content

Sure takes a lot of energy to address discontentment. As a horizon watcher, I can miss the miles in between. Highway hypnosis. Ann’s quotable soul amnesia. Thinking I’ll feel finished when it’s finished. When I get there. But there are pertinent details and fine print I would skim and miss. The fear of missing out is real but it ought to look more like missing the faintest strokes and whispers that make life so painfully breathtaking. There is beauty and progress in the details.

Trying to tackle this as I examine the things I want to be finished with and the things I want to begin. Discontentment can rob me from enjoying what has been graciously set before me. It’s a complicated compromise — believing for more while practicing gratitude for what’s been given. It requires that I constantly take inventory of what I have, while still making room for what’s to come. If I never allow myself to partake of the present, I’ll forever be chasing a unicorn that eludes me. The magic is the here and now. The wonder is in the finest fingerprints.

I swing wide each day between these two postures. Yesterday my youngest daughter was a tyrant, provoking everyone to their boiling. This morning she woke early to tend to the animals and announced she was singing with the crickets as she did. She was a chaotic mess yesterday yet perfectly in tune today. Inconsolable yesterday, divinely contented today. So true to the process. So true to the struggle.

One minute I’m admiring the most insignificant seed and finding my brain overwhelmed at the miracle it is … how truly significant it is. The next, I’m looking at the feral overgrowth that is my garden and wishing it far away. I tell you, the temptation to arrive at some finished and flourishing place is crazy-making. I’m beholding and marveling, and then I’m overlooking every step it took to get there. Double mindedness in full bloom.

What if the secret to having more is cherishing what you have? What if value increases the more we value? What if being satisfied has little to do with what we have and is more about understanding we are already wealthy beyond what we deserve? My eyes see what’s unfinished before I perceive what’s been completed. This visionary needs better vision.

I have been thinking about the hundreds of projects that need completed around my home. Turns out I’m the biggest project of them all. I dug up some before pictures of our kitchen when we bought the home years ago. I decided to measure from there as a way to gauge progress. I’m all about the analytics (how a thing performs) but I often forget to enjoy the fruit of labor. Quickly I’m off, attempting to better. How about the good enough? Good enough to sit a minute and breath it in.

I want to knock out my drop ceiling in my kitchen, expose the beams and replace the vertical paneling with horizontal. I want to tear up the laminate floors and finally get that new fridge we are long overdue. Improvements. I am hard-wired for improvement. I am not as skilled in living peaceably within the undone. Better than I was a decade ago but only because I am forced to be. I do believe that many times “that” thing is not introduced until we find ourselves full of the “this” thing. Settled in just enough to grow the roots of gratitude. I fear I’m the biggest tyrant of us all in this house.