Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Life is pure adventure -Maya Angelou


Someone really needs to clean this window.

It's been such a mish-mash of random things around here over the last 24 hours.  Mostly hilarious.  The little guy was running around before his bath yesterday and peed on the floor, then immediately started scrubbing at the puddle. With my toothbrush.  He also lost his balance yesterday and headbutted me.  I have a black eye.  I had a dream last night that I was at an estate sale with Orson Welles.  Another dream that my mother was waiting outside of the post office for me in a car that was shaped like the little man's clown fish bath toy.  

I love small things like this.  I love life desperately.

We need to go grocery shopping this afternoon, badly.  I'll be out and about with my toddler, his runny nose and my black eye.  I found the concealer I bought the last time I gave myself a shiner and tried to cover it, sort of.  There seems to be a fine line between covering a black eye and trying to cover UP a black eye. But we need to go. We're out of milk, food, beer and I'm using our last extra toothbrush.

I was reminded of Maya Angelou's essay "Living Well. Living Good." and took a moment to re-read it today.  You can read it here.  In part, she writes that: 

"Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. We leave our homes for work, acting and even believing that we will reach our destinations with no unusual event startling us out of our set expectations. The truth is we know nothing, not where our cars will fail or when buses will stall, whether our places of employment will be there when we arrive, or whether, in fact, we ourselves will arrive whole and alive at the end of our journeys. Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. "

If you have the time, this interview from The Atlantic is brilliant.

Who knew the day would take you here?




4 comments:

  1. That made me laugh! When we moved here a few weeks later my wife opened the car door into her eye, gave herself a black eye and a nasty cut, the neighbours must have wondered what had moved in next door!
    I did wretch a little bit about your toothbrush though (I'm a bit funny with teeth cleaning - other people anyway), just lucky you saw him and he didn't put it back without you knowing!

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    1. Your poor wife! It's so embarrassing because any way you explain it the reasons seem made up. Lol. The little guy has also thrown our toothbrushes in the bath, toilet etc so I've learned to keep a large stock of them on hand.

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  2. I love life too. On another blog, we were reminded to stop and smell the roses - a great expression.
    Like Kev, I laughed at your shenanigans (how do you spell that?). I have a 6 year old boy and am forever cleaning up after him :D

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    1. Tracy I can't even imagine what we're in for when he's that age. Probably I will just leave the cats in charge of him.

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