Doing Small Things

I’m not sure where the time flies these days, though I am sure the fact that this week kicked off with a migraine made any productivity a bonus. I still haven’t finished the final chapter of The Builders, though I added almost 500 words to the WIP. I also read a post about story endings that finally gave me clarity about how I want to wrap things up. If I could just sit down without a to-do list a mile long, I could probably finish post-haste.

Another week, another try.

😀

In the meantime, we’ve started building out hubs’s new musician site, and we’re slowly emerging to attack the new forest of grass that sprung up in the week and a half of rain we’ve “enjoyed”. My phone indicates I’ve upped my average walking distance back over 2,000 steps per day, so there’s more progress on the fitness front.

Aside from all that, I’ve been pondering the great divide between our living experience in the DC area versus the midwest and the southwest. Someday I’d love to return to where there are more cacti, mountains, and a regular view of the Milky Way, but until then, I’m going to have to pay attention that I don’t become complacent about how wildly out-of-sync this area is from an income and cost-of-living perspective versus the rest of the country. I discovered a data aggregation site that includes tracking (based on publicly available numbers) about U.S. median income. From that starting point, I read an article about the persistent level of poverty, another about the things the middle class can no longer afford, and what wage stagnation looks like. This was all capped by a new chart put together by economist Pavlina Tcherneva that shows the dramatic inversion in financial gains for the middle class over the past 20 years. All of these things together make it obvious why zombie stories have become the popular new metaphor for our country: We’ve all been sprinting so hard to just keep pace, we have no energy to consider how we might actually get ahead.

It’s crystallized my view that we need stories that have hope and some kind of happiness in them to start changing the mental narrative that traps us in the negative thought spiral that nothing can or will change. We are all invited daily to choose our perspective. One of the things I most appreciate about my path with hubs is his growth to a daily practice of gratitude–it’s become one of the most powerful tools for both of us to be able to step outside the race and appreciate the peace we can enjoy together. So I’m sharing a useful post on tools that remind you to be thankful. I particularly like the quote that kicks off that post:

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ~Thornton Wilder

So for this week, I will continue to do the small things I can with great love in my heart. I would encourage you to do so as well–and to check out how the other ROW80ers are doing.