Blessings

So I started off this month following the Blog Every Day in May prompts by the Story of my Life blog.  If you follow my blog, you might have noticed that I have trailed off.  I have posted the majority of days in May, but I’ve missed some, and I’ve been beyond horrible in following the prompts.  But this is all for good reason — I found my writing was suffering.  I figured I’d rather go for quality over quantity, and I would rather write about what speaks to me on a given day rather than follow the predetermined constructs.

That being said, today I want to jump back in if even for a day because Thursday’s prompt was, “Things you’ve learned that school won’t teach you.”  When I saw this, I immediately thought about the following quote by Harold Coffin:

“Envy is the art of counting other people’s blessings rather than your own.”

How often do we do this!  Well, perhaps I should speak about myself rather than you all and say instead, how often do I do this!

Lately, I have been feeling a remarkably strong urge to move forward.  It feels as if I have been stagnating for years now, content in the situation I am in, and not really motivated to make any huge moves forward.  My guess is that this is because I was pregnant with Goosie, then taking care of infant Goosie, and then I was pregnant with Mae, and then had newborn Mae.  While she is still quite the infant at four months, things feel like they have calmed down for the first time in awhile, and while we would both like to have more children, my days of two under two are over, and I’m thinking that is not a phase we will relive in the future.

In other words, I have a little bit of time.  And space.

In my mind, I have been revisiting goals nearly as old as myself.  And I’ve been longing to pursue new goals.  And there are some goals I have achieved that I have simply outgrown, and I want to revisit.

And this is all so good.  And so motivating.  And so positive.  And yet it can also be a bit overwhelming when I look at the present state of my life and see where I want it to go.  I’m guilty at times (many times) of seeing others who have progressed further in certain areas, and I feel jealous and envious and I wonder why I can’t be there now.

And the answer is ridiculously easy.  I can’t be there because I am not.  I had other plans and goals I chased.  I had other obligations.  I had other dreams for myself and God had other plans for me.  I have my life to live and the living of it has led me to where I am right now.

When we sit here and compare ourselves to others, we bypass all of the blessings we have been given.  And we also bypass all of the work we have put into getting where we are at now.

Life is a series of individual steps, and where we end up at the end of our lifetime is determined by which steps we take and how we take them.  So often I want satisfaction right now.  I want the fruits of actions I have not yet taken.  I want the reward without the work.  Quite simply, I want to move in a direction that my feet have not yet taken me.

And so I try to be patient.  I try to count my own blessings.  I try to remember that if I had all of these new dreams accomplished already, I would have had to forgo others that I chose in the past.

And I’m simply not happy with that.

I love my life.  I struggle in many, many areas.  There is so much I haven’t yet achieved.  But when I look at things honestly, there’s also quite a bit that I have achieved.

And when I look at it that way, I’m no longer so frustrated and so impatient to reach the future.

Everything comes in its time, and its time will come if we step in the appropriate directions.  And in the meantime, when I find myself counting other people’s blessings, I will remember my own are greater than I ever could have imagined.

Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!