If you haven’t already figured this out about me yet, I spend a lot of time thinking about the culture of life I want Levi to learn from the way Greg and I choose to live our lives. We talk a lot about the important of friendships with him and we make our best efforts to surround him with people who are going to love and care for him especially in these tender and impressionable years of his life. We try to impart to him that possessions have little meaning and nothing is really ours anyway so what’s the point in living your life around how you can get the best and newest and most expensive stuff.
Lately though I have felt another tug on my mom’s heart of a “life lesson” I want Greg and I to strive to live out for him. How many times do we look at our calendars and think, “Man! How did we get this busy so fast?!” It’s the American syndrome of success that tells us being busy means you are powerful, important, sought after and well liked. And yet, the reality of it is that most people HATE feeling so busy. We hate that we don’t see our kids as much as we want. Or that we feel like ships passing in the night with our significant others. Or have you ever tried to plan out a dinner or a play date or even a quick lunch with someone and there simply is no blank space on the calendar because both of you have filled it with other dinners, play dates, meetings and lunches.
Don’t get me wrong, I clearly love friendships and they take time and that is always time well spent. And we have to work because that is how we are able to put food in hungry mouths and don’t forget, you have to actually go buy the food for that hungry mouth so sacrificing the weekly trip to the grocery store to free up more time isn’t an option either. There really are so many things that we really do need to spend our time on to be happy, healthy and fulfilled. But how many things that we choose to spend our time don’t actually make us feel fulfilled but just make us feel busy? Man, especially in toddler life. I weekly fight the temptation to fill up Levi’s schedule just so I can keep my busy beaver happy. There’s music classes and story times and open gym times and science centers and zoos and just about anything else your little ball of energy would LOVE to go do. But when I start filling our week with that kind of a stuff and a friend texts me desperately trying to have lunch with us and all I can say is, “Well we can do NEXT Wednesday at 3….maybe. Hang on, let me think about this some more.” Well, that’s just ridiculous.
So here is where the rubber is meeting the road for me. I have come to realize that, for the most part, being busy is a choice. I choose to be busy. I choose to fill up the calendar and lose all the blank space. I choose to make my life full of quick dinners and way too much time in the car. Right now, its a choice I make. But sooner than I would like to believe, being busy won’t be as much of a choice as it is now. Because soon, Levi will want to join a soccer team or play an instrument or take art classes. He will develop his own interests and hobbies that will be stepping stones to who he is meant to become and we will try our absolute hardest then to let him become that person. So we will probably do more dinners in the car on the way to practice than we would like. Greg and I will wave hello and goodbye in the driveway as one returns home and one leaves. The older Levi gets and the more we take on the busier we will become and the harder we will have to fight to teach Levi how to make good decisions with his time and to make his relationships a priority… but we don’t have to do that now. We can teach him to slow down.
But this means sacrifice. This means as much as I would LOVE to indulge in my newest obsession of barre workouts 3-4 times a week, I need to accept that that is too much time away from my family and be content with going just once or twice. As much as Greg would love to accept every happy hour invite after work and every musical jam session that he is invited to, he chooses to parcel those out carefully in light of what is best for all of us. We make these sacrifices with the hopes that when life does truly get busy, we can still make good decisions as a family with our time. We can still invest in good relationships and give the people we love the time we all need to feel loved and cared for.
So for now, I am choosing to leave blank space on the calendar. And I am leaving it there so that Levi can learn that being busy isn’t being popular. Being busy means you miss out on last minute lunch dates and after nap cuddle sessions on the couch. Blank space means you are leaving space for God to fill with whatever people or events or meals or downtime He sees fit. I want Levi to learn to live in the blank space.
itaintallrainbows 