This morning, it was me, myself and… Twister? Yep. My big guy went on walkabout this morning. He loves his morning walks. He checked out the new concrete piers for the deck, inspected the mulching job in my perennial gardens, took a gander in the woodshed at the firewood we stacked over the weekend and then spent a lllooonnnggg time staring into the fenced garden. I like to imagine that he was considering the opportunities for fresh veggies this year; he was more likely fascinated by a fuzzy face that had made its way in there. (Or, simply he forgot what he was doing and just thought he’d look busy instead.)
After waking to fabulously sunny skies, the fog has rolled in and will likely stay until about 10 a.m. Since I’m the only human heartbeat yet awake, I had to go outside and shag Twister when he strayed too far from his allotted backyard boundaries. Ultimately, we made a deal: he comes in and I do morning snack. As we were walking in, I had the random thought that Twister was living his best life and that started me thinking, what is a best life anyway?
Presumably, we all pursue our best life, right? Yes, we can wind up in unhelpful situations (she puts in mildly), but we didn’t get there because we were looking to make bad decisions. Instead, we got there because we wanted to be there. At least in the beginning. We may have later found out that where we were was not where we wanted to be, but at first, we thought we were going to the right place for ourselves.
But, what is a best life? Is it the best moments in one’s life? Or is it a way of living that creates a lifestyle that you generally – and genuinely – enjoy. Hmmm… let me contemplate both.
If “best life” refers to the high points of one’s life, there are a few times that particularly stand out: our wedding day and the lead up to it, Antigua, Lake Placid and my husband’s first Ironman, that cruise I took with my mom. There’s a theme here to those best life moments, if you didn’t already notice it: they happened when I was generally on vacation and experiencing something out of my ordinary. Okay, so in that context, “best life” means extraordinary times.
Yet, what if “best” life was about maintaining a life? Wouldn’t that be more profound? Maybe less abundant sunshine and shooting stars, but more enriching all the same? Well, if that’s my working definition for best life then I cast my thoughts to now. Am I living my best life? Still in the midst of years of renovations, still working, still planning for retirement and saving like a fool, and still with an overwhelming amount of the daily/weekly stuff to do. On its face, that doesn’t exactly sound like a so-called best life. Still…
Well, let me rephrase it a bit. The renovations are almost over and we have made our house uniquely our own. It’s beautiful and when we do get the deck done, the entire house will feel very functional. We just didn’t renovate to update things, we focused on form following function and making timeless choices. In the end, that was the key to avoiding renovation regret. Now that we are close to the end, I still wouldn’t change a thing. As for working? Well, it’s part-time, for myself and from home. Enough said. I couldn’t make that situation better if I tried. Planning for retirement? Okay, I can’t restate that to make it better: we just have to keep saving. And finally, the daily grind. On a Tuesday after a holiday weekend when we were grinding out a slew of weekend projects, I face the prospect of laundry, grocery shopping and chasing down some lost mail. I also have one long meeting, a powerpoint deck to do and a shorter, strategy session. It will be busy, particularly considering that I also need to mow today. But… . there is a quiet solitude in mowing and the instant satisfaction of making something look good. We all know by now that I love my clothesline and the simple Zen of hanging clothes to dry. The grocery shopping means providing for my family and I love that; the mail issue can hopefully be solved by stopping at the post office on my way to the grocery.
In the end, however, living my best life – at least in this interpretation – isn’t necessarily about what I do, per se. It’s about my why. I love the quiet simplicity of our lives. I love that when I hand mow the back portion of the yard where we spend the majority of our time, it looks like carpet and makes it easy to enjoy both a campfire and hanging clothes. I love that no matter how busy I am, you can only hang clothes so quickly and then you have to wait on Mother Nature. Those simple acts force me to slow down and – dare I say it? – calm down. I love to make healthy meals from scratch and enjoy both the prep time and that pre-dinner time when my husband and I talk about our days.
Most of all? I love that after a lifetime of chasing dreams, achievements and other things I define as “more,” I’m finally at a place where enough is truly enough. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t live a life that anyone would envy. (My cats, though, it’s a different story.) It’s a hard life when you do as much as you can – even renovations – yourself. It’s a lot easier to throw clothes in a dryer than to hang them out or mow the entire lawn with a tractor vs. a push mower. It’s easier to not rescue strays, if your conscience can live with it. But there is a quiet simplicity to it. After this weekend’s marathon work weekend that culminated in our huge garden getting weeded, landscape fabric installed and re-mulched and nearly three face cords of wood into the woodshed, every muscle in my body hurt last night. But I woke up this morning feeling better – maybe a little sore – and proud that we still do things for ourselves.
My best life? Probably someone else’s nightmare. But it’s mine and I’m living it.
The Yuppie Homesteader 