A New Life

 

A couple of weeks ago I started noticing that my weeks had pattern—every week was far busier than I was used to and far busier than I wanted it to be. 

Every week ended with me, exhausted and overwhelmed, making the resolution that next week I would get control of things and then my life would be “back to normal.”

I miss my normal life.  I’ve tried hard to get it back.  I’ve tried to go to bed earlier and to schedule my life more carefully, hoping that those things would help me get back to normal.

And then one day it occurred to me.  (Or the spirit spoke to me.)  I can’t get my normal life back—because this is a new life.  It is not simply the old life, transplanted to a new place.

The old life was far away from everything.  Because of that, we didn’t go places very often.  In the old life the kids were only home schooled.  In the old life we didn’t have drop-in visitors very often because we did live so far away from everything and everyone.  In the old life there were lots of days that I never left my house (or my yard anyway) and I was happy with it that way.

This new life is so different.  We live close to everything.  We go lots of places.  I go exercise three mornings a week.  I go to play the piano for the choir two times a week.  The kids go to school five mornings a week.  Sometimes they go back at lunchtime for choir, or for play practice, or for the battle of the books.  The girls go to color guard and flute lessons.  Jared hangs out with his posse every afternoon.  They babysit one dog and walk another every afternoon.  People from my ward drop by to pick something up or drop something off.  They stay and chat for a while. 

It’s all so different and it feels busy so much of the time; far more than I am comfortable with.  But on that day I realized something about my “normal life.”  That I need to stop waiting for it, and I need to stop whining about it.  (Yeah, that’s me—the waiting whiner.)  Because as hard as it has been for me to accept, that life is gone, left behind in a beautiful neighborhood of hills and curvy roads and beautiful trees.  This life here is a new life; something different that is still being revealed.  Hopefully something that can be equally beautiful.  So I need to figure out how to survive and (more importantly) how to thrive in this life, since it seems clear that this is Heavenly Father’s plan for us right now. 

I’m not sure at all how to accomplish this.  But I’m pretty sure it starts with letting go of the old normal, and embracing the new normal.  With an end-of-week evaluation that assesses what’s working well and where I need to make adjustments, rather than an end-of-week whine fest.  And that it includes taking a nap…