A Year of Health

I can’t remember if I wrote about this before but 2023 is my year that I want to focus on my health. Not only my physical health but also my mental and spiritual health. I feel like I am at the beginning of a big growth spurt. It’s a little intimidating but also exciting too. I know there will be some growing pains and setbacks but life is a journey. One thing that I feel like I am blessed with is an interesting perspective on time. I am able to see things in more of a big picture and grand scheme than in the here and now. Which honestly, I don’t feel like it’s very appreciated in the culture now a days. Successful people seem to be very detailed oriented and being able to put a bandaid on the problem at hand is what people want done. I think instead of putting bandaids on things I try and see how I can prevent even needing the bandaid. Or a different perspective that I tend to have is the bandaid is actually good and getting the scrape is not a negative thing. It’s a learning experience in the long run. So for this year I don’t want to fix things and try and make my life perfect. Yuck, no…I hate perfection. It’s boring and too predictable. I do want to set up habits to meet a few goals that I am trying to make but what I really want to do in this year is set up a lifestyle that is full of joy, contentment, wonder, beauty, stability, love, peace, and thriving. I tell my kids and myself all the time “just because something is hard does not make it bad.” I’m trying to reframe mine and my families perspective when it comes to that. I want us to find joy in the simple things even if they are actually a bit harder to begin with.

I have noticed that good things tend to be harder. I think that’s because work isn’t supposed to be bad. Whether you take Genesis literally or figuratively work was before the fall. Men and Women were created to take care and cultivate the earth and the creatures on the earth. The fall didn’t change that it just made that job more difficult. It brought pain to the work. So while there can be a lot of pain in our work I think we can find joy in it too. We find purpose, community, a way of life in not only our jobs but also the work that we do outside of our jobs.

I don’t want you to get hung up on the capitalistic view of work. When I say “work” I don’t mean our jobs. Of course that is included in the definition but we have a lot of other work that goes on every day that isn’t just our jobs. I think this work especially is where we can find a lot of beauty and contentment in.

I think that part of growing up is coming to the realization that the mundane work of life never ends. There will always be dishes to clean, clothes to wash, bathrooms to scrub. It will never go away. The ironic thing is that once I came to that realization and acceptance it helped me not dread those chores as much. I realized I was spending way more time griping, procrastinating, and dreading the tasks then it took to just do the tasks themselves. I was my own worst enemy. I still don’t enjoy doing all the tasks. I HATE putting the clean laundry away. I hate it with an undying passion but alas, it’s still always there needing to be put away. I’ve come to accept that fate and it truly has made it easier to get the job done.

One of my goals for this year is to find joy and contentment in the mundane of this work. It’s such a big part of our lives and I don’t want to live for the weekend. I want to live for the here and now. I want to find the wonder and the beauty that is right in front of me. I want to find the wonder and the beauty that is in my job work but also my day to day work. I want to instill this into my children. Life is beautiful. Our work can be beautiful. Hard things don’t always mean they are bad things and isn’t that a grace in it’s self?