My friends often say that I speak in jingles, that my language is riddled with one liners.  So every once in a while I wonder if I missed my true calling in life.  Perhaps I should be working at Hallmark or writing for fortune cookie companies.  These places would be able to do something with my bits of wits and stuff that are lost on my current employers who prefer the verbal meanderings of “Boos Coos” and “Wachael Way”.

Then my internal critic pipes up:  “You don’t have any real wisdom to share.  Look at your life!  You speak of organization:  what if people saw the piles of stuff inside your closets?  What if they knew that your husband almost lost a toe this evening trying to extract a frying pan from the kitchen cupboard but had to try and pull it out over a grater, a ginormous pot, and four dining bowls that have *no* right being in a cupboard with the pots and pans?  Hmmm?”

To which I say, “Well, in my head, my closet is organized, and my kitchen is larger and doesn’t have massive amounts of unusable cupboard space.  Also, if you were a munchkin, you could dive into the cupboards to get out the frying pan:  for them, it’s a very practical layout.”

Then internal critic chimes in again:  “And all those blogs you read, you know, the ones about finance/crafts/cooking/playingwithkids/listeningotgoodmusic/emergingchurch/livinggreen/livingsimply/beingcreative/existingholistically/homeschooling/beingacoolandinterestingperson, do you do any of that stuff?”

To which I don’t respond, because I’m pretending I’m a munchkin and diving into my gargantuan and disorganized kitchen cupboards.

This weekend my mother, Wise Woman Extraordinaire who has learned to kick Internal Critics in the Tush, shared with me some words she heard from a friend many many years ago.  See, I was griping about how Daily Chores wear down my will to live.  Waking up each morning and knowing that there’s another load of laundry to do, another load of dishes to unload, another bout of scrubbing off little boy pee stains off the bathroom floor, well, it doesn’t make me look forward to my day (although it does make me look forward to watching Martha where things are pretty and clean and organized by her army of anal perfectionists and making a mental note to add Army of Anal Perfectionists to my Amazon wishlist - they carry them, right?).

And yet, having been raised in the church, I feel incredibly guilty about these feelings.  Internal Critic lectures on how blessed I am to have a closet full of stuff, and have pots and pans with which to systematically remove my husbands toes, and have small boys with functional schplinkies that miss the ginormous target known at the toilet bowl.  “People in third world countries don’t have this “problem”, you know.”  I know, oh, I know.  And deeper into the cupboard I climb where ooh!  I the popcorn popper I borrowed from my folks to make popcorn Christmas chains, you know, four years ago.

Mom said her friend told her:  “You have to do one thing each day that you won’t have to do the next day.  Otherwise you’ll lose it.”

Profound!  And it made so much sense!  The day before when I was feeling bogged down the with daily, I brushed the dog.  Before brushing him, I was all “blah.”  Afterwards I felt this strange sense of catharsis (it could also be a strange sense of my allergies shutting down all sinus function):  the dog was clean, I had gotten a bit of a workout - it was like a small mountain had been climbed.  And the momentum of “ooh, pretty dog and yay me!” kept me cleaning and organizing and coloring and explaining that yes, tomorrow we will go visit grandmomgranddaddyuncamatt “up at Wose Vahwee” for the umpteenth time until lunchtime.

“You have to do one thing each day that you won’t have to do the next day.  Otherwise you’ll lose it.”  See, that’s true wisdom:  a quality one liner.  Now if only those quality one liners only did stairs . . .

Daily Drivel