Liz Rasley

So, lately-life has been something else.

Don’t know if you can tell or not, this blog post is, oh, only 10 days late.

Yep, the deadline was the 15th, and here I am on the 25th, still a little uninspired and mostly tired, trying desperately to make this all somewhat work.

Isn’t that life somedays? Barely fastened together with paper clips and safety pins, hoping that it will all somewhat work?

That’s what life these days feels like to me: a bit frazzled, more annoyingly complicated than I remember it, and more full of dishes and things-to-be-done than the folded laundry and crossed off to-do lists life of my dreams.

Sigh.

So, in all of this is stress, anxiety and fear, my familiar bullies, show up and try to make this a grand affair out of these small, small pebbles of problems in my life. However, the conclusion that I have come to in all of this is that it’s not that life is perfect one day and falls apart the next; it’s not so extreme as that, even though my frienemies anxiety and fear would like me to believe that.

If you’re anything like me, you tend to be idealistic (to a fault), and tend to see things as either “good” or “bad.”

For instance, my family remembering Mother’s Day=good.

The drama and the scene in getting me breakfast in bed, and the actual Mother’s Day=well, not so good.  It was full of wet pancakes, spilled water from a bud vase and an un-quiet toddler trying to faux-wake me up (I do not do so well staying in bed in the mornings) and all things that I wouldn’t have expected.

In the past, this would have been a BIG sigh.  A huge frustration and an example as to why my life isn’t perfect and things don’t go my way! Goodness, why can’t everyone see I just wanted to have a day where everything went perfectly? Is that so much to ask?!

Of course it is.  Nothing is perfect, and I know this. I swear I do.  And yet it’s only taken me an eon to see that  everything in my life is imperfectly perfect.

I’m finding that life is best lived, best experienced in the seams of the day, in the seams of the moments of great big events and expectations, like my Mother’s Day impossible expectations.  It ends up being about the little moments, these quiet, unexpected, unplanned moments that make the day/experience/event.

What I mean by life in the seams is this: it’s the things in the day that go unnoticed, that get pushed to the side for the other things, the big things, the everything-went-wrong things.   It’s the day when there are too many people, too many long lines or traffic jams, and just about everything has left a bitterness in your mouth like an over-ripe lime.  These days are hard to forget and hard to remember kindly.

And yet these days aren’t days that were wholly bad or wholly good-that’s just the thing:most days are not wholly good or wholly bad.  However, we want to label them so (ok, so maybe just me) and so we miss out on the fullness of life, we forget the imperfect joy of jumping in an elevator with a toddler on the bitter-lime mouth day.

We forget the tender words from our husband on the day of the Very Bad Haircut.

We somehow aimlessly misplace our friend’s compassion and quiet kindness on the day that It Poured And I Took Public Transportation And I Forgot My Umbrella.

So much we miss.  So much we are invited to remember, if only we could recall the small things throughout our lives and not the simply the retouched, picture-perfect moments.

So much of my life-I’ve waited and expected it to be this big, pink, frilly skirt full of grace and peace and perfectness. And how much of life I have missed, knowing that it all lies in the gloriously unfinished seams.