There is no such thing as sanity.
The kids are screaming and running around, alternating between fighting and playing with toy guns and wands.
The dog keeps barking at thin air. Sure one of those times it was the mailman, but all the rest are for absolutely nothing.
The laundry is sitting exactly where I left it, with one load in the washer, one in the dryer. The rest sitting in baskets in front of said machines waiting their turn.
The dishes are piling up in the sink, all dinner ingredients are still sitting in the proper storage spaces they were put after the shopping trip from the other day.
And I am gloriously sitting on the couch, coffee cup in one hand, and a paperback book in another.
This is my idea of bliss during any school vacation.
Who needs sanity anyway?
The Power of individuality
The power of learning to be who you are in the face of judgement is daunting. More daunting than most of us have the strength to admit. Even less of us can say that we have beaten the challenge of overcoming.
I have fleeting moments where this clarity hits me that it just doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. As long as I can live with myself and my family doesn’t have to deal with any repercussions from my decisions it shouldn’t matter.
And yet in the exact next breath I am forced to explain to my kids that other people’s perspective really does matter in some situations. If the home room teacher you get in the fifth grade gets the idea that you are a troublemaker within the first few weeks of class, then they tend to watch you more closely and scrutinize the things that you say in a different light, all year. Of course you can break that mold at any point by showing continuous good behavior but the original perception is always right there in the back of their minds.
The teeter tottering of this subject will always be up for debate, with everybody having different opinions from each other. Hell, one persons take on this subject will change so frequently that it is hard to imagine that a person would honestly believe that they have a good leg to even stand on in a debate.
We like to thing that it has a simple answer, in a world where there is very few simple questions. In reality it is a highly complex dilemma that we will battle until our dying day.
It doesn’t matter what type of judgement haunts us since we all have different nightmares.
The way we choose to handle them is completely an individual decision however.
I am not the only one right?
Every year I say that I am going to buy less for Christmas for everyone around me.
And just like every other person in the world, I find myself dreading the amount of hours that I will need to work to pay off the credit card debt I accrued instead.
Closing old doors
I recently had an old friend send me a message telling me that he is very aware of the pain he caused in my life. The constant drama, the pain of lose of friendship by a person I called my best friend for many years.
And I find myself at a loss.
I have forgiven him before after a different seperation of friendship, just to have him do the same thing again.
I know better then to fall for this again.
I felt nothing however and I thought I would.
I felt no relief, no concern, no worry about how he has been.
Have I grown that much that I have figured out how to shut the door permanently on people who have shown constant negativity?
Live life lightly 