‘Twas the night before Thanksgiving and all through the house…it’s completely silent because my children are at daycare, M is at work, and I’m home baking cookies and writing until it’s time for daycare pick up.
Have you ever seen a beehive, the kind with glass sides that lets you look in on hundreds of shimmying bodies milling about, each one pressing against another until they become one vibrating mass?
Self-improvement is always on my mind. It’s echoed in the blogs I read, the social media I consume, and the conversations I have. And while self-improvement is a worthwhile goal, I think an equally important pursuit is to approach life with a spirit of contentment.
I recently applied for a new job in my division and during one segment of the nearly five-hour interview, someone asked me: “What motivates you to be successful in a job?”
When I was little, my sister was afraid of monsters in her closet. I’m not sure who started this, but every night, my dad or I would spray into her closet from a Pledge can we’d covered in construction paper and labeled “Monster Be Gone.” It actually seemed to work.
Yesterday our family visited a new-to-us church. “Is it going to be s-c-a-r-y?” Graydon asked, his desire to spell out words increasing with each new word he learns. “Not really,” I replied. “All churches are made up of people, and people are just people, so that’s not so scary.”
I recently listened to one of my favorite new-ish podcasts, Best of Both Worlds. In one episode, author and speaker Laura Vanderkam talked about re-framing mom guilt by calling it wistfulness. Vanderkam said that instead of feeling guilty when you’re working and subsequently not with your children, you should instead acknowledge the feeling as wistfulness–a feeling of longing for something while also knowing not all ideal situations can exist in the same moment.
I know this much is true: it is very hard to say no.
I woke up this morning and remembered my commitment to intuitive eating. I said to myself: Today you can eat anything you want.
Do you know that feeling you get when you think you should probably say something, but you kind of hope someone else says it so that you don’t have to be the one to speak up?
That’s me right now. I’m over here hoping I don’t have to be the one to say something while knowing deep down I can at least be a one. One person who adds to the chorus of people speaking up and out, lifting their voices to effect change.