The Scream

Ducking my head to walk underneath the small fort we built for the little people in our lives, I dropped to the ground to see if I could add another pushup to my tally. It was raining, and the ground underneath the fort was dry. Standing up, one more pushup under my belt, I headed back out into the rain. Because I was wearing my Seahawks Super Bowl Champs hat I didn’t see the low board ahead of me and walked right into it. I hit my head. HARD. I hate hitting my head.

The next thing I knew, I was bent over, screaming at the top of my lungs. I screamed, and screamed, and screamed, until I couldn’t. It’s a good thing our closest neighbors are a ways away, or they might have called the local sheriff to come investigate.

All I can say is that it felt really, really, really good to scream. It felt like a mixture of rage and fear, and a few other emotions that must have been lodged pretty deep inside for awhile.

I guess I just needed to scream.

There is a lot to be angry and fearful about right now. So many things out of our control. So many things that need to be addressed and fixed and repaired and built and changed, and most of us feel pretty powerless to do anything about it. Whenever we feel powerless, rage and fear aren’t far behind, and those emotions need to come out somewhere. For me, it was a guttural scream, bending over underneath a fort out in the pine trees.

Sometimes I guess we just need to scream. And then stand up and get back to work loving and helping the people and the world within our reach.

Plan B

It is so easy to get derailed. You have a perfectly planned day, and then suddenly all hell breaks loose with things you didn’t anticipate, couldn’t anticipate, probably didn’t want, and yet have to be handled. Now.

Cue: Plan B

Probably no surprise, today was one of those days. It meant setting aside some important things that I had planned to do in order to take care of some urgent things that I hadn’t. At one point I was sitting in the “sick room” at our little school because it was empty, connected to the school wi-fi because ours couldn’t handle the task at hand, managing two iPhones in an attempt to transfer data from one to the other, while talking to Apple Support on another iPhone where my call had been escalated to a senior advisor. All the while trying my best not to swear in front of the nearby students as I took notes on a scrap of orange paper from the pumpkins they were cutting out to decorate the school hallways.

Eventually the mission was accomplished, and the fiasco had only taken a mere five hours out of my carefully planned day.

But then who ever said we get the day we planned just because we planned it? If we steward our time well, hopefully we do more often than not, but other times we get the day that shows up and rains on our carefully planned parade. That’s when we get to cue Plan B, and as much as I hate to admit it, I think that’s a good thing.

Plan B forces us to loosen our grip on the need to have it our way.

Plan B helps dispel the illusion just a little bit more that we are in control.

Plan B reminds us that it really isn’t all about us.

Plan B teaches us to be more resilient and less rigid.

And…Plan B challenges us to be graceful and gracious in spite of it all. (steep learning curve)

Thank you Plan B.