Take time to waste time

Hiatus. According to my husband, it’s an awful word. (Then again, he calls me “vabrant” and has been known to “want to tode - not dote - all over me.) In spite of the man’s unique relationship with the English language, he’s right. It does sound like a rare rectal condition. But gross connotational phonics aside, the word is actually the stuff of genius. I took a hiatus, and it did me darn good. December was an ode to life-minus-laptop, with time to weave my daughter’s french braid to her impeccable liking and to eyeball overturned dung beetles with my 8-year old. We stayed in a shack at the end of our holiday. No, like, literally, a shack. And we ate cereal out of two tin cups that a better mom would have banned for fear of metal poisoning. From the deck where our hammocks hung we boiled sweet coffee on a camp stove and sipped up the sound of birdsong and wind over the valley. Luther and I kept rising earlier with the sun, and the kids kept sleeping in later. There was just too much ‘nothing to say’ that had to be said each morning.

We came home refreshed. We brought home stories and beach sand in our shoes. There were waves ridden and Christmas packages unveiled and soft serves overturned in parking lots. Nerf bullets and champagne corks flew over Ouma’s table, and the days ended with aloe on our sunburnt skin. It was all too darn delicious… But ask us about our holiday, and we’ll keep coming back to that shack. Our trailer stayed unpacked and unopened. We managed to live, all five of us, out of one small suitcase - and we still could have halved it. We each had our own sporkife (yup, that’s what you call it, ok?) and we learned to treasure it (because the alternative was a rusty fork, spoon and knife that wafted of mildew.) Our shower was a pipe on the outside wall that offered two minutes of hot at best. The options were minimal, and we loved it. We did old fashioned stuff like read books and sleep and talk to each other. Luther and I tackled my Goliath called “how the heck do you think we’re going to be able to go around the whole world in two years?” A good book on the subject and permission to dream later, I’ve never been more convinced that, not only can we do it, but we absolutely must. Now we’re home. Life is great. People are great. They infiltrate the open spaces of our lives, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. But there are definitely days, when the phone is relentlessly binging and the kids are tugging at my shirt and the rice is burning on the stove, that the shack seems like a happy alternative.

I know. Duh. The point is not to move to the woods and convert to sporks. But it did get me thinking. We spend far too much time on the wrong things, plagued by this thing called privilege. We’re so busy trying to craft the perfect school, the perfect marriage, the perfect triceps, that all these advantages become impoverishing. It’s as if we’re stuck in the pages of a ‘choose your own adventure’, with fifteen different options of how to steer the story and no clue how to reach the end. We’re all punchdrunk by opportunity in this western world, and dizzied by the number of terms and conditions tapping on our shoulders and turning our heads. Options alone are not making us happy; in fact they’re often making us sick.

Paul, that awesome guy, had something to say on the matter: "I don't have a sense of needing anything personally. I've learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. I'm just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I've found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am." Content. No matter what. Imagine that.

Content with the mismatched bedside tables. Content with the new crop of wrinkles and the memory that has me googling Ritalin. Content because I have already have The More Than Enough living inside of me.

And if we really wanna know Him, unphased by the full and by the empty, we'll have to learn how to wield the sword of one little word over our internal chaos. Its fierce friendship has surprised me lately. It’s called No. I’m sorry, but No. No, I won’t mentally redecorate my guest room every time I walk into it. No, I won’t open my whats app before I open the scriptures. No, I won’t package gossip in Christianese cover ups like “just being concerned for her.” No, no, no. Because I’m realising something, the older I’m getting. Boundaries are not just for defence; they're for retention. ‘No’ is not a word that’s meant to push away, in as much as it’s meant to hold in what needs to be there. And that stuff is the good stuff, the gold stuff, the Jesus stuff no Vitality points can accrue. It’s far better than a retweet of a second hand revelation. We need to recapture the art of ‘wasting time on Jesus’, remembering that being and beholding is not only a right but a responsibility we need to fight for with everything we got. So I’m gonna raise my glass to margin this year. I’m gonna learn to enjoy the moments that can’t be listed or ticked off in a box. To see clouds that way that Tristen does (aka “sabotaged chickens chasing seahorses.”) To actually use the hammock that hangs outside the kitchen window. To fight for less options and more ‘nothing’. If I can get that right this year, I’m pretty sure I’ll have done more than all the other years of doing everything.