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Posts tagged ‘living the dream’

Aug 8

14 Comments

Superwoman and the Impossible Dream

I sit in the middle of a half-painted room.

Green painter’s tape encases the semi-white trim of my stairwell. A gallon of  Swiss Coffee paint sits opened two feet from me, a two-inch paint brush on the newspaper-covered floor next to me.

I am tired.

Two years ago, David and I remodeled our kitchen. We took out a wall, replaced the cabinets, and painted it – white.

White has a dramatic effect on a small house. The walls look cleaner, less enclosing, somehow.  And when I saw the kitchen results, when I realized how much white opened up the room I spend the most time in, I thought, maybe I should keep going with this color.

So I did. I stretched the Sandstone Cove into the hallway and down the stairs.

But I got tired.

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Jan 11

5 Comments

A Healthy Dose of Rebellion

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. – John F. Kennedy

Living in the town you grew up in has its advantages and disadvantages.

Primary advantage: you know where everything is.

Primary dis-advantage: you know who everyone is.

That last part’s not quite true. My ‘town’ is really too big to be called a town. But it’s the smallest ‘big-city-suburb’ I know, because everyone is related to everyone, and once you know a handful of those people related to everyone, you know everyone else and how they relate back.

Someday I should really do a ‘six degrees of – (insert semi-Mennonite or Dutch name here) chart’, except it might take me, well, years to write down.

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Nov 9

8 Comments

Living the Dream

Last week, a woman died at the Occupy Vancouver site.

We’re not entirely sure why. Many believe it was a drug overdose. Some say its her own fault. Some say its the mayor’s fault. Some say it’s the richest 1%’s fault for causing her life to feel so hopeless she felt she needed that large of an escape.

I say, that large, because, how many of us don’t need an escape, from time to time?

It’s interesting that we’re so quick to attach fault and blame to events. I spoke with a few colleagues recently about how personally we take each delivery we’re a part of. If it goes well, we attribute it to ourselves. If it doesn’t, we also attribute it to ourselves. And yet there’s always a few events in life – birth, death, and all the little things in between – that don’t seem to have been anyone’s fault.

Sure, if you’re looking for it, we can attach blame to anyone, for anything. Usually I find I need to blame someone or something when I’m the most afraid or ashamed about something. When my world has been shifted significantly, I’d like to find the giant who knocked it off its curve.

Sometimes, there’s no giant though. Sometimes there’s a thousand tiny hamsters, seeming to run in different directions, that make enough scurry to move something really, really big. Read more

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