The Next Big Thing

You know how there are those times in life when you are asked to describe yourself?  Maybe it was an “All About Me” essay in the fourth grade.  Perhaps a job made you do a lengthy self-assessment.  Either way, almost all of us will agree that describing yourself pretty much sucks.  We’re always our harshest critic.  It’s also strange when someone else describes you…the “spotlight” feeling is not fun for people that are not actually dancing on a Broadway stage.  The older I get, the more I fantasize about being a hermit. 

Today someone at my new job was asking how things were (we’ve got a LOT going on in life, here at the Kovnesky house) so I filled them in, and they said…

“You’re the most laid back person I know!”

Which made me raise my eyebrows.  I don’t consider myself to be laid back at all.  I have a horrible time relaxing, I’m always strategizing every move (place the empty water glass on the kitchen table instead of the counter and when I come back to this room I’ll have fewer steps to the dishwasher, at which point I will scrub out the pots and pans and let them dry on the half-clean towel and grab that on my way up to the laundry room…) and it’s exhausting, thinking all the dang time.  But I thought about what my life must look like to someone on the outside… 

In one and a half months:  New baby, new job, out of state move, flooded kitchen fiasco, pesky household guests, daycare shortage, the list goes on…and I see what they mean.  Smoke isn’t coming out of my ears or anything. 

But you know what?  It was easy.  Every bit of it. 

The next big thing is always better than the last, especially if you know it before it happens.  Which basically means that you better have lots of faith that it will work out.  And if you do, it will.  The things that go wrong in life are often wrong only temporarily, and they needed to go wrong in order to properly rearrange the events that are waiting for you, just around the corner.  You have to be paying attention to see them though, and you have to expect them.  If you’re expecting the wrong things, your eyes won’t be adjusted to be able to see the right ones.  You know this.  I know this.  Of this I am sure. 

What was in that lasagna?