This year I’m trying to have fun.
I’ve written about this before, about learning to rest and about “shirking the duty-driven life.” But it’s clearly not a message that has truly gotten through to my psyche.
Last year my “one word” for the year was “delve.” (I can’t find that I ever blogged about it, but it was my word in my head, at any rate.)
Delve: “to reach inside a receptacle and search for something.”
I maybe didn’t buy into the one-word process as much as some bloggers, but I did think about it as I talked with my women’s small group and as I wrote here on this blog. I started thinking about my faith in some hard ways, and I thought about who I was and what I want to do with my life. (I didn’t come to any conclusions, for what it’s worth.)
But I just finished reading Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, and I realized something: I’m tired of delving. I’m tired of being vulnerable and over-sharing and wondering what my basis in life is. I really just want to have fun.
And what’s so wrong with that? As I sat and had an emotional breakdown over Brown’s section on perfectionism, it dawned on me that no one other than myself was judging me if my kitchen wasn’t clean. The vast majority of the arbitrary strictures I put on my life are just that: arbitrary and self-imposed. And something just snapped and I decided I wanted to make the fun choice.
To look at the dirty dishes and decide that it is valid not to wash them just now simply because I don’t want to.
To go for a long walk in a new place where I don’t exactly know where to park just because I need to feel the dirt under my feet and look up and see trees.
To pick up takeout instead of cooking dinner.
To stay up just a little too late reading.
I’m not less of a woman or a worse wife if I let myself choose the fun sometimes.
So I’m trying to do that this year. I trust that my hyper-organized, self-critical personality will not let me take this too far and go off the rails, but maybe that would be okay once in awhile too. I’ve never really gone off the rails. Heck, I’ve practically BUILT the rails.
And this year I just want to have fun.
