The learning curve continues... forever, actually. With not a minute to spare I finally finished the garage - my goal was to finish this project by the time school started. I'm 11 hours and 59 minutes under the wire. That's better than some tax years...
Reorganizing my life has been a learning experience. For years now my favorite Dutch word was "verplats". It basically means to move something from one place and put it someplace else. Instead of actually cleaning and putting away, I am forever verplatsing. The things in my house have always found their way around in circles - I thought I was forever getting rid of things, but when I really took a good hard look at it, I was merely moving stuff from one place to another, giving the illusion of clean but continuing to amass more and more stuff that required - you guessed it - verplatsing.
So this season has been brutal. Instead of shortcuts to the illusion of clean, I forced myself (and my family) to live in chaos while I did right things right - instead of stuffing I pulled things out of corners and closets; instead of throwing things into bins and labeling them "miscellaneous" I painstakingly went through every box and bag, sorting and repackaging things into only bins that were properly labeled and could be stacked on one another in neat little rows across the shelves in the storage room.
What I realized through the process is that I've done this with my life as well. I've spent too much time stuffing things away and promising I'd sort it out later. I haven't gotten rid of enough junk, and I haven't found a place for everything in a long, long time. The old adage really is true - you have to have money to make money, and you have to take time to make time.
In an effort to simplify my life I've spent my entire summer (in between trips to the cabin) focused solely on this one purpose. There were times I wanted to quit - times I wanted to give up and just start stuffing again, but somehow this time had to be different. It was time to grow up - to make long term decisions over ones that bring instant gratification.
What I found in some of those boxes and drawers and closets have caused me to examine my life - and the lives of those around me - in new ways. On the one hand I can look back on a life that has been full of adventure and rich with experience. Those were the memories I was happy to sort through, picking the best photos; the coolest mementos, and compiling them into their own boxes that are now so much easier to retrieve and relive. It's the junk I had a hard time with - the stuff I didn't want to remember - all the pain and the trials and the things I haven't been so proud of.
I threw away a box of trophies I'd kept since childhood - every softball, gymnastics, dance and soccer award I'd ever received was in this box. My children have seen it. They know who I was. But more importantly, they know who I am now, and they themselves have become my monuments to anything spectacular I could have ever become. They're my today, not my yesterday.
Keeping yesterday isn't all bad. The photo albums and high school yearbooks contain irreplaceable memories - snapshots of time gone by. I found myself only wanting to save the best photos - the ones that showed me in a favorable light or in my skinny jeans... but to be honest, in order to get a full picture of me you'd have to look at all the awkward pictures of me along with the great ones.
I guess in the end we have three choices to make - we can live in the past, always looking longingly backward when it was "the good old days", or we can live for the future, playing "what if" and never enjoying today because we think it will be better when we can finally ________...
Me? I want the third alternative. I want to remember the past and respect it. I want to look to the future with anticipation but not longing. But most of all, I just want to live for today...
09-14-2007, 01:49 AM
My latest blog entry
Linear Mode
