the post that leads to nowhere {my ordinary life.}

{The response to yesterdays post was wonderful {huzzah!} and I'm excited to get underway!  I'll give some details tomorrow, so make your way back.  I'd write about it today but I needed to get the following post out before my brain exploded. You know how that goes.}

At the onset of this post, I know it will wind down a road to a non-existent conclusion.

But just like running, reading or talking to my husband, click-clacking on the keys is just something that I must do, to close out a day.  Who knows why or for what return, but I need to show up and prodcue something, maybe more so these days, then before.

I've been thinking about an ordinary life, lately.

Remember in You've Got Mail when Kathleen Kelly questioned her small life?  I do.  I recall it all the time.  I even wrote about it once and I remember the response being quiet and maybe it's because people don't stop to think about a small life or if ordinary is o.k. Maybe people feel a sense of failure if they lead a seemingly small life.  Maybe they feel the only satisfaction comes from a life lived large and outwardly grand?
Maybe it's because we are living in our future lives already and taking little time to observe our future space.

Today I woke up with a cold and I had horrendous hair until 9am.  I went to the post office and I just ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch.  For second lunch, I'll have another.
I saw a friend and watched my daughter swim huge strides across a huge pool and felt pangs of pain as I saw her once-small body reaching out to grab a concrete slab, when I can still feel her newborn skin pressed against by chest.

My kids sleep and it's warm and my house needs to be tidied up.  It's quiet and the mailman is walking up and down the streets but I can hear the faint roll of a lawnmower.

A very ordinary life.  A very simple and sometimes boring one, too.

But why I like that isn't because I'm adverse to excellence or greatness. Quite the opposite, actually.  I think I like small and simple because it leaves room for the extraordinary to actually occur.  The wiggle room in my life is a blessing so I'll squeeze it out and save it in a jar so when a moment comes for whatever greatness may be calling...I'll be there.  Hopefully.

Small and ordinary is good because it doesn't assume that we understand everything and we aren't doing all of the many things we think we should be doing.  There's wisdom in that, right?

A line in one of U2's songs resonates with me.
"The more you see, the less you know.  The less you find out as you go."
Why I like that, I'm not all together sure, but it might have something to do with the cold hard fact that when I try to break from simple, I muddle everything.  I dip my hands and feet into hurried waters and come up soaked with regret for not being more wise and slowing down.  I search and look and tend to want to figure things out and I'm getting to the point in my life where failure in that regards is teaching me to stop it.  Let go.  Stop pushing and be.
When I go out searching, sometimes I come home forgetting what I went out looking for.

Does that make sense? {it's alright if you're saying no}


Ordinary is o.k.  After-all, we are all a bit ordinary. We just run from it, which we shouldn't because it binds us together.
It doesn't mean that we can't do extraordinary things....we just have to move life to a place where extraordinary can find a timeslot.

{See.  I told you it was a windy road to just about nowhere....}