Mundane to Sacred

A friend asked me yesterday if I was still blogging. I admit, I lost track of days and there were things about this year long experiment that I needed to process through. For starters, it is difficult to manufacture urgency. If this year really was the last year of my life, I'm certain that with it would come a sense of real, authentic urgency. It's not there.

Also, my life is not very interesting and the more I write, the more aware I am of that fact. So, there's this truth that is hard to accept and I had to find a way to make peace with it. We shook hands and I told myself that my life didn't have to be interesting to be fulfilling.

Another friend asked me if this experiment was like the movie, "Bucket List." It's not. I don't have a bucket list. If life is about doing certain things before I die, then those things for me are quite mundane at the moment. And yet, it is the daily things that are often the most spiritual. Waking up, making breakfast, seeing the kids off to school, looking for a job, helping kids with homework, doing dishes, sweeping floors, putting gas in the car. The reason that these things are sacred is that people are involved. At the same time, I am stretched to find a way to write about them from a sacred standpoint. But, I want to.

This reminds me of an excerpt from a Dean Koontz book titled, "Odd Hours." He writes, "Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life."

The question for me is not, "what can I do to make my life more meaningful?", but, "what is meaningful and sacred about my life now that I take for granted?" This is the question that I've been processing and what has kept me from writing for a few days. I don't want to wait until something is over and I'm alone to realize that life in and of itself is sacred and that it is the togetherness that makes it meaningful.