly microphones.
We listened to all of the songs on this playlist plus a few more from this one.
Then we had bathtub snacks and beverages, of course.
But better than Legos, hairbrush microphones, bathtub bubbles and favorite music was the fact that, for the first time in two days, I stopped crying.
I’ve been excessively and unusually weepy—and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Sincerely. It’s me getting in touch with my reality.
Because I’m not perfect. (Although I am perfectly imperfect.)
I have gloriously lofty ideologies, but I will forever make mistakes, and, thankfully, plenty of them.
Because I don’t want to be perfect—that’s boring.
I don’t want to always be good, wholesome, happy and anything else that’s pretty to write about—or read, for that matter.
What I do want to be is this:
Honest.
I want to live my life from a place of genuineness, even if that means that I’m open with my missteps and errant ways.
Still, I don’t want to be open and honest if it means not being kind.
Honesty that deeply hurts another should be questioned adamantly.
Improper.
I don’t want to live in Downton Abbey, although it would be nice to visit.
Sure, I love the clothes and the characters are a fascinating collage of personalities, but it’s—how do I put this—a little too stuffy for me.
I don’t want appropriate at the expense of enjoyment of life.
Permanently idle, no—but capable of being idle, yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Movement can sometimes be an escapist means of denial.
To sit in my discomfort, when it arises, is to know myself, and to know myself breeds wisdom and, potentially, a better understanding of those around me as well—and that I want. (Plus, we all need balance and part of balance includes rest.)
Does this mean that I don’t try my damnedest every day to be a wonderfully good and wholesome creature? No—but there’s also a striking difference between intentions, aims and end results.
Much like my day not going as planned, life doesn’t—overall—typically go as scheduled and, further, because of these unexpected detours, we become the people who we are.
And I like me.
I like my sassy tongue–even if that means I’m occasionally a touch too sharp with it.
I like that I’ll never be able to spell occasionally without thinking about it—it means that I’m human.
And I like my daughter’s quirks—they’re, strangely, often her most pleasant talents.
I like, too, the days when my child and I are snowed in or that we’re home not feeling our most amazing—because this is when those little snippets of life happen that bring me the greatest, most genuine, most honest, least expected joys—and that’s why I stopped crying, finally.
After all, there will be plenty of school days and plenty of yoga classes, but there won’t always be days when I have a three year old who wants to sing with me into our toothbrushes in the bathtub—or maybe, just maybe, this will, likewise, be different than I suspect.
Photos: Author’s own.
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