While You're Busy Making Other Plans

Well, hello there.

Over the past few weeks I have thought – at least once a day – about what a neglectful blogger I’ve been lately. You all know me well enough to know that busy is (ahem, always) my middle name but these past two months might just be the busiest on record. There have been trips and adventures and I have tales galore. There are many stories I want to tell you, so many thoughts I’d like to record.

Each and every time I stop what I’m doing or have a moment of down time, I think about what I’d like to write about here, about what I’d like to tell you. And there’s a lot brewing in my brain. But the theme that I always seem to come back to is this amazing, wonderful feeling of contentment that I have been lucky enough to stumble upon. I know – even as I type it – how terribly hokey and cheesy that probably sounds. I always feel the need to add the asterisk where I tell you that yes, I have some frustrations in my life, yes, there are some issues that annoy me, no, I’m not an annoying version of Suzie Sunshine. Often it seems it is easier for people to understand the jaded, the negative, and the pessimists. And yet. For several months running now, all I can think when I start my day, is how pleased and happy I am with my very own little life.

Perhaps I am not explaining myself well. But what I mean to say is this: there was a stretch of time at the end of my twenties that was awfully difficult for me. Even now, when I think back to how I felt and what I was going through, I feel myself growing tense and stressed. And even though I knew, deep down inside even then, that things would eventually get better it seemed like such a very long time coming that I didn’t know if I would ever make it. When I didn’t know what else to do, I broke the days up; hour by hour, minute by minute, because that’s the only way I knew to process them.

I still take things minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day, but for just the opposite reasons. Things are just so good, so perfectly and contently normal – even with life’s annoyances – that I want to take time, to slow down and process them. I want to appreciate and savor them.

And that’s what I find myself thinking on so many of my days. My life. It is unfolding in its own unique way. It is different than what I’d initially pictured, of course from what I’d initially planned.

Yet it is so much better than I’d ever dared to imagine.