Enjoying the Simple Things

Life is busy for all of us. Too often we can get caught up in all that we are doing in our lives that we don’t slow down, much less stop doing, The Madness.

I’m not being critical here – I fall into this trap too often for my own liking.

When I was a young married woman with a growing family, the scene was much the same.

Maybe the particulars were different – little munchkins running around, kid’s school and sports events, husbands cyclical work routines and managing my own part time job. It was crazy then.

I had thoughts that once a certain season in my life passed, “life would settle down!”

Ha! No such thing!

So, here I am at 54 still learning how to do the ‘work- life balance’ thing.

This new business adventure I began a little under a year ago has consumed quite a bit of my time. It is hard to start from square one and build from there.

But it has been worth it. The temptation to think, do and even sleep business related things is all too easy to fall into. It has been a struggle at times not to just allow it to consume me.

But the Lord reminds me all the time to take all my thoughts captive. We have the ability to control what we think on.

Maybe we can’t control the split second that thought first comes into our minds, but we can choose what to do with that thought – to dwell or not to dwell – that is the question!

It’s quite a skill to develop and I am certainly not saying I have attained that skill.:) But what I can say it is my goal and something I try to work on everyday.

Controlling our minds plays a big part in the work-life balance struggle we all face no matter what our jobs may be.

I took these photos last spring. To capture the images, I had to be still, slow and patient (and straining my calves!) A new lens helped me to get close enough to see the details that my normal eye could not.

But it wasn’t until I looked at the images in my editing program that I realized all the details that I had walked by so many times before and never noticed.

I had missed the beautiful water droplets resting on the leaf edges of my yellow barberry, the web a spider had meticulously woven from branch to branch, the rain drops that seam to hang in mid air as they rest on the transparent web and the little critter making his way across the buds on the peonies.