let's be adventurers

my internal clock woke me up saturday morning. it doesn't matter that it was the weekend. at 5:34 my brain tells me - you should be awake. 

my elementary-schoolers started school last week. we now officially have a first-grader and a third-grader. they've pretty seamlessly slipped back into school mode, and i'm grateful for the fall things coming. but things feel different this year. and by different i mean that they feel too similar to before. there's not much of a feeling of: oh-my-goodness you're older and bigger and ready for new adventures.

and i think that's part of it - i'm realizing just how long it has been since we've had a real adventure, and i can feel that i'm starting to get stuck. going away from the normal has always been an important part of processing life for me. different spaces matter. 

i don't want to get stuck in any one way of thinking. because we very easily become narrow-minded and think the world only works a certain way if we surround ourselves with the same things and the same people and the same routines and never go anywhere else with anyone else. 

it's easy to intellectually know that there are a variety of ways to see the world, but if we go too long without interacting with a different pocket of people we may start to practically live like there's only one way to do things. we may start to practically believe that the way we do things is the way they must be done. 

we may fall into the type of automatic thinking that leads to wants being seen as needs, and that normal is something real. normal is a myth. it's a cultural norm that has been ingrained into life.  

anyway. i've been realizing the importance of the pause. because getting outside of my normal helps me to see the ways that i'm ridiculous. it helps me to see that there are other ways to live and other ways to think about things. 

it helps me to see the ways i put expectations on myself and on other people. it helps me to back up and re-evaluate how i'm spending my time and my resources. am i using my gifts? am i really acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with my God? {the short answer is no, i'm not.}

so often i'm so wrapped up in my own life that is right in front of my face that i don't take three steps back and really think about what the heck i'm doing. 

filling the hours up to the gills is a great way to let life slip by without thinking. 

it's also a great way to suffocate.

i think that's why i miss adventures. adventuring is unknown. it's different, it's new, and you can only plan it out but so well. it demands some deep breaths and launching into the unknown - if only for a moment.

because the restaurant in boston that you hoped to go to may be chock full of people, and the one just down the road may have space and it may lead to one of the best meals you've eaten in your life. {as happened to us back in 2011. and yes, i still think about that risotto.}

i'm not big on the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, let's just be spontaneous and do something without thinking kind of adventures. but am i even leaving space for an adventure to happen? 

there's a certain amount of wilderness wrapped up in an adventure. it's the advent of something new where you don't know what to expect and you don't know what you're going to get. and there's something about that type of situation that pulls on you in ways you didn't expect. it also pulls the unexpected out of you and helps you understand yourself just a little bit better. 

this job is teaching me a lot of things about myself. and if i'm being honest about it - i'm not convinced i actually want to learn all of them. it has shown me over and over again how much help i need, and how much grace i need, and how paralyzing it can be to want to do something well when you feel like you don't really fully know what you're doing.

that's part of the trick in life though. most of us don't really know what we're doing. i didn't really know what i was doing before i was working. parenting is a giant reminder of that - one right after the other. none of us knows what we're doing. some people are just better at lying about it than others.

remember that old song? life's a dance you learn as you go? 

true, friends. it's so true.

why do we need to convince ourselves we have all of the answers? 

{if you know the answer to this, i'd love some insight. i tend to think it's just because we want to be in control so badly that we can't admit how out of control we actually are. we wanted to be like God. we ate the fruit. and we keep eating it every day thinking that we can be like God. thinking we're in control. grasping at straws and working ourselves into a frenzy. now, back up the rabbit hole we go, alice.}

here's to the learning. 

here's to the adventures.

here's to living a life where we're actually honest with ourselves.

xoxo