Look ahead to the pain

Sometimes I get sad thinking about how life will never be the same. The point where your siblings start having kids and you realize you will never be able to just pick up and go, or when you get a job, and you can’t attend every family vacation, or when you have kids and you and your husband won’t ever have the same date nights, or when they grow up and leave and you’re alone again?

These thoughts are frequent, but lately I’ve been  thinking about how good Cole and I have had it. We lived one block from work, Cole and I would either walk hand in hand to the office, or he would pump me on his bike and almost kill me as I clung to the handlebars. And we saw each other all day, and I would try to be sneaky and give him a good game every once and a while. We would come home for lunch together, and knew all the same people and what was going on in each others lives all the time, because we lived each others life.

I sighed the day I quit our job and was keeping some of our correspondence from the office email, and found this:

Guess what I just did??

Went home. Loved our house a little more. Took some pictures of our tree. Ate a toasted English muffin sandwich. Looked up how to take care of our most brilliant tree (it’s the easiest tree in the universe because its used to surviving in Africa, has no known enemies aka bugs, and lives forever!). Read some Intuitive Eating. Drank some of your Rockstar (only a little!). AND, the BEST PART OF GOING HOME FOR LUNCH? Opening up that beautiful box that had the letter in it that you gave me the night before we got married….and I fell in love with you ALL over again.

Goodness I’m glad I married you. Thanks for not giving up on me.

I’m a recovering perfectionist, which sometimes leaves me wishing I could go back, and fearing what’s to come.  As Cole and I read Lone Survivor one afternoon, I read this and thought the words were brilliant, they spoke to me. As these Navy SEALs give everything they’ve got in the most grueling and torturous training they’ve (and I’ve) ever heard of, they were told it would get worse. These are words of advice as to how to get through this almost impossible training:

First of all, I do not want you to give in to the pressure of the moment. Whenever you’re hurting bad, just hang in there. Finish the day. Then, if you’re still feeling bad, think about it long and hard before you decide to quit. Second, take it one day at a time. One evolution at a time.

Don’t let your thoughts run away with you, don’t start planning to bail out because your worried about the future and how much you can take. Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day, and there’s a wonderful career (LIFE!) ahead of you.

Simply stated:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. – Matthew 6:34

Is it bad that this spoke to me, and my life is relatively easy? Anyway, I sat on the top of Squaw Peak this morning and pondered those words, and as my mind started to wander about when to have kids, if they’ll be as bratty as me, what will happen to the world, to the economy, and to our future family, I remembered

Don’t look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day, and there’s a wonderful [life] ahead of you.