David preached on choosing joy yesterday. Wow, how obnoxious, right? “Choose joy!” Ah. Yeah, I’ll get right on that. How about you choose to piss off?
(No, dear readers, it wasn’t really like that.)
There’s a significant count-your-blessings piece to it. I’ve met damned few people in my life who truly did that anywhere near as much as they should, and to a person the ones who did lived modestly. That’s a good reminder for all of us.
The piece I need even more, I think, is the choose-your-reaction piece. Whatever behavioral shortcomings I carry around with me tend to simplify to that. And guess what? Most of the time, your reaction is the only thing you reliably control.
That frightened me when I began to genuinely realize it. It’s sliding into a place more like liberating these days.
So far, the whole empty nest thing has been a lot stranger than I thought it would be. All of the predictable stuff—the hot water, the quiet, the reliable presence of all of the spoons—is nearly none of the profundity of it. The part that’s crawling me, and the part into which choosing joy slots nicely, is the unexpected volume of the recovered mental bandwidth. (It’s a bit more nuanced than “less tired,” but it’s down that road.)
With each of my children mostly running their own lives from remote locations (counted blessings? I think so!), I’ve got more in the tank to choose joy.
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