x-posted from Facebook
Inspired by Dee who has done some serious good stuff in the past decade!! In the spirit of all the Top 10 of the Decade lists, list the top 10 things that have happened to you or that you have learned during the last decade. I TAG YOU ALL!!
1. I’ve been blogging for nine of those ten years, which is a little nuts. But blogging has taught me how to be a better writer, how to write anyway (and to be never be scared of the blank page), introduced me to one point two million fabulous people including several who have become very important friends and gotten me some work.
2. I gained a daughter in the last decade and through her also gained a more extended family than I ever thought possible. Her arrival and her presence has lit up our world in so many, many ways.
3. I learned that “this too shall pass” is true of bad times, thank goodness, but also sometimes of good times. Learning to cope is apparently a life-long lesson.
4. I learned that parenting is hard on a marriage even when the marriage is good and that it’s important to like the person you’re married to because otherwise it will be awfully hard to love them.
5. I built a writing career, got my name in magazines, got my name in books and figured out that success is in the eye of the beholder.
6. I also figured out that I don’t find the actual achieving of my goals all that satisfying all by itself and that I will always find something else that looks better just a little bit further off in the distance, which has taught me that I better learn how to enjoy the journey because the destination is never going to be the point.
7. I discovered that homeschooling is very important to me and that we will sacrifice a lot to be able to do it. Given how reluctantly I came to it, this is a little surprising.
8. I quit fighting my introversion and began to accept it (and so figured out how to live with it), which has ironically afforded me a broader and busier social life. Go figure.
9. I struggled painfully with the loss of my identity as a crunchy, granola earthmama when I realized I was never going to birth another baby but then slowly grew to understand that life is more interesting (if not any easier) when we embrace paradox and learn to live with complication. I also appreciate the lesson in compassion even though it was hard and ugly going.
10. Oh and I converted in the last decade! I just realized that! And here I have a child who will become a bar mitzvah in 2010! Whodathunk?
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That picture of Noah kills me. I want to eat him with a spoon (figuratively of course, cause that sounds a little creepy).
In the 80′s, during the beginning of the AIDs epidemic, I read an underground comic that had the message that there is one phrase that will bring you comfort in hard times and despair in good times: “This too shall pass.” It was an unusual place to learn a life lesson, but it has stuck with me. I couldn’t imagine that the situation with AIDs would ever change, and while AIDs hasn’t passed, the situation has changed. Anyway, I try to really enjoy the good times based on this principle.
Very cool.
We still have to find a time to get together with Jenna and our respective kidlets. ACK!! Schedules, they’re awful!!
My schedule is about to get a lot more reasonable after next week — thank goodness!!!