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Big Rocks

Teaser from yesterday was that I would write about HOW we get to wear the pearls AND have the dirty fingernails... how we get to hear the stories AND have everyone leave us alone.  Teaser yesterday.  Torture today.

Somehow my impossible thinking -- my Wonderland reasoning -- seeped into my Northern Virginia reality and made me think for a minute that there is an answer to that question.

There's not one... just a couple of hints.

Here's one of them.  If you have a pile of sand, a pile of pebbles, and a pile of big rocks and your objective is to fit them into a big glass jar, there's only one way to make it work.  If you put the sand in first, then the pebbles, then the rocks, you'll have a LOT of lonely rocks that sit abandoned on the table.  However, if you start with the big rocks, then put the pebbles, then the sand... it all fits.  All of it.

Here's another one (thank you Lloyd "Grandaddy" Nelson Harris):  Keep the main thing the main thing.

So, Grandaddy, how do we do THAT?

First, we have to be clear about what the main thing is.

And, frankly, that's where I'm stuck.  If I put my boys first, then if I'm painting and in the groove and they ask me to play Legos, I guess I should do that.

No.  That's not right.

Just this afternoon I painted, they played.  They played, I forgot to cook dinner.  Pizza and root beer, painted fingers and stories of imagined plots felt pretty damn happy.  Pretty right on.

So, maybe the main thing for me is finding and sharing InSpiration with the souls I love and the souls I've yet to love.

I'll try that out for a few days and see if that fits as the main thing.  It feels a little incomplete because it doesn't account for food and shelter and those other lowest levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  But, I guess those details are pebbles, right?

Next, we have to REMEMBER what we already decided the main thing is.  This means focus and concentration... maybe it means writing it down and looking at it whenever the urge to pick up the toilet brush strikes us.  The toilet brush is a small pebble and it gets attention after the main thing.

I feel like I'm on the right track, anyway.

I guess if the main thing is truly the music of our hearts then we feel like it's dessert and so sometimes we save it for last, good little children that we are.  But really we need to eat it first.  Devour it wholeheartedly, without guilt, knowing that if we do we'll still have room for the meal.

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