I'm just warming up!

Look Sherrie!! Get out of my tights about this! I've been thinking...really hard...for about two years. Now I'm done and I'm ready to update. I simply have no idea where to begin. I don't even remember where I left off. I went to school, I graduated, I looked for a job, I found a job that I loved and hated simultaneously, and then quit that job to take another one. What has been happening in my little world seems so teeny-tiny compared to what's happening all around me. Life is crazy!

I have those moments, especially at night, when everything suddenly starts to seem so trivial. I look at the little McDonald's toy on the kitchen table and pick it up with the junk mail to throw away and it suddenly occurs to me that same toy was the center of big drama just four hours earlier when one of my girls was all upset because that was the one she wanted but didn't get in her bag. Now they are sound asleep and the day is behind them. Like glitter from a craft project, a few pieces of the day will stick with them into the next, but the McDonald's toy won't be one of them. It's amazing (and often a little embarrassing) to cast my mind back to a situation that seemed so dire and important at the time and now just seems so irrelevent and trivial. We all have those moments: That argument you allow yourself to get all fired up about that seems so stupid a few months later or song that you secretly played over and over because you couldn't get enough of it and now you skip over it on your iPod.

So when I sit down to watch or read the days news at night before going to bed, I feel overwhelmed by the things happening around me that make me - my world - seem so insignificant. Maybe this is why I have chosen the field I have...maybe it's easier to feel like I'm on the outside of crises trying to help, than allow myself to be in the middle of it.

This is the point in the post that I admit, I'm just rambling. I seriously have no idea where I'm going with this. Oh yeah, wait...

What got me thinking about this was the very sad news my best friend received a few days ago. I have always enjoyed the fact that she and I approached life so differently. Quite frankly, I think the reason that, after 22 years, we still talk all the time and never seem to run out of things to talk about is that our worlds are so different. It's as if someone created two people with essentially identical values but had them each take very different paths in life and got to simultaneously watch them move through the life span. Oh, and one of us has WAY better taste in movies and the other is WAY more artistic. She immersed herself in a truly humanitarian effort a few months ago to help two baby girls. Just when she thought the time had come to watch with hope and anticipation to see how it all turned out, one of the babies made it clear that she had plans of her own and they did not involve spending a minute too long in this world. I could sit and try to come up with the perfect thing to say - the ultimate words of comfort - but I know that, at the end of the day, all I can do is look for the places that need support - the holes that need patches. I sit from one end of the nation and think about two families, one on the other end, and one in a different country and how she makes this world so much smaller for the rest of us. I mean, I now know the names, stories, and the voices of people from a country that, before, I could only point out on a map but knew nothing else about.

There I go...rambling again.

Okay, so I guess it's time to get back into this. I acknowledge that I tend to have an opinion about EVERYTHING so I may as well slap them all over here instead of places they aren't welcomed...or requested...or warranted. The sooner the world learns that all anyone has to do is listen to me, the sooner everyone can resume live erring on the side of caution rather than adventure!

xoxo