Catching Up

My blessing book is up to date.

In case some of you are unfamiliar with why this is a momentous statement, I will admit to you that I have not written in it for quite a while. Every few years my blessing book gets a week-long hole that becomes a two-week hole because I procrastinate in filling it...and before I know it, it's a six month hole and I have to bite the bullet and start where I am because I haven't a hope of filling it and if I don't do something quick, my next entry will sound something like this:

"Since I last wrote, Mom has had two new babies and Anne is engaged to be married to someone we hadn't met yet at the time of my most recent entry."

At least you can't have two new babies in six months, so I'm not THAT behind.

Sometimes I've wondered why it means something to me to keep it up-to-date, but when I don't write for a while I remember the value of it.

To me, a blessing book is different from a normal journal or diary in that it's for something more than just relating "this is what I did today". It's a place to write down both things that I'm thankful for that have happened today (blessings) and things that I'm thinking of; even things I don't particularly want to discuss with anyone else quite yet. When I write in it regularly, I tend to think more clearly and to be more peaceful, since it's a way of concentrating on blessings instead of passing right over them and forgetting they happened. It also helps me to ponder, something that's also easy to forget about in the usual bustle of going to auto shows and playing quartet and hurried shopping trips and so on and so forth.

In writing my get-over-the-gap-and-just-start-back-up entry yesterday, I had to go over the past six months and consider what new things I have learned and what happened with the things I was thinking of last time I wrote.

The biggest pondering that came to mind was on the concept of being dramatic and upset; and how being dramatic and easily upset by things blinds me to what is actually going on right in front of me.

I know I've referrenced this so much lately that you guys get a glazed look in your eyes when I say something about it, but I really have been thinking about it a lot, and when I opened up my blessing book to write yesterday everything I had to say had to be reworded to keep it from being an author's version of events instead of what actually happened. This whole tendency to want to make a Big Deal out of every little thing is pretty deep-rooted. Take my reaction this morning to planning a shopping trip and having to figure out how to buy things without Mastercard as a viable option and you see one of my failures in conquering the Big Deal mentality.

It seems to me that an awful lot of what we've been discussing lately regarding how a family should work hinges on everyone looking at what's really happening in front of them and just doing whatever needs to be done without a fuss. "A Fuss" meaning: discussion, argument, excessive planning, or downright magnifying a little thing like cleaning the kitchen floor into a huge project in our heads. We all chuckle at how certain relatives can only do one thing in a day because it's "so HARD" to do anything else; but the more I watch us doing things, the more I think we should quit throwing stones. All those glass panes forming our house walls are expensive to repair!

Of course, resisting this urge does make for a more boring blessing book entry on the face of it, but I notice some of my earliest entries from a few years back have an insincerity to them that comes from making too much of too little. Now if I can just transfer my recognition of my dramatics in writing to my dramatics in doing the shopping...I might actually stand a chance of trying out for the part of Elinor Dashwood instead of Marianne!