Today's View From the Mat

Honestly, I just took a picture I liked and came up with a profound-sounding caption, so now I'm trying to think of something I can say to go along with it...

"Thus I considered all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted, and behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun." Ecclesiastes 2:11

It's easy to see life this way.  For two years we have been here in Texas, living our Great Adventure, and some of it has been truly Adventurous.  I started a dance team.  Like...What?  BYC Dance Company came into being, and it was amazing!  But some of it (a lot of it) has been less Adventurous.  We have spent countless days sitting around our apartment, staring at Netflix or, Lord help me, Minecraft.  That background music gets really old after a while, ya know?  You can only build so many houses, blow up so many piles of TNT.  Eventually you've watched all 9 seasons of Bones, both seasons of Agents of Shield, and all the nerd-tastic movies you own a few times over, and you've baked more cookies than you could eat in a month...and then eaten them all.  In a weekend.  I was making myself a planner, and collecting nice little quotes from pinterest to put at the top of every page (because who doesn't like pinterest sayings, right?), and I came across one that said

"What you do today is important because you're trading a day of your life for it."

As far as pinterest cliches go, that one struck me as being pretty deep.  I mean, it's true!  Every single day I spend sitting here on the couch, watching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and eating salad and cheesecake is a day of my life in which I do nothing.  How's that for vanity?  It's not even striving after anything!  It's completely selfish.  But lately I find it so hard to strive because it's all just wind anyway, isn't it?  I got to thinking, and was trying to figure out what is worth a day of my life.  What is important enough to give up my life?
People.
People are worth it.  My family is worth it.  My kids at the school are worth it.  My tiny dancers are worth it.  But today is July 24th, and I have 4 days till my last summer dance class, 4 weeks until school starts again, and 4 months until I get to see my one of my sisters for Thanksgiving.  In the meantime, I have been doing that whole hippy, focus on me-time thing.  I do yoga and I started tumble classes (I am so close to having a back handspring I can taste it!).  I read two books in three days, and I built a custom planner.  I baked a batch of cookies and a pan of cheesecake brownies.  I bought strawberries and bananas and made chocolate fondue just for the heck of it.  I cut my bangs and dyed my hair and I try to dance at least every couple of days, just for me.
I get frustrated feeling my life is stagnant.  I am  missing my family, and I feel I am not doing a whole lot of good right now.  But as I was chilling in child's pose this morning, listening to the humming birds and enjoying the sunshine, I remembered something:  we came here for a lot of reasons, but one big reason was for us to have a chance to establish Us.  We came here for Us.  Not for our families or the people around us; they are absolutely still SO important, and ultimately life is about the people, but maybe it is ok to take time to be...Us.  I realized I haven't had an anxiety attack all summer, and we even went to Strawn for dinner the other night!  I socialized with people, and had normal conversations, and didn't have any ridiculous urges to yell at my husband for things I imagined.  Must be doing something right...maybe being a selfish hippy isn't so  bad, eh?  
We are coming up on our 2nd anniversary on Monday, and really, two years isn't very long, in the grand scheme of things.  Someday soon we will be ready to come back to the real world.  Someday soon we will be strong enough to focus on more than just Us.  Someday soon our family will be established and we will be prepared to expand it.  But for now, just for a while longer, I am going to be content doing yoga and cooking steak for Jesse.  We will continue to work at being Us, because someday life will be hectic and other people will be involved, and we will need Us to be auto pilot.  We will need these years of isolation and frustration and adventure and discovery and anxiety and boredom to look back on and remember who we are as Us.

And that's today's view from the yoga mat, the part of the blog when Rianna reveals the way life changes when you look from a hippy point of view.  Peace out and namaste!