speaking and being spoken to

I am in Boston, overlooking Nantasket beach from my table by the balcony.  The days here have been alternating between slightly warm and sunny and slightly cool and rainy.  Today, the light gray clouds are meeting the dark gray ocean and my husband is out with my daughter buying a kite to fly in the roaring wind.

I spoke yesterday at a national conference.  Now that it is over, I can see that the weight of it has been riding me for months now.  It is good to be done, even better that it went well and that I have a few days to recover before entering back into the awesome mayhem of our life right now.  These are the best kinds of things - being ten weeks from having a baby, cleaning and packing things for an imminent move into a house, a real house that has more space and will be ours in less than 48 hours, having the honor of being asked to speak in a forum like the one I spoke in yesterday.  Still, for a girl like me who needs a little coffee and solitude and some blank paper time to maintain sanity, it is a lot at once.  I am tired.  Good tired.  Needing a break.

Ironically, after I managed to stress my way through the last week of 11 hour work days + prepping my presentation + packing for this trip + packing for our move the day after we get back + trying to pretend I could do all of that and not completely lose my marbles once or twice, I came across a few things Don Miller and Emily P. Freeman recently said that rang true this morning.  

First, that sometimes, the best thing you can do is just show up, don’t run, stand there with your hands in your pockets and live in the fear.

Second, that we can pray, prepare, and hope for certain outcomes, but we certainly can’t manage the outcomes.

I get all freaked out sometimes that because what I am doing doesnt always feel easy, that maybe I am doing it wrong.  But actually, I think that is just life on certain days.  You show up in the midst of doing the hard things, and you hope, and you cant be sure of the outcomes, and that can be stressful.

So this is our free day, not a sunny warm beach day but a cool, windy, Boston-in-the-fall beach day.  Not the weather I would choose, but it just so happens to be great kite weather.

And when you have great kite weather, you ought to fly a kite.