I wrote this coming home in the car yesterday. I’d been having lunch with a friend. I’d had a really lovely time. She knows me well and is a wise and good listener, so I always feel lighter when I leave, but getting to and from the town in question was difficult. There was traffic, roadworks. I was late because I crawled the last mile, and there was also the seemingly usual torrential rain. I found myself saying, “That was really good, shame about the traffic and the weather.”
I think I’ve spent my whole life waiting for the perfect day. I am a planner, a list maker, an organiser, because I have always thought that would give me the best chance. Today would have been perfect if only … next time I must do … But there will never be a perfect day. So instead of hoping for one of those, I’m going to try and appreciate the really good ones, or even the ones that were almost a disaster. The family day when most of us were on form. The theatre visit where we had to wear our masks for the whole performance. The garden, even though an awful lot of my lovely flowers need propping up and dead heading. Watching the Olympics but hoovering and dusting in between the exciting bits – and yes, it did need doing. Having a wonderful ten minutes being a dinosaur and then having to change a rather interesting baby dinosaur nappy!
So the beautifully imperfect me, writing on my adequate machine, thinking low brow thoughts will mean today is not perfect, but it’s not been a bad day. And it doesn’t mean we have to stop planning and organising to the best of our ability, so that things go as well as they can, but when the sky opens up, I’m going to learn to dance in the rain. When I next get stuck in traffic, perhaps I’ll use it as an opportunity to pray through the list of people on my heart.
My favourite fridge magnet of all time is, ‘Bills paid, jobs done, children clean and happy, pigs fuelled and ready to fly!‘ So perhaps I knew all along that perfection was not a real possibility, I just hadn’t put two and two together.
