Often, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do when I wake up, other than make a cup or two of coffee. Past that, I’m generally going with what’s right in front of me.
Of course, I do have a vague outline of tasks to be done but unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how one looks at it) most of those tasks are not related to what I “personally” would like to spend my time doing.
In fact, I believe that I’ve honestly lost track of what I would like to do with my time…(which may be due to a fucked up childhood with a narcissist & his belittled spouse for parents, the older sibling of many other siblings who were all the wrong gender, ugly divorce by said parents, early marriage and the birth of 5 kids before 30 yrs. old., philandering, substance abusing spouse, finally exiting from bad marriage, then subsequent years of working more than I ate or slept to feed hungry offspring… ). Not sure what part of that was the single event that divorced me from my own personal “I love doing this” feeling, but somewhere along the way I forgot.
Consequently, I’ve embraced that my life is typified by one distraction after another… and I enjoy what I’m doing, regardless of what the activity is. Otherwise, I’d be one unhappy bitch.
My little granddaughter is a perfect example to me (as are all babies and small children) of really loving what’s happening in an immediate sense.
Even though I don’t get to see her everyday, when I do she’s pretty consistent. Unless there’s a good reason for her to be upset, she’s really excited about EVERYTHING. Consequently, everyone around her is excited too!
Joy is infectious… like when someone is laughing so hard that they can’t even say why their laughing (cause they can’t get the words out for laughing) and once they do somehow sputter out what got them laughing… you realize that what made them laugh wasn’t funny to you… But you’re still cracking up and now laughing even harder because, even though you’re laughing really hard (cry/laugh), what made you laugh in the first place wasn’t even funny enough for you to laugh at all…
Joy is like that.
One of my kids was feeling down last night, but we’d decided earlier in the day that we wanted to go out to dinner. So we did. We saddled up to the bar, squeezing our way in (lots of folks had the same idea as us to go out to dinner) and ordered some stiff drinks … The kids who was feeling down, wasn’t miserable, but sick of feeling down…
If I put my hands on people something happens and all this warm energy moves through my hands to whomever I have my hands on. It doesn’t resolve the problem, but it’s comforting none the less. I found myself putting my hands on both the kids I was enjoying dinner with, while we chatted about our respective days.
There are times when I really wish that I had the kind of magic in my hands I used to have when my kids were small. I could put my hand on an owie and it was instantly better. In fact, my little ones would run across a playground to where ever my hands happened to be, with the offending body part stuck out until it was “fixed” by mama’s hands.
I’m not unique to this – ALL mothers have this magical ability for small children. It’s just part of the “angels watching over your babies” thing and I took full advantage of it, often claiming the magic as my own. It wasn’t, but I knew how to use it.
Now I have to depend on my kids’ faith and determination to live great lives, but the times when any of them are having a terrible day are difficult. The only solution I’ve found, bar none, is laughter.
Last night, the three of us made total fools of ourselves laughing at a website that posts screen shots of people’s horrifically funny texts to each other that have been auto corrected.
I supposed we should’ve been embarrassed, but we were laughing so hard at the texts we were reading that there wasn’t time for that. After at least 15 minutes of this public display of hysteria, we left…
One thing’s certain, people heal themselves a lot by finding joy… we start that way as young kids and generally begin to take everything WAY too seriously.
… So even though I can’t remember what it is I like to do all the time, I love that I like to do what I’m doing most of the time.