Tucking things away

Put your heart into it.

Choose love every chance you get. Because when you choose love, love chooses you. And we know this isn't easy. 

Sounds so good. Feels so soft. Is so hard!!!!

Living with others, working with others, well it can downright irritating. It is not easy to ignore the messy bedroom, or clothes on the floor, or the pile that someone is working on. 

The tone that someone speaks to you with can send you in a whirl.

The way they looked at you. Well was there any need of that?

I am easily irritated. An ugly cup on the table might bother me. I like things just so. Pillows askew on the couch, crumbs on the counter. Plastic lunch boxes on the gorgeous wood sideboard. Yup, I am her. I am always tucking things away. 

And someone talking to me when I am writing and interrupting my train of thought, even if they are offering me a cup of tea. Why do people need to talk? That's what I think.

That's what I can be like, a crab.

But here is the beauty of aging. You know that the crab inside of you is a crab. And you try harder.

The shorter time gets for you the harder you try.

That has been my experience. The older I get the more I choose love.

The more I choose love the more natural it feels.

Now sometimes when I am alone I still fold the towels quickly and slam them down on the stairs, thinking, "I am the only one who ever folds these." No addiction to perfection here.

I faulter. I feel righteous indignation.

Then I remember that I piled eighteen logs of our four cords of wood, and that I am not sure where the vacuum cleaner is anymore and I remember that each of us does our best. That it is not about sharing the load as much as it is about sharing the love. We are here, after all, to be good to each other, to make the way kinder, to beat down the path for each other and hold back the branches so that we can each make our way.

And then I am good for a bit, sometimes a good bit. 

And then some morning, out of no where, things bug me again, and I have to talk myself around. It could be about anything or anyone. It is just the way of a life. It is just who I am, who we are as human beings.

We are not perfect.

But we are good.

And we try.

And we do our best

to choose love

because we know

that when we do

love chooses us right back,

Thank you for reading.