Things That Are Lovely

Sometimes I think I could drown inside my own head.  On days like today I wake up with a swirling, dizzying overload of thinking crowding my brain until there's barely room in there for reason.  I lay in bed too long after the alarm, talking myself into getting up.  My limbs felt heavy.  My room, still bathed in early morning twilight wrapped around me, too much like a cocoon.  I knew that outside the covers the chilly air would shock me out of my complacency and I wanted too badly to cling to it.  So I kept lying there, even after the second and third alarms.

My life is quite perfunctory of late.  I do what is required of me and little more. Still with my obligations met, so many things that should matter more seem to get lost in the clutter of my brain.  It's as if I forgot how to discern the important from the nonsensical.  Lost in the limbo of neither succeeding or failing, I feel on the verge of just rolling up in my blankets and going back to sleep.

Last night I heard a talk about storytelling.  The guy said there are three important components to every story. The audience, the characters, and a sense of wonder.  I thought how like real life a story can be.  After all, life at its essence is nothing more than a story with a beginning, middle and end.  Hopefully there's some wonder sprinkled in here and there, and whether we like it or not, we always have an audience.  I am struck by the realization that I have lived my whole life in front of an audience of critics who make it their business to judge, reject, applaud, approve or disapprove of the way I am living my story.  The speaker says we writers must always be conscious of our audience, we write for them, after all.  If they don't like your story, you failed at telling it in a compelling way. I think about all the ways I fail at living out a story of which anyone would approve.

With that on my mind, I fell asleep last night to blissful nothingness.  Dreams did not intrude upon my already used-up mind.  I drifted along on the blackness of night and the silence of stillness until my alarm jarred me awake.  The sound assaulted me so fully that within a matter of seconds, my mind was all aswirl with thoughts of how I fail so often at life.  I refuse to dwell in the past, so today became my muse.  I woke up knowing already exactly how my day would play out.  The story, told before it began.  Maybe I felt as though actually getting out of bed might passive aggressively give the finger to Monday.

Eventually though, I did swing my feet over the side of the bed, flung the covers back and let the cold chill of morning take over my senses.  A few minutes later, I could barely remember my cocoon that now sat wrecked, not unlike a chrysalis after the butterfly finally escapes.

I'm not going to even say I showed up for this day with beauty and grace.  I plodded along.  I grouched and griped and shook my head a million times at all the wrongness around me.  I made my way to work, where a conversation about politics nearly sent me scurrying back out the door, but instead I changed the subject then watched as the arguers shook their heads and griped and groaned.  One left--offended perhaps, but I was in no mood to care.

It's funny to me how everyone is entitled to an opinion as long as they agree with the opinions of those around them.  It's even funnier to me that people with their full cognitive capabilities still intact can lash out angrily at someone who is functioning as best they can, with basically no short-term memory at all.  This is not a demonstration of kindness or graciousness.  It isn't "Christian" at all.  But dare I say what I'm thinking?  No way.  I keep my silence close, almost use it as a shield to protect myself from the verbal onslaught of ignorance that waits to assail me concerning things of which it knows nothing.

It's my job, in a way, to just put up with it.

I'm not so fond of my job today.

When I got home this afternoon I caught a glimpse of my little weedy flowerbed in the front yard.  Tiny purple Crocus are popping up everywhere.  I found the teeny bulbs last summer, buried under one of those pieces of fabric that's supposed to keep the weeds out of your flowerbeds.  I pulled up all the fabric, softened the dirt and left the bulbs there, not knowing if they'd come up in the Spring.  My boy and I got out of the car and walked over to examine them.  It's as if 30 more have popped through the soil overnight, a reminder to me that nature stops for nothing once it's set free.  I wonder then, what is keeping me from blooming?

Perhaps my own thoughts sabotage me; I cannot stop the flood of negative thinking once the gates pop open.  I let the current drag me down.  I get covered up like those Crocus bulbs--blocked from the light and rain and even the mounds of snow that make wintertime the perfect time to hide.

There is a time for everything, and for me, times are changing.  So now, instead of dwelling on all the ways I fall so short in life, I will think of something lovely: My pretty purple flowers, beset by weeds but blooming all the same.


"...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."  Philippians 4:8