Layers of Living

It’s quiet in my little corner of the world right now. Being prepared or getting prepared? Those are my thoughts this morning since awakening when the light was just seeping through my curtains. We spend much of our waking hours getting ready for something. The next meal. The next workday…..and are there clean clothes? Preparing for the lives that we live. Yesterday I reviewed the list of my Daily Planning Guide and found that, although it looked not bad as a list, it just didn’t seem enough. For the next few days, I’m looking a bit deeper into the details on each one. 

As I’ve moved through my morning, I have been preparing food. One of my favourite household jobs. The house smells delicious. French onion soup in my small crock pot - still needs the beef broth added. Honey garlic ribs in my large crock pot. One recipe from online and the other from a cookbook I purchased in Regina in the ’60’s. That last recipe I had to rejig the cooking times to make it a crock pot recipe. No, I’m not having company today and I do live on my own. So who or what am I preparing for?

After all the brain work this morning, I’ve come to the conclusion that preparation comes in layers. Layers that we engage with every day to be ready for each step that we take. I don’t know many clairvoyant enough to be able to see any of the curve balls that show up without notice. We have to be prepared to tap dance or shift quickly so that our plans don’t go completely awry. And of course there are times when some things need to get put on hold until the latest disaster is averted. As preparation is the foundation of each day, unless we learn how to dance or catch that curve ball, we may wind up in the middle of a disaster. On the up-side, if it’s spontaneous fun that comes at me, I have learned to stop what I’m doing and go with the fun whenever possible. Back to the question about my food preparation this morning. It is all about personal preference, enjoyment in the very creation of meals and a more cost effective approach to taking a hot meal to work.  

Preparation can be so much more than tasks on a list. Using these three qualifiers, preference, enjoyment and cost could move preparation out of the flat, literal sense of a list stuck on a fridge door, or shoved in a purse into why we choose to move through each day the way any of us do. For my writing project, preparing a niche amid layers of ordinary living, is key to its completion.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Don’t forget!  March is Epilepsy month with Purple Day for Epilepsy on March 26 each year.