Trash

Ever feel like you just need to go out and pick up your trash? My dad used to make his way to our back garage door, slowly picking up the random trash that had littered our front and side yard. He would finish his run at the end of our street, then collect the lids or sticks or little plastic pieces that might have blown out of the garbage cans (or been strewn by the dogs?) into the grass. I found myself doing the same thing the other day, as I walked to our front door. Just picking up the loose ends. Little pieces that are not consequential in their own rights, but together, make for an unsightly welcome.

And, my English major mind couldn't help but compare it to life. There I was, picking up the garbage. And people do it everyday, all the time. Don't we do it with our literal selves, too? Sometimes, it's just what is required. We have to go out, or go in, and pick up the unnecessaries, the things that have gotten in the way, the things that have littered our soul or our heart or our mind and recycle the heck out of them.

We heard this past week at a MOPS meeting of women and mothers searching to be better and kinder and simpler and smarter (and a million other things) that we must learn, as St. Paul preached, to be content. To seek it out and cling to it. Not settling for, but settling in. That idea helped me breathe this week. It helped me relax around the clutter or annoyances or mistakes or shortcomings and find contentment. This is not my strong suit--it's genetic, actually. That guy who picked up the trash--yeah, not a content, settled individual. :) He passed it on to me, though in a milder version, like Crystal Light. Maybe, hopefully, my kids will be normal? So, I must seek and want to be content. And it's hard, for there is always, always trash in the yard.

Out of the frame

Are we living our lives in the periphery? Are we being an audience member to our life? Are we choosing to be the understudy, when we should be the leading lady? Are we choosing to lead a passive, absented main life, while the rest of it, the stuff that matters, gets shoved to the side to be seen, when convenient, in our periphery, in our rear view mirrors?

It occurred to me the other day the roles have reversed: Steve and I stopped giving our kids remote games. They do not have any mobile devices except for Nick's phone, which is monitored and limited. They play the Wii on a very rare basis, and do not default to the chair facing their computer monitor. However, Steve and I, with our Iphones and kitchen computers, Ipads and laptops, seem to live our lives with our faces planted into some kind of screen. Playing a game, writing an email, searching for an answer, looking people up, looking people down. We spend our time with our family, except on rare occasions, with our phones very near our persons and the priority being its dinging, reminders, game pushes, etc.

Somehow, even family television night on Tuesdays looks like the four of us, watching big fat people lose weight, but there are two of us, really only listening to the show. We are devoted to the round three of a game, the email we've been waiting for, the crazy Wiki search of someone we just thought of--rather than the children and spouse in front of us.

Now, this is not all the time, clearly. But I've begun to notice it. And it made me wonder--will I look back on my life, this precious time of my adulthood and parenthood, and see it in a limited way? Will my memories, literally, be from the perspective of one looking down, rather than one looking at? A friend of mine the other day said she had been advised to try to be a human being rather than a human doing. Tough, but I understand. I don't want my life, my memories, to be framed by a stupid handheld convenience. I don't want my kids to remember me always distracted, always saying "Now, what?" to them. I don't want them to think they come after the computer, after the funny Facebook picture, after the. . .

I think my iPhone needs to go in "toy timeout."