Learning to be content

Trent worked late last night. I spent some quality time with Facebook while holding Lillian who was suffering from a bad reaction to immunizations. She just wanted to be held. I complied. One Facebook profile in particular really got me thinking. It was the profile of an old friend that I went to high school with. I was amazed by the life she's leading.

Her profile notes that she's working on her doctorate degree. The girl also has 3 Master's Degrees. Yep, that's right. THREE. The pictures on her Facebook account show various scenes of high adventure. Hiking here, Europe there. Her blog discusses the minute details of 19th century cathedral architecture. In every picture she's dressed in something so totally fabulous I almost had to run to the mall and just BUY something.

At the time I was reading through all this, I was wearing my awesome aquamarine velour sweatsuit. My hair, badly in need of revitalization ( roots and regrowth like you can't believe) was tied back in a hastily arranged ponytail. I had splotches of mopped-up spit up all over me. Let me tell you what, I was lookin' good. The contrast of her life with my awesomeness sorta made me feel distressed.

My dilemma? I used to be her (minus the 4 degrees). Travel to Europe? Oh, yeah, baby. Master's degree? Got that thing going on, too. And how about those weeks in Park City in large expensive suites, paid for by the coaltion that sponsored the literacy initiative I was a part of? Once upon a time I ate fabulous food at expensive restaurants and didn't know how to turn on the oven in my own apartment.

And... like my Facebook friend, I was single. Maybe she's different from me, but I didn't want to be single. I didn't like it. I spent a lot of time worrying about it.

In fact, one day, while stopped at a traffic light near my house, I watched a young woman pushing a baby stroller while a little blonde girl skipped along beside her. I watched her cross the crosswalk, and the heartache and sense of emptiness I felt was almost palpable. I wanted to reach out my arms and grasp what she had.

"I would trade everything I have in the world right now to be that girl," I told my friend, Anne, the next day at school as I shared the stroller scene and my accompanying sense of loneliness.

Anne responded in a way that surprised me. While she listened with great compassion, she didn't give me a break. Instead, she told me the truth. She simply said, "Oh, Liz. You just want that life because you don't have it now."

Anne was right. Her words pointed out the truth: it's so easy to ignore the blessings of a given set of circumstances and focus on those aspects of our lives we would change if we could.

Maybe if I stopped that young woman with the baby and darling toddler, she would have told me about the lack of sleep she's had, or how she's learning to live on a tight budget, or even something as simple as explaining that she's wearing that aquamarine velour sweatsuit because her baby is sick and her Sevens jeans aren't nearly as comfortable. Maybe, in fact, she was looking over her shoulder, figuratively speaking, at the nicely dressed and coiffed girl in the CRV. Maybe, in fact, she would want to change places with me.

I've spent a good deal of my life looking for the next bend in the road, focusing not on the hand I'm playing but instead on the one that might be dealt in the next round. There will always be those things that we wish we could change. There will always be those things we wish we could have again. I know this. I just didn't realize that I would learn it again.

To be content. In all things. To be at peace with what I have today. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today. To this, I aspire.