(our Science Fair award winners!) One benefit to desperately trying to ready your house for sale - and ridding your home of 40 bags in 40 days - is the discovery of things in your home long forgotten.
Yesterday, as I faced the task of purging three floor-to-ceiling book shelves of the excess reading material they housed, I came across one book I've always glanced over and never thought twice about reading. Actually, I found many of this type of book. But suddenly, rediscovering them in the scene of eternally purging them from my shelves and my life - never to see them again - it became imperative that I learn their secrets and keep them forever. {{and love them and hug them and...}} I couldn't spare even one.
I determined that I would read every last book from cover to cover. To prove to myself that each was worthy of a potential move to another city - to prove to myself that the dust that covered them was worth the disposable dust rag - I brought one upstairs.
Stephen Covey, in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, relates that families are off track 90% of the time. The path airplanes take from origination to destination becomes his correlation in the book. He talks about how pilots have a flight plan, yet spend the majority of their air time correcting for wind and turbulence and human error only to eventually land in their designated location.
This concept fascinates me.
Today, I bebopped over to an old post of mine - and laughed at the irony that today I am exactly where I was two years ago --- a potential move, a home in need of tons of cleaning. And I see that in 24 months, I have spent a great bit of time 'off course.' It's reassuring to know that I have the potential to still end up where I hope to.
But I have to initiate a plan. Maybe {{any plan}} is better than no plan. Yesterday, I realized I am not doing the things (again) that I always told myself I would do...rock the baby, read the books, lay down with them when they asked ... even when I poignantly know it is fleeting.
So, I purpose to tear off the paralysis of negative thinking and instead cling to proactivity. I have a flight plan. I will remember to use it.
So, the plane keeps flying. And I adjust. Not to say that I can sit back and let the laundry go and not paint that wall. But to acknowledge that I am headed somewhere important. And I carry precious cargo.
