This past week has been, well, a week. Arriving home from Florida on Saturday, we landed in snow flurries. That should have been my sign. But hopeful after a week of wall-to-wall sunshine, I dismissed the omen. By Monday afternoon, I got the message: the week was going to be bumpy.
But I made it to here – Thursday – which is my Friday. More than that, today is a day blissfully mostly free of meetings and I am once again experiencing wall-to-wall sunshine, although 30 degrees colder. And all of that got me thinking: what is more valuable in our lives? The sum total or the parts? Every day, I try to reflect on the good parts of my life and my hubby and I each tell the other three things we’re grateful for that day. But in this blog, I focus on the big picture: what is my life about and where is it going? Therein lies the tension. Is it the sum or the parts?
I would argue that it’s actually both.
I recently encountered a friend whose very existence seems to be what she’s not grateful for. We all have a friend like that and I truly do care for her. But in her stories, she is the victim and in her life, the rain only comes to her parade. Her response to me? I was lucky or, as she would put it, one of the privileged. And yet, no one experiencing my week would have called me lucky. I bombed in not one but two meetings, we have a half-put-together catio in our fireplace room in my otherwise messy house, I’ve been eating like crap, its snowed for three of the five days I’ve been home and my husband and I were both a bit sullen after repeatedly frustrating days at work yesterday.
Yet, when I think about the things I’m grateful for this week, the list could be equally as long. We found a landscaper who will fix the remaining part of our ditches and backfill the front yard, including seeding it; the catio is going to work great for the furry ones and they’re going to love it, we were able to get all of the piers we needed for our new deck before they sold out (and they’re already sold out), despite my bad performance in two meetings, I particularly shined in a third, I finished out a contract that was frustrating me, and today is going to be completely sunny.
See? Here, it’s about the parts. It’s about finding something every day to be grateful for. The parts matter.
But when I pull back the lens even farther, I think about the life I’m trying to build. Again, I should point out that it’s not a life anyone should envy. The house is in various stages of being done and we sometimes feel like a slave to renovations, we can both have stressful jobs at times, our lifestyle is a bit more – hmmm – challenging than what others would want, my sister has had cancer, and the adoptees around this house are always creating extra work.
On the flipside? The house is turning out exactly as I wanted it and while our jobs can get stressful, I do what I love and I do it part-time. I also work from home, which is something I absolutely love. Our lifestyle is harder but there is something incredibly satisfying about putting freshly line dried sheets on the bed. My family is closer than ever and I can’t imagine life without my fuzz buckets. When I think about my life from the 30,000-foot level, it is good. Not always as calm as I would like but solidly in the good column and I know that on our true “go forward basis”, life gets better.
See? Here, it’s about the sum. The sum is a life that matters to me.
So, what is my conclusion here? Is the sum worth more than the parts or the parts worth more than the sum? I have a few thoughts. First, they’re sometimes equal and that makes sense. By living the everyday with the right mindset (i.e., the “parts”), it creates the tapestry of the life (i.e., the sum). Each equally feeds the other. But at other times, the sum outweighs the parts or the parts outweigh the sum. On those really good weeks, I want to focus on the parts – like that week in Antigua or the week we finally put the house back together after finishing the floors project. At other times (and usually all summer long), I like to focus on the sum when I’m having coffee on the back deck in the morning and marveling at how I built a life that allowed me to do that without a care in the world.
Mostly? I truly do think it’s all about perspective. In hard times, good times, sad times and joyful times, our approach matters. Whether you’re finding joy in the only good thing to have happened that day or purposefully building a life that satisfies you, leaning into what is good makes the difference. That’s me. I’m leaning in.
The Yuppie Homesteader 