this happy nest

Ever have those weeks where life keeps hitting you over the head with the same two-by-four? Or maybe its more subtle, like recurring road signs saying “Pull over, deal with this now!” Sometimes it’s for the betterment of your character, other times it points to places in your life where you’ve sprung a leak – and happiness is leaking out by trickles or bucketfuls.

I’ve been experiencing such a week. The first road sign on my journey to self-actualization was while reading C.S. Lewis. In Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, he touches on the concept of busyness and empathy as distractions from experiencing true pleasure. Seemingly innocuous things in our daily life may be strangling our ability to experience joy. They steal our time, our drive, and our passion for life and action. Maybe I can give you a few examples to which you can relate: the internet, social media, gossip, Netflix, endless theoretical debate, materialism, fantasizing, and worry. Maybe we are a sedentary people both physically and spiritually because we spend too much time talking, typing, thinking and not enough time acting. C.S. Lewis discussed that where we have passionate likes and dislikes we will act, but when we get caught up in mediocre likes, we stagnate. There is so much challenge in the word, stagnant: “stale or foul from standing; characterized by lack of development, advancement, or progressive movement; inactive, sluggish, dull. Powerful, isn’t it? No one likes to think of their life as stale, foul, or dull. Maybe we have deceived ourselves into thinking that our busyness of mind and body will provide the excitement, pleasure and achievement that we ultimately seek. This leads me to my second road sign: my mom recommended a series entitled “The Peace and Power of a Prioritized Life” by Chip Ingram. He provided a list of Six Symptoms of Misplaced Priorities: busyness, undue stress and pressure, low grade nagging guilt, financial debt, prayerlessness, and excessive behavior. Any of these sound familiar? The mirage leads to a lot of dissatisfaction.

Sign number three – yesterday, NPR aired a story about a scientist who studies happiness in humans. His study showed that irrespective of what activity people were engaged in at any given moment, if they were distracted or their mind was wandering and not focused on the task, they described themselves as less satisfied. This tells me that we were not created to have divided minds. The old adage of whatever you do, do it with all of your heart, mind and soul. The scientist also found that people today are less happy than people 20-30 years ago. My theory is that there is simply more “noise” than there was back then. Being a 30-year-old whose life straddles this gap, I feel this in every fiber of my being. And not to solely blame the internet and technology for our society’s degradation of happiness, I think we simply have too much at our fingertips. Everything is available to us, and in abundance. We have a million choices to make everyday! I remember when only the original Oreo was available in stores, and then the twice as delicious Double-stuff was created. Now there’s like 15 flavors of Oreo…Some advancements are great, some are noise. Maybe our happiness struggle is a battle with quality vs. quantity. We have lost our ability to determine what is true pleasure and pseudo pleasure. We need to relearn how to experience rich, deep, satisfying moments, the difference between passion and mediocrity, and how to have an undivided heart and lead an undivided life.

-lr

I hope you don’t mind, but I need to gush about my husband for a minute. I keep a list of all the things I love and appreciate about my spouse, (Ladies, this is great for those days you need a reminder! Wink, wink.) and periodically I add to the list. I won’t bore you with the entire list, just a few highlights.

1. He is quick to apologize. I can’t explain to you how special this trait is! I never doubt that he loves and adores me. He isn’t willingly to let anything get in the way of this fact or any argument to cripple my sense of love and safety. If there are any men reading this, it is DAMN SEXY, and you should try it sometime!

2. He sincerely tries to make me happy! He’s willing to make sacrifices to ensure that I am fulfilled, and he ascribes to the “happy wife, happy life” mentality. It’s so genuine that in the throes of severe PMS I get a nagging sense of guilt because my raging hormones make me a temporarily unhappy woman! How unattractive! Especially when a happy woman makes everyone happy, kids included.

3. We are opposites. You’re wondering why this is on the list? The obvious response is that we compliment one another, where I am weak, he is strong and vice versa. The less obvious reason is that it’s challenging! It’s hard for an idealistic extrovert to be married to an introverted realist. But he thinks I’m worth it! He lets me sit in coffee shops to be alone for hours when it means that he’s at home getting cabin fever with the kiddos. He entrusts me with the family rules and budget which otherwise would not exist. He trusts me and has faith in our differences.

Last night, I was chatting with friends on the topic of celebrity marriages and how refreshing it is to hear about couples that have stood the test of time – the same man happily married to the same woman. But it’s not just rare in celebrity circles, it’s rare in general. It made me think about why I am happily married. I am happy because I have a loving, generous and humble spouse.

