Significance

For some reason every time I return to my lonely Great Escape blog page just one thought runs through my mind: "Well this was a huge mistake."

The truth is my life isn't exactly noteworthy to anyone else since I graduated college. It hasn't exactly been boring (although I am burning through Netflix at a probably unhealthy rate) but there aren't any huge events or developments that can compete with my sisters' rapidly approaching due dates or my brother and his wife's hilarious newlywed antics (p.s check out their blog The Gent and the Journaler its a thousand times better than this one).

But I've realized that I am in a beautiful stage in my life where everything is frozen in beautiful simplicity. I've been busy most of my life, and I've always focused on the significant events. Its all I've had time for. But I am finding that there is such significance in those in between moments, those breaths before the jaw-dropping monologue.

Take today for instance. Nothing noteworthy or significant from a stranger's perspective happened. My sisters came over with their INSANE children and we all just sat around for hours and talked. Half the time I didn't even say anything, there were even a few moments when I wasn't even in the same room. And I'm sure my sisters thought I wasn't even listening (just like we always thought mom was just doing laundry in the other room when we were kids but then she would chastise us for something we had said when we thought we were safe--seriously, moms have the weirdest selective hearing). But the truth is I was listening, maybe not to every word they were saying, but I was listening in a different way.

It's like when you're exhausted and you put on a song you have heard a million times and you just lean back, close your eyes and hum to that old familiar tune. I grew up with that humming noise of colliding voices all talking over each other or next to each other or around each other. There's something beautifully comforting about a house full of familiar voices. It was a weird kind of gift to be able to experience that again today.

It was like I was seven years old again and Kari and Kristi were inevitably arguing in the next room while my brother and my dad were glued to the screen driving themselves insane with their predictions for march madness. Only my sisters weren't fighting and my brother wasn't there (it seemed strange that his voice wasn't added to the array), and my other sister wasn't annoyingly asking me to leave her alone. But it had the same feeling of fullness that my childhood home always had, a fullness that I always took for granted.

Now I've always sort of been a loner, and I've been fine with that. But running through my living room chasing kids while trying to simultaneously listen to my sisters' newest mommy drama reminded me why we were not created to be alone. There is beauty in simply being with people you love, doing absolutely nothing. Today, I look back on those childhood days where I was bored to death and all I could think to do was whine to my mother or siblings and I smile. Because those days were simple. Those days were beautiful. Those days were significant. Well, at least they are to me.