I have moments every day, when life feels unbelievably frustrating, unfair, impossible to navigate — just plain bad.  And I carry the stress in my shoulders, my back, my jaw.  I make myself sick (legitimately sick) with fear and over thinking.

And then there are moments, when the man and I are driving with the windows down, Lucy’s head rested on the window sill, the Beatles or Bruce on the radio — nowhere to be, nothing to do, just a moment in time.  And as I watch the country side slide by, the green grasses waving in the breeze, the bright blue sky dotted with puffs of white clouds, I think how full of blessings my life is.

Maybe things don’t always go my way.  Maybe I have to do things I don’t want to do.  Maybe there are restrictions on things that I don’t like.  But — even if I can’t run today … it doesn’t mean I’ve never been able to run, and it doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t ever be able to run again (although that is a strong possibility).

But my point is – it’s so easy to get side-tracked by the ‘bad’ things.  The ‘no’s’ and the ‘nevers’ — but if you discipline yourself to find the good, it’s sort of incredible how they mightily outweigh the bad.  My husband and I will never have children, but we are blessed in each other, in our friendship and our enjoyment of each other’s company — the sound of each other’s voices.  We have families we love and who love us, and perhaps the most high maintenance dog in.the.world.  But Lucy’s high maintenance helps dissipate the heaviness of my high maintenance — and that’s sort of a beautiful gift.

Today, after cleaning our apartment more thoroughly than we’ve cleaned in quite some time (a person could pass out from the cleaning solution fumes) we packed Miss Lucy in the truck and we headed to a local restaurant (dog-friendly, of course) to enjoy some munchies while our landlords showed the apartment to potential new renters.  And the real-ness of leaving this home set in — the excitement for our new adventure, and the sadness at leaving our beautiful, lovely space behind.  And I thought how blessed we were to have lived in our apartment for six years, with landlords who have become our friends.  How blessed we are to have arrived at this moment, when we are able to afford our first home — in the exact area we’ve always talked about wanting to live.

And I thought how important it was, how important it should always be — to appreciate all the things in our lives.  Because life is precious, people are precious — and it all comes and goes so very fast.