November 2, 2024
I return home after ten days away and without any effort whatsoever notice what’s wrong. The neon pink mums I labored to plant before I left didn’t get watered, and they’re shriveled now. Squirrels have dug in the pots, seeking homes for buried treasure and leaving a trail of dirt in their wake. The porch is covered in dirt and leaves, joint effort of squirrel, bird, wind. And that’s just walking from the sidewalk to the bright red door.
My husband calls me on it as we brush past each other in the well-choreographed dance of unpacking and skipping kids across time zones and to bed after a cross-country flight. “You immediately see what is wrong. What about trying to notice what is right?” I wince, because I know he’s right, because I know there are as many beautiful details as broken ones and it all depends on where I focus my gaze, because I want to be the kind of person who focuses on the beauty—what do you think I’m trying to do in my writing? It’s so embarrassing when you cannot embody your ideals!
His wording is spot on—it does take trying. Without trying, my eyes go to the problems to be solved. It is unnatural for me to rejoice in what is good, but the more I do it, the more natural it becomes—my nature transforming one tiny choice at a time. This is precisely why I put in all this effort to write about the beauty and goodness in the everyday—not because I’m the expert, but because I’m the novice. It’s a practiced art, a muscle I’m slowly building.
The red door—it was splintered and split, paint worn away along the bottom ridge. My husband’s been fastidiously sanding it down, smoothing away the sharp edges, and while I was gone, gave it fresh paint. It glows cherry red in the afternoon sunshine that hits it just so. Why didn’t I pause to appreciate that? I do now.
A few days later a mom friend perches on the front steps after dropping off her child to play with mine. We talk about messy houses, the shared sigh of recognition in the tornado we know the kids will make while we let them be. I see the glowing red door. I stop the complaint in its tracks. Not everything is being destroyed. There is also repair.
And there is a price to pay for fixating on the problems, seeking perfection. “I could anger clean for an hour, or I could let it go and use that hour to be at rest with people I love,” she says. “I’m learning that I’m happier when I let it go and spend the time on what is really satisfying, living with the mess.”
“That’s a good reminder,” I tell her, my mom friend who preaches back to me the words I believe are true. Yet in the fray of everyday life, I can feel like nothing is more urgent than making the mess disappear. Like order must be restored for me to be ok, like I must have outer peace to have inner. “Maybe I’ll use it in the newsletter I need to go write,” I tell her, only half joking.
She was making her way down the steps, preparing to head home to get her own work done, but at that remark paused again and looked back at me. “Here’s something for your newsletter!” Her older daughter used to fixate her entire Halloween experience on the amount of candy procured, ambitiously racing through the neighborhood to fill her bag. “But this year, we were headed to meet her friend,” making their way down one of the longer streets in our neighborhood in search of her. “I kept asking if she wanted to stop at this house or that one to get candy. She turned to me and said, ‘Mom, that’s not my goal this year. This year I want to spend the evening with my friend. I have a different definition of success.’ “
If success is the perfect house, yard, life, kids–I’m failing. You probably are too, no offense. But like my mom friend, like her daughter, we get to decide what matters most. We don’t have to be a failure because of the imperfections we choose to live with in service of the things that bring meaning and joy. And as it was for my friend and her daughter, when we choose to walk away from the collecting or posturing that is christened as successful in the water we swim in, it’s often an exchange for deeper relational connections. That’s an investment that never seems to get old.
I had a version of this experience recently, when I attended my college reunion. I’d hoped, initially, for an onslaught of satisfying relational connections with adults, former classmates. But there was no childcare provided, and for much of my time on my beautiful former campus, I had three kids in tow.
Did I get to meaningfully connect with the people I’d planned to? Barely. But when I shifted my focus—my definition of success—to enjoying the company of the people I’m related to in a place important to me, there was a shift in how I experienced it. It was, so to speak, worth giving up some Halloween candy for.
While on campus, I exercised my idealistic search for beauty in the everyday to a greater extent than I did in the days to follow, when I returned home to dismay with the mums. I began pocketing little sparkling things that caught my fancy—a leaf with a lovely curve, a slim stretch of curled bark. These treasures accumulated in my pocket over the course of the day, then became a temporary work of art, a moment to pause and focus on not the messy porch but the glowing red door.
