A quiet Sunday at home…
I spent the day catching up on laundry and tidying up all the messes that tend to accumulate around the house. Especially that pile of perpetual paraphernalia that accumulates by the phone in the kitchen.
Sidenote #1 – alliteration much?
Sidenote #2 – We finally bit bullet and got rid of our home phone line. Something about it feels kind of sad..that this staple in every home I’ve ever lived in is no longer part of my everyday experience. But we most certainly will not miss the obscene amount of money that we’ve been spending on a target for telemarketers. But all is not lost because i’m fairly certain we’ll still have the pile to keep that memory alive.
Anyway.
Going from room to room, putting things away, I kept an eye to the weather channel and the news on the latest hurricane. Once again, my heart going out for those in the path of Irma’s destructive winds. I was sad to see the devastation in the Caribbean – one of our favorite places on the planet.
At one point, as I was folding a load of t-shirts, I got to thinking about all of the families in south Texas who have been displaced or who are in the process of tearing out wet carpets and moldy sheet rock. Or the families who are hunkered down in storm shelters while the wind howls all around them. And in that moment…in the middle of my own mess, I thought to myself, ‘I wonder how many people would gladly be folding clothes on an ordinary Sunday at home.’
It was a perspective shift of epic proportions. Because all of a sudden, folding clothes and sweeping the kitchen floor and pulling weeds and going through the junk mail seemed less like burdensome chores and more like a great privilege. <<Insert gratitude here.
I know that sometimes when I talk about mindfulness or living with intention it can sound kind of esoteric and nebulous. But moments like this are exactly what it means to me.
Yep…gratitude changes everything – even a load of laundry.
Peace, Kelly
It’s really overwhelming!