simplicity

a dear friend of mine reminded me of its worth today.

Not everything has to be grand.  Or perfect or monumental and extraordinary.  Not everything should be.

A strong feeling that I've had the last few weeks has been: whelmed.  Not overwhelmed, not overwhelmed: just whelmed.  By the litany of things that I should be doing - could be doing - to make my life more interesting, meaningful, sparkly, or even just plain organized.

My laundry-list of reproach is long.  I have an embarrassingly lengthy list of e-mails that I've never returned.  A number of dear friends that I still haven't connected with (even though I've been back from Rome for ten months - jab jab jab).  Babies I haven't met (accompanied by baby cards I intended to send and never did).  A drawing kit I bought on Valentine's Day that I still haven't cracked.  Work assignments that I'm slow on.  A room that refuses to stay clean.  Deadlines I cheat on.  A heartache I should have unravelled by now.  A social life that I soak up one week and discard the next because I'm just so so incredibly tired from keeping "it" all in the air.

Single life is supposed to be so glamorous somehow.  Yeah.  Sometimes it is an absolute thrill to keep it all going.  And sometimes, its just a pile of stuff thrown at you and you're on your own.

Whelmed.  Whether it's by other people's expectations or my idea of how-it-should-be.

Both of them are so damn distracting.  Because neither of them is real.  I can't control what people think about me and I can only do so much to reach my ideals (are they even what I want anyways?).  But with either of them at the forefront, I turn away from the reality of what is happening before me.  Or even within me.

It's good to remember that our goal in this life is simplicity, order, and love for the sake of the only One who matters.  That, as a dear friend once wrote to me in high school, "All that is gold does not glitter / Not all those who wander are lost."  We only have to find ourselves in Him.

That might be the hardest thing of all.  But it is simple.