Lately, Mother Nature has been on a tear. It has rained the kind of rain that farmers love once the garden is planted – a gentle, consistent rain almost every day. That means that the forest behind us is already filled in and a responsible citizen could mow the yard every 3-4 days. But let’s be honest, here. I’m not a responsible citizen. Instead, I’ve just about had it with the rain.
Here’s the deal though: the rain has been demotivating. Thankfully, it’s not a week where I needed to be super motivated, but I also can’t just let the wheels fall completely off. So outside of cursing Mother Nature (which may or may not be jinxing my whole “I need sunshine” request), I’ve got to find another source of inspiration.
When you grew up in Western New York, there is one thing you learn to fear: a cold, wet summer. Honestly, we can handle anything else. Six feet of snow? It’s a pain in the neck, but we can clear it and make it possible to leave our houses and drive our vehicles. Within a few days, all of the drama is over. Dark at 4:30 p.m. for a solid month of the year? We’ll get over it – it’s guaranteed to get light again. But a cold, wet summer? Eh gads! That was the payoff for everything else! We would have to wait another full nine months to get another crack! And anyone around here knows that our fabulous warm, bright and sunny summers are the only reason to endure our winters.
We are now only two short weeks from the unofficial start of summer and a quick glance at The Weather Channel’s website shows we have only cooler and wetter days ahead for the next 10 days. In the back of my mind, I’m also aware that El Nino is fading and with it, the favorable weather pattern. We are likely in for a hard, cold winter in just a few short months. Summer can’t fail me now.
I sit here, angry and demotivated at the gray clouds above me.
And yet… .
It’s not lost on me that in every minute, there is sixty seconds of opportunity. In every hour, sixty minutes to build something new. In every 24 hours, there is a full day’s worth of memories. Each of us only get so many of those days and I have a choice to make: fill these hours and minutes with something meaningful or simply fritter them away being mad at the rain. I’m honest enough to admit that there’s enough frittering going on around here. Sometimes, I need to treat these minutes and hours with the reverence they deserve instead of cursing out the clouds.
That’s what I intend to do today. I’ve got a few hours of work today and outside of that, I want to get life a little back into control around here. Now, I know what you’re thinking: I work 10-12 hours a week and the rest of my time is focused on being a homemaker. How on earth can anything get out of control? But that’s just the deal. Before I spent as much time keeping our lives organized, the small elements of chaos that reigned daily around here never even got noticed. But now that I’m focused on it? I can see very clearly every day how chaos creeps in and I fight in vain to keep it at bay.
So, today is about both the mundane and the reverent. I’ll get work work and housework done. That’s the mundane. But the reverent? I’m going to make a nice dinner and have a good conversation with my husband. I will have moments with each of my pets and promote them feeling safe and secure. I’ll finish this blog and think about restarting my novel. I’ll connect with my sisters.
Rudyard Kipling wrote in his poem If, “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run…”. The implication is that you will have conquered wasting time on the way to adulthood. Today, on this rainy, uninspiring day where I fear a wet summer and I’ve got the cloudy blues, I’m going for it. I will fill this minute – or at least 45 seconds of it – with some purpose and treat the day as the gift it is.
The Yuppie Homesteader 