My thoughts drift, as they often do, and this morning I was struck by the sun shining through the skywalk window sparkling on the dust. It was so pretty until I started to sneeze and realized that it was dust, not heaven-sent sprinklings of patience and time. What a violent burst to my bubble.
I have written about a sprinkle jar before – the sight of sparkly cinnamon-sugar falling out of a jar melting into butter on warm wheat toast correlating to the warm fuzziness of a happy, worry-free childhood.
Of course, it’s the romanticized version of the sight, the movie set slow motion scene with perfect lighting – I do not recall sunlight pouring into the kitchen and straight into the tiny pieces of cinnamon and sugar as they dissolve into the butter. I recall sitting down with my toast at the table to read the comics and attempt the crossword, plopping down for Saturday morning cartoons or in front of the crackling fire. It’s the relaxation, the minute or two to take a deep breath and just be.
It’s been a long fall adjusting to new grades at school, home improvement projects that seem to have a mind of their own, irregular work schedules, and the stress of balancing work, school, home and parenting. Finding balance is hard – especially because I have trouble balancing myself, have been known to trip over my own feet, fall off of sidewalks and cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.
There is an old corporate training program about work-life balance with an exercise where you imagine that you are juggling glass balls and that each ball represents a part of your life – work, home, etc. You are supposed to imagine what would happen if you dropped a ball while juggling and that ball broke beyond repair. Juggling requires balance (which I lack) so I preferred to imagine that all of my glass balls were safely tucked away in my pockets where they were not at risk of crashing.
Earlier this week it felt as if everything was off balance, that the glass balls were about to dig themselves out of my pockets and crash to the floor. I took a few minutes at work for just me, opened up a new Word doc and made a list of everything that was so hard that day. The last thing on the list was ‘refill sprinkle jar’. I took a deep breath, stood up and stretched and just let the worry go. I could do nothing about a lot of the stress so just let it be rather than let it bother me.
At home that night I made cookies with my daughters. A batch of snickerdoodles that failed so miserably I could only describe them as a cookbook type-o. I made a second batch of always successful chocolate chip cookies, half for a company Thanksgiving luncheon today, and half for a co-worker with four children whose husband suffered a massive heart attack earlier this week.
Sprinkle jar, refilled.
