You go about in pity for yourself
and all along a great wind carries you across the sky
-Ojibwe saying
For the past few days I have been going about in pity for myself. It was really quite spectacular. It seems I have many, many reasons to pity myself. I have a case of strep throat that is resisting a series of antibiotics; haphazard finances; howling children already suffering from cabin fever; a home that looks like someone turned it upside down and shook it; and so on.
I was really pitying myself, though, for my abject failure to create a distinguished life. I still languish under ideas that I am somehow going to rise from the ashes of the ordinary to become someone remarkable. Don't ask me what, exactly. Just remarkable. More remarkable than the person I actually am: a mother with limited patience and energy, a wife with varying levels of enthusiasm for matrimony, a housecleaner, a hobby artist and writer.
On Saturday I was wiping down office furniture and was grim with the understanding that this is actually my life. No shooting star here, just a regular gal making a living.
So, the pity. But it happens that I have a living connection with God, and today he sent along two miracles, priority. The first was a talk with my uber-grounded friend Ann. She reminded me in her simple, quiet way that it's not important to be a shooting star; that God is just as satisfied with a humble cleaning business and reading my kids bedtime stories as he is with the lecture-circuit New Age forward-thinking healers I so admire. She told me of a woman she knows who says she starts each day aiming at a target. Wherever the arrow lands, her friend says, is where it was meant to be. This kind of thinking allows me to forgive myself for not putting away the clean laundry. My arrow just didn't make it that far.
So that was a relief. But then the next miracle, a surprise gift from my friend Danielle, who could not possibly have known that I so coveted a Lainie's Lady. And what does this lady say? You guessed it: faith.
I hope like hell I'm living my life right. But then again, I'm starting to understand I can't life life right. I can only live it.
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1 comment:
As if this list of ways you impact the world weren't long enough already, I do think you might have left something off your list:
a mother with limited patience and energy, a wife with varying levels of enthusiasm for matrimony, a housecleaner, a hobby artist and writer, and an inspiration.
For all those people you hold in high esteem, remember that there are others who see you in the same light. If you're wondering who, you can count me as one of them.
You are remarkable.
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