Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Keep the Easy Things Easy


With autumn comes less light. It seems that we are home more, though I'm not sure that's true. It just feels like we spend more time inside these walls. And suddenly all the things that we've left undone - all the little bits of stuff that have gotten left out and gotten disorganized - are driving me crazy. They are all in my way. Not only that, but I want this house to look better. Why does it have to look like such a mess all the time?

Well, it's because we haven't been cleaning it.

To be fair, we have traveled more than once since the summer ended, and it felt for a long time like we were either preparing to leave or settling back into routine once we returned. I also had that foray into creative tomato processing, not to mention the grape jam/syrup/molasses adventure. We had houseguests. There were things to do that I don't even remember anymore, but the days were used up in a hurry. There wasn't much time to get things organized, and for that stretch of time, it was easiest to just let things go.

Now it is easier if things are put away. I choose small organizational tasks when I have a pocket of time to fill, and I am gradually getting everything put away or thrown away or given away. I reorganized our kitchen countertops so that we could have the toaster out all the time, as I realized that having it tucked away out of reach of an outlet meant that sometimes it seemed too hard to both get the toaster out and drop some bread inside. I'm sure that sounds terrible, but it is what it is. As we head into the darkest days of the year, I want it to be easy to make toast, so I have made it easy.

The way I see it is that there are a lot of hard things that crop up in life, and it is best to keep the easy things easy. There is nothing wrong with making things easy if it doesn't hurt anyone - it is not laziness, though some might argue that it is. It's more about budgeting the time and energy we have available to us. I increasingly feel that we worked our way through some of the hardest bits of our girls' childhoods, so our hard isn't really that hard, but there's no guarantee for a friction free future. And there are little difficulties that crop up regularly, not to mention my desire to help bear the burdens of others, having had so many of my own and our family's burdens generously borne by others countless times. So I'm keeping the easy things easy. Starting with the possibility of making toast.

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