I wasn’t 100% certain I had much to write about for today, so I was about to skip it. Fridays we usually leave open for ideas on our content calendar. Sometimes we will plan things and sometimes we won’t. This was one of those weeks we decided to leave open for interpretation. This last month Mike has been back working full-time with a client and I have been spending my days balancing between caring almost full-time for Hayes while also stepping little-by-little back into work. It was a good month. One that was hard, full of questions and good thoughts about what really matters in life and what really doesn’t. Ultimately there are probably about five things that we could say this last month has brought forward, but the biggest one is our need for some good ole’ stillness. Not from each other. In fact, we have realized without a doubt that we are far better together as a team than, as we say “siloed,” in two directions even if our vision is similar.
That said, today when I nabbed the mail a Schoolhouse Electric catalog sat in our mailbox. I opened it turned the pages while I held Hayes and there was this paragraph in the first page that struck me. I read it multiple times, and I felt like there it was, the absolute truth I needed. The full paragraph you ask? Here it is:
“As our sense of place grows stronger, it becomes essential to just let it be. Time enjoyed in solitude creates the space we need to let life’s wildness in. The sense of balance we strive for comes into focus when we spend our days with intent. Hours as precious as these are best lived generously and with care.”
The last nearly 3 months since Hayes has arrived has been a time of reevaluating life and what we deeply desire to do with our lives and the kind of world we want for him and any other children we are lucky enough to have. It feels like a massive task that carries so much weight, but we strongly believe in taking this time as an opportunity to stop for one minute and ask what is the next 10 years? Where do we want to say we are at 40? Who do we want to teach our children to be? What do we want to exemplify to them?
It has been good. As we sit each morning and look at this little life taking in everything of our world we place around him, I realize the duty we have to him and to ourselves as parents to establish a life that fulfills us and offers him an environment to thrive in.
We have had ideas for a long time about what this looks like and what the next steps hold, but now more than ever we feel it is time to be serious about this. If there is one thing (which there aren’t there are many) a child will do for you, is get you serious about life. When I read this, I felt stirred and as if I read something I knew to be complete truth and the deepest desires of my soul. It is funny how just the right words can strike such a truth within ourselves.
So, we decided to take a long weekend this weekend and head out on our first weekend away to the mountains to spend time in solitude. We wanted to disappear from the here and now and the groove of life. We wanted to give ourselves the space we needed to dream, make the plan of what we plan to be intentional about in these coming years, and to breathe some fresh air. In many senses you wanted to offer ourselves the solitude we needed to let the wildness in.
We haven’t traveled at all since Thanksgiving, and to think about time away from our routine sounds like just enough of a gift, but to take this time intentionally to talk through what we want most, and then to figure out how we plan to make it happen is even more exciting.
So this weekend follow along as we head out into a high altitude, take our first trip with Hayes, and just create the space to dream again.
