Does anyone else out there continually vacillate between strict discipline and wild spontaneity? Maybe it’s the difference between my creative brain and my logical brain. Maybe it’s the contrast between the scheduled world of public education I grew up in and the freedom of homeschooling that I live with now. It feels like half of humanity would scold me for either choice. Maybe it’s the change from working to staying at home. Whatever the reason, I can’t seem to stick to either a schedule or the lack of one for more than a week at a time. Something inside of me seeks to make every day EPIC. And it can’t make up its mind on exactly what IS the best way to induce epic-ness.
In order to achieve epic-ness, we must define it. Merriam-Webster says it means “extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope.” Well, then. It’s basically impossible to do that every day. If epic is normal, it would eventually cease to be epic, and a new standard for epic would be established. So maybe both discipline and spontaneity are needed to achieve feelings of epic-ness. If my normal is constantly changing, then every day might feel epic, even if I am doing ordinary things!
By nature, I am not a planner. I’d much rather see where God takes me. But the sting of making many mistakes that could have been avoided by planning has trained me to seek out the perfect routine, in order to hopefully avoid such pain in the future. And here my discipline and spontaneity are at war again. It’s a cycle: We’ll have a good routine down, and then I’ll go through a time where new ideas are hitting me from every side, and I’ll change things to incorporate them. Or a life change will happen, and we are forced to change things. Or for some reason, everyone is crabby and nothing is getting done. So we take some time off and then have to get back into the swing of things, which is always rough.
Amidst all this chaos of life, I am constantly trying to figure out what is worthwhile. What is beneficial? What is necessary? What can we cut out? What should we add in? Should we do this daily, weekly, monthly, yearly?! Sometimes my mind is such a battlefield. I don’t want to waste time, and I don’t want to schedule too many things and leave no room for fun or deviation from the schedule. And just about the time I am satisfied with our “normal” routine, something changes.
Many days, I feel like I’m not enough. I feel I’m not doing enough. I feel like I should be doing something OTHER than what I am doing. I second guess every decision I’ve made. Some days I feel elated when I check off the boxes on my to-do list. Some days I feel elated when I rebel and refuse to do anything on my to-do list. On the days I am disciplined and stick to my “perfect” routine, I hope the showers of small things done over and over again, with love, become epic over time. On the days when I throw the schedule out the window and we go on a grand adventure, I hope the flood of excitement and the unknown will be epic.
I know we need both the showers and the floods to create a full life. And I think each one prepares us for the other. It’s the showers of mundane and monotonous, intentional, habits we do every day that prepare us for the floods. Hopefully they will root us in peace, love, faith, hope, good health, and an appreciation for the good and the beautiful. And it’s the flood of emotions and excitement from getting outside of our comfort zones that give meaning to our intentional habits. Hopefully they will leave us with lasting memories and life lessons.
Every day is epic, in its own way.