-lr

Today is my birthday. It’s also Friday the 13th. Which set me up with a terrific segway into my unfortunate track record with birthdays. Like the time in middle school that my mom took me and my friends to a mall for my birthday, and somehow I got separated from my friends and ended up wandering around alone because there was a time before cellphones. Or the time I fell in a mud puddle waiting for the bus and had to suffer through the entire school day with mud-splattered clothes. What doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger, right? Or how about the year that my Grandpap passed away the day before, and my whole family was thrown into grief and mourning. Even then, my sweet Grandmother, the most wonderful person I know, had the presence of mind to remember my birthday and feel sorry for ME and give ME an extra-special squeeze at his viewing because my birthday would be forever linked to the most devastating thing that has happened to my family thus far. (I am often in awe of this woman’s compassion.) And on the heels of that tragic year was my 21st birthday in which my boyfriend at the time was in his car driving 500 miles to Nashville TN to follow his dreams. More recently there was the year we had a freaking mini-blizzard in Nashville and no one could come to my birthday dinner. Really, Nashville?

In case you didn’t pick up on it, I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to my birthday. And I was gearing up for an unlucky year again: my kids and I have been sick for a week, and I’m exhausted; my living Grandfather suffered a stroke on Wednesday…I was holding my breath. But as I started mentally writing my sardonic blog post this week, I couldn’t help remember this one birthday, the birthday to redeem all birthdays. And that’s what, I decided, my post should be about.

It was 2008 and I had been in love with someone for 5 years, and single for three, and I hardly dated since. But I had met someone, and we had been hanging out regularly since Thanksgiving night. We had stayed up until 2 am just talking, not touching. And this went on non-stop for 2 weeks. Of course, when a boy is showing up at your work every single night to hangout with you, people start to notice. My boss had some concerns that maybe this boy wasn’t over his ex and my friends were afraid I was leading him on, girls can’t just be friends with boys you know…and that’s when it hit me. I didn’t want to just be friends. I didn’t want to lose him. I wanted him to be around every day for the rest of my life.

So when he asked me if he could take me to dinner for my birthday, there was a pregnant pause, as my mind processed my options. I inhaled and decided to take the plunge.

He showed up in a tie, very dapper. And on our way to the very nice French restaurant, we held hands in the crisp December air and took the walking bridge over the river. We strolled to the very middle not far from a couple dressed in white gown and black tux. Ironic, right? I knew that night that I would marry this man. Underneath a cynic, you can always find a wounded romantic. Every thing about that night was perfect: the weather, the food, the atmosphere, the wine, the company. It was magical. But it was there under the stars, that my luck changed with a kiss.

Thank you to my husband – for the best birthday I have ever, ever had in 30 years. And for being the birthday gift that keeps on giving. I love you!

~lr

The other night, my husband emerged from our daughter’s bedroom to find me curled up in the middle of a box of Joe-Joes and a Garth Brooks Live from Las Vegas special. I tried to play it off like it was musically educational, which it was, but I was initially drawn in by this country powerhouse and the nostalgia that comes with his music. I don’t know what was playing on the radio at your home, but the Brownlee kids grew up on Michael W. Smith, Steven Curtis Chapman, Amy Grant, Vince Gill, Martina McBride and Garth Brooks. And I just realized the irony that the latter is the only one I haven’t met! (Gotta love living in Nashville!) Humor me for a minute as I stroll down memory lane… I clearly remember owning a Lorrie Morgan cassette tape and listening to her cover of “Tears on My Pillow” over and over. I’m pretty sure one of my cousins had a life-size cardboard cutout of Randy Travis (someone please confirm or deny this for me!). My parents embraced the boot-scooting phase of country music in the ’90s, and we heel-toed to a lot of Brooks & Dunn! And then there was the brief phase after seeing him in concert at a local fair that I was in love with Dwight Yoakam (yes, you read that right, not the ever-popular Tim McGraw or my mom’s personal heartthrob, George Strait. Yes, little old me had a childhood crush on Dwight Yoakam!)

Isn’t it fascinating how vivid our memories are when tied to music? It’s like muscle memory, it absorbs into the very fiber of our being. Being an overly sentimental person from birth, I can still remember watching with tears streaming down face as Vince Gill performed “I Still Believe in You” at the CMAs. Fast-forward to my couch in Nashville 2013, and I’m singing a duet with Garth Brooks recalling every word to “If Tomorrow Never Comes”, serenading my bewildered hubby with my luscious singing voice. I guess it’s true what they say, “you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.”

Ah, the good ole days of country music. Stop and take a minute to let the nostalgia of the ’90s wash over you. I hope, dear reader, that you leave comments on this post, even if you didn’t relive the same music memories as me. But “if I start walking your way, and you start walking mine…we can meet in the middle ‘neath that old Georgia pine”(Diamond Rio).

~peace and love, LR