The Little Things

The most frustrating thing for a writer is to have the need to write and to be unable to find the words. My head is literally brimming over with thoughts and yet I keep hitting that brick wall. Everything I write these days feels forced and very cliché. I am dealing with a virtual mountain of life changes, emotions, and challenges, and now is the time I need to write the most! And yet nothing comes to me. My main means of coping is failing me.
Everyone tells me to focus on the positive, and of course that is the most obvious tool to use when you are struggling. And yet when those alligators, as I have come to call my negative thinking, come nipping at my feet, positive thoughts only work for a very short time, and then they come swimming right back. I look at the obvious. I have healthy, amazing, beautiful children and they are my biggest cheerleaders. I have a job. I have friends who love me. I tell myself that those things should definitely outweigh the negative. No place to live that is my own, no car, etc. These are the things that swirl through my mind. Feeling like a stranger in my own life. I try to step back and focus on the positive, and then it eludes me once again.
Yesterday was a particularly bad day for this. And then I started receiving texts from my youngest daughter. They were lists of things to feel positive or happy about. Some were serious, some poignant, other downright hilarious. They are a mix of the big things and the little things. The little things popped out at me, because those are the things I forget to think about when the alligators come calling.
There were things like my children’s smiles, our dogs, the people that love me, the first day of summer, food, coffee, breathing, being alive, twerking, coffee, laughing at the stupid things people say, eating ice cream, our favorite tv shows, Chinese food, my nice butt, funny things we have experienced together, laughing until your stomach hurts, bacon, Mexican food, laughing until you cry, cooking pinterest recipes, long baths, thrift shopping, talking about the zombie apocolyse, McDonalds French fries, looking back at everything that seemed awful at the time and laughing…..
The list went on and on, all in all probably about a hundred things on her list! Little or big, poignant or downright silly they are all things that I need to never forget about. When my alligators come-a-calling I need to take them out and lob them like grenades. I need to keep them and add to the list. I copied and pasted them from text to email, and I think I will begin to add to them. To write them down, and to keep them fresh in my mind.
Many times when we are struggling we forget how very blessed we are and how amazing life can be. We search for the big things, at least I know I have been. Where will I live? What will I drive? When I graduate where will I work. I forget that those things, while they matter, are not the essential make up of our lives. Our lives are tapesties woven out of a thousand threads of the little things.
Thank God on that day words did not escape Sophia Rose. I will forever be grateful for the list, and the gentle but firm reminder that the positive is out there, that I am living it, and that my life is indeed rich beyond measure.