Enjoy the little things.
Enjoy the little things
There is a scatter pillow on my bed and it has this quote on it - “Enjoy the little things.”
How true that is of this season that we are in right now. Living has been stripped back to basics in the great lockdown of 2020!! With life happening right within the four walls of our house, our outings being our 30mins of exercise a day and the best that you are going to get from so-called “retail therapy” is a trip around Tesco to collect the weekly grocery supplies making sure that you are keeping your two meters of social distancing.
It got me thinking of a conversation I had with my colleague and friend a few weeks previously. She has read this fabulous book called “One Thousand Gifts – a Dare to Live Fully Right where you are” by Ann Voskamp. In summary, the author who has had a really rough journey chooses to look for things in life that she can be grateful for. She took it right back to basics and every day she chose to celebrate something she was could be thankful for – some days were slim pickings - she celebrated the rainbows in the bubbles of the soap suds as she washed yet another plate in her pile of dirty dishes. So thought-provoking!
Looking around I realize I have so much to be thankful for, right here in my flat and what a great thing to practice in these days ahead – finding something I can celebrate and be grateful for each day. It’s the little things that we take for granted in the rush of the normal day to day life – the smell of my morning coffee, the laughter of my girls, a scripture verse in my morning bible reading and the comfiness of my purple nightgown that I fail to appreciate in amongst the busyness of life.
Ann writes another quote that challenges me “Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.... Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.”
In this time when things are stripped back to basic, when I don’t have my crazy morning commute on the A316, when I don’t have to think about packing lunch boxes and ironing uniforms [ okay I lied I very rarely iron anything ]. During this time when things are all topsy turvy and out of sync I wanted to take the time to celebrate what I do have and relish in the time that is mine to live in right now at this moment.
With the Easter weekend upon us and my youngest daughter desperate for an egg-hunt I want to be present and appreciate what I do have and enjoy what’s right before me. For us, as a family, it’s a time of double celebration as Easter is also a time to remember and be thankful for the gift of life, love, and joy that Jesus made possible to us through the cross.
So this weekend let’s not think of all we could be doing or should be doing but rather let’s take the time to celebrate what has been done and what we have.
Happy Easter!