Can you love an ordinary life?

Can you love an ordinary life?

One with work and dishes and a few good friends and a TV show to binge.

A hobby, a hike, a puzzle.

Fresh flowers.

Children, if that’s your thing.

Cats and dogs and horses and hummingbirds and butterflies, also, if that’s your thing.

Clean sheets and a new song (or maybe an old one). A song you can belt while you drive in your ordinary car. The one that needs an oil change and the coffee cups cleaned out.

Early bedtime and your thoughts on paper in the pretty journal you found at the bookstore last Saturday.

A person to kiss goodnight, if that’s your thing.

Can you be bored?

Can you be lonely from time to time?

Can you see yourself if others cannot?

Can you dance in your bathroom or ride your bike or lay on a beach in the summer, and on the couch in the fall, with a good book and the fireplace on?

Can you feed your body vegetables and floss your teeth and budget your money?

Can you say you’re sorry when you’ve hurt a person and forgive the ones who can’t? Who can’t because the world hurt them too badly, or maybe they were born that way. Can you accept that the answers to that particular mystery are not your business- unless of course, the answers might make you more compassionate, more safe, or more free?  Can you master the difference?

Can you practice the discipline that a life of integrity requires? Can you try again when you’ve slipped?

Can you fall in love with an ordinary you- a messy you and an angry and sad and tired you, who also feels moments of intense joy and self-connection and pride and a deep sense of peace and calm?

Can you fall in love with an ordinary life?

Can you fall in love with yours?

With you and with yours.