Graduation, marriage, church callings, friends, family, extracurricular activities, eating healthy, exercising, laundry, cleaning your house, good grades, and I could just go on and on. Does anyone else ever feel like their life is a check list that never gets finished?
I hate checklists. Few times in my memory have I ever actually seen those satisfying little check! marks next to everything on my list. Why? I'll tell you why. When I sit down and start thinking of all the things I could do, suddenly the whole world is open to me. I could climb Mount Everest, have a nice chat with the president, then head home to do laundry, polish and shine the house, and make a wonderful homemade meal all the while wearing six inch high heals without having a hair out of place. Oh, not to mention I'll read a book, check up on the latest news of the world, and write a 12 page paper in a foreign language before going to bed, just because I enjoy it. For some reason, this all sounds reasonable to me while I'm sitting there. So my pen fires away and before you know it I've filled up a whole two pages with things to do. Then I start working on my list. As I work thoughts pop into my head like, "Oh! I need to email this person" or "Oh! I should add that errand to my list" and so my list gets bigger and bigger.
What ends up happening is that at the end of the day, I take one look at my list and end up throwing it on the floor with a "screw this" and sitting on my couch trying to remember where I lost my brain at some point during the day.
Point is, I sometimes get so wound up about what's on my list and what I'm not doing that I forget to just breathe! Yesterday, today, and probably tomorrow have been sick days for me. Apart from my death march to and from one class (which was decidedly NOT a good thing for my health) I didn't attend any of my classes, events or gone to work like I was supposed to. I've had to email professors, reschedule speaking appointments, and go to doctors. But has the world ended? No! Am I failing school? No! Will I be condemned to eternal wailing and gnashing of teeth for sleeping and watching tv for a whole 3 days? No!
I'm stuck here till I get better, so I might as well face it, the world is going to keep on spinning even if I'm not there pushing it as hard as I can. It's OKAY not to be on top of everything, because if we were all perfect, this world would be a pretty boring place. We are not superhuman, we do not fit all the qualifications to be Hollywood stars, but we are beautiful with our imperfections. We shouldn't be striving to become the ideal, but rather we should learn to love, accept, and become the best we can be.
So, here's to writing short, realistic lists. Here's to realizing that if we're doing our best today, tomorrow will take care of itself. Here's to knowing when to stop, breathe, and say "screw this" to the world and it's "ideal". Here's to sick days where the only thing you can do is just sit and wait for things to get better.
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