The Kindness of Making Peace with a Messy Life or "Managing Gracefully"

"It's not only children who grow.  Parents do too.  As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours.  I can't tell my children to reach for the sun.  All I can do is reach for it, myself."
― Joyce Maynard

There was a time in my life when I was single and lived in a studio apartment with everything in its place.  I loved the smallness and simplicity of it.  Then I got married and lived in an off-white monochromatic apartment where I did not serve red wine or dark liquids.  My husband would groan as he would watch me balance our checkbook, which I insisted on doing to the penny.  And then, there's now...

I sat at the kitchen table this morning, after one more messy meal, remnants of a long weekend all around me.  There was a nearly empty and left-open sack of Tastykake donuts on the table and drying beach towels on the chairs.  My messy life.  I read somewhere that the children years are messy years.  And indeed they are.  In every way.   As I perused the messiness and madness, a phrase from the book I was reading jumped off the page at me.   In It's Easier Than You Think, The Buddhist Way to Happiness, Sylvia Boorstein writes about "managing gracefully."  She writes about being at a gathering of meditation teachers, during which participants shared what was going on in their lives.  They all had problems, but they were still happy or at the very least all right.  She realized that what they were doing was "managing gracefully," which, she says, is better than managing tensely or fearfully.   

With Boorstein's phrase juxtaposed against the messy backdrop, I decided that is what I would aim for:  Managing gracefully through my messy life, knowing that this phase won't last forever.  And knowing, too, that I will miss the mess and its co-creators when they are gone.  For now, managing gracefully seems like the kinder option -- for me and for them.  At peace with this new thought, I put down my book and went to find my children and give each of them a hug.