What to write when one is tired and has left the morning’s post until the last minute again? I guess I could say that I have been doing what I said I would do when I didn’t make any new year’s resolutions. I have been going slower and taking more care to live in the present instead of putting things off until the conditions are right.
My sister, mom and I went to visit a friend who has a delightful home on the banks of a dam far from the noise of the city. I don’t know if I have ever gone away simply to be with certain people and do nothing but read and sleep. Slowness was the weekend theme. I drove us there in our old-new car which is designed for bush territory more than anything and is more powerful than it is speedy. We weren’t able to get anywhere quickly even if we had wanted to, and when we arrived our friend thought a tractor was pulling into her driveway. Some thoughts and conversations never occur whilst we are driving fast cars and flying from commitment to appointment to meeting. We have to physically get ourselves to places where we are allowed to put our feet on the couch and not move for hours on end.
From time to time we had to pick up the pace, like when a snake slithered past and when a frog spread his sticky feet across the window pane in the shower, looking like he might want to launch himself across the room, and when our boat seemed to find itself in the eye of a storm. Other than that, the only time we changed position was to reach for our cups of tea and another piece of chocolate.
Another thing that happened this week was our daughter’s birthday party. She wanted a unicorn cake and I had that cake made to perfection in my imagination. It wasn’t rocket science – surely – and I had a picture to help if I lost my way. The moment of truth came when that ice cream cake was collapsing into a puddle in the freezer, moments before we were supposed to be singing happy birthday. I could have hidden it, maybe even fed it to the dogs and then told everyone how the dogs had eaten it sadly, but I brought that failure right out into the open. The little one who had asked for it did not seem to realise that it didn’t look like the perfect image we had based it on. Glitter makes up for a lot of things. Several people asked what it consisted of to make it so delicious. The fact that the eyes slid south a few inches leaving the eyelashes floating and the horn was outrageously large and lopsided was of no consequence! When we stop hiding our mistakes and far from perfect lives, so much freedom is released. We are able to experience something delicious in the mess and the people around us realise they don’t need to strive either because their peer has set the bar very, very low. Look I think it’s good to try, and we needn’t be ashamed when we are good at things, but every now and then a good flop is just what is necessary to keep us all grounded and setting our focus on the main thing.
And the main thing is what? Loving God, loving people. Staying connected and face to face. Working on being brutally honest and vulnerable with others in an age when perfect stories are playing themselves out on our screens and everyone thinks the dog ate the cake when, in fact, that friend should have just ordered the cake from the lady who makes cakes for a living.
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