What You Do and Who You are Matters

What you do and what you are matters.  Repeat it.  Believe it.

It’s hard to do, believe me.  There are weeks where I feel on top of the world.  I can do everything!  I am exactly where I need to be.  Then, there are weeks where nothing falls into place.  Everything is mess after mess after mess.  These are the weeks I find it hard to follow my mantra.  I don’t feel that anything I am doing matters and sometimes if I am completely honest, I don’t feel I matter.  Not in a boo-hoo-the-world-is-crashing-down-on-me way, but in a what-am-I-contributing-to-society-today way.  Does the universe really care if I do another load of laundry?  Actually, the universe probably doesn’t want me using any more precious water.  No more laundry it is!

I digress.

I live in a world of unending to-do lists, picking up toys, laundry, cleaning out the upended box of natural shredded wheat from the car, and the list goes on and on (see above about to-do lists).  There are days where most of my time has been spent arguing with a two year old about something that was so important at the time, but has since been forgotten.  Sometimes, I see my reflection in the mirror and think who is that person, why doesn’t she brush her hair?  Nowadays, I feel gratitude if I get to take a shower uninterrupted.   The struggle, my friends, is real.

Sometimes, we become so entrenched in surviving our everyday lives that we forget exactly how powerful our place in life really is.  The monotonous overtones of living our lives can regularly distract us from feeling that our place in life amounts to more then cleaning up toys, running errands, balancing the checkbook or cleaning.  We become so ground down in our to-do lists that we forget to take a look around at the world we have created around us.  I know this because I live it.

There are moments when I feel the gratitude seeping out of me and am so thankful for the chance to get to clean up after two messy girls who don’t have a care in the world.  These moments are later followed by moments of feeling that everything I am accomplishing, every task I am doing is simply one in a long list, that I do on the repeat cycle, day in and day out.  It is difficult sometimes to find the balance.  The overachiever in me feels defeated and the bohemian in me laughs because in the big scheme of life and all that.

There are times when shaking off these feelings can be tough but at the end of the day I look around at all I have, and I think that what I am doing, albeit some days not the most earth shattering, matters.  It matters to my husband.  It matters to my girls, even though they are not yet able to appreciate it.  It matters to my family and friends.  And if I am completely truthful on those days I have a rare glimpse outside myself it matters to me too.  It matters.  In the end, we are the sum of more than all the parts.  We are more than our errands, our commitments, the to-do lists.  The things we do every day are substantial. Maybe not in the way we originally thought but they are substantial nonetheless.

So remember, that what you do and what you are matters.