No Effort Whatsoever

In mid-April, as I was driving into town to meet a friend for lunch, I had this moment where I was swept away by the breathtaking SUDDENESS of spring all around me!  

Fortunately, we hadn’t had an intense winter in South Dakota, but when we didn’t have snow, it was brown, cold, and often windy.  The only color to be seen came from the evergreens and the various shades of blue the sky offered when it wasn’t completely clouded over.  

However, on this particular spring day, it was a crystal-clear, lush, sunny seventy degrees. The crabapple and plum trees were in bloom, the lawns were greening, all while the tulips were preparing to unveil their radiant flowers.   

AND it struck me that I hadn’t done anything at all to create this gorgeous day myself.  I didn’t need to.  I didn’t need to spend days obsessing over its smallest details in order to ensure that spring would come.  I had no proposals to write or planning meetings to prepare for and attend, nothing.  I didn’t need to worry in the least about spring appearing around me.  

Spring simply did its thing, entirely beyond my efforts or lack thereof.  

In a world with no shortage of things that one is free to worry about, from politics to hunger around the world, to the environment, right down to the stuff happening at work, at home, with the people we care about, with our health, our happiness, not to mention trying to imagine what on earth the future holds….It’s nice to know that there are some extraordinary and miraculous things happening entirely beyond our control.  

You know, I used to be a control freak.  Since I had a difference, a disability from birth and assumed it to be a gross and tragic imperfection, I wanted to have absolute command over every other area of my life.  I was always straining to see twenty-miles down the road to anticipate upcoming imperfections and avoid them at all costs.  

The problem with choosing this approach is that EVERY possible path I could have gone down had the possibility of something beyond my control.  I have never worked so hard as when I was trying to anticipate and micromanage every aspect of the future for myself and the people around me.  It was an exhausting and fear-filled way to navigate life to say the least, and ultimately an exercise in futility.  To be in total control, I would have had to essentially do nothing and go nowhere and still I’d be subject to forces outside of my control.

So, as a recovering micro-manager of life, it’s exceedingly nice to watch spring flourish without any effort on my behalf.  

Maybe sometimes, the best approach to living is embracing life for all that it is, the beauty, the imperfections, the struggles, the joys, the abundance of things we have some influence over, and the abundance of things that spring up beyond our control.

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