[making fewer plans]

They say life is what happens when you're busy making plans. Usually the story of my life. But for the last month since school got out, I made as few plans as possible, and the change was really great.

I attended almost every life event from a baby shower to a baptism to graduation parties, weddings and a funeral. I also had lots of quality time to spend with friends and family, ran, biked, journaled, read the Bible, gardened, mowed, picked strawberries, baled hay, tried to keep the kitchen and laundry shuffle in some sort of order, dominated a puzzle, finally finished a book and made and sent out my thank yous to all my financial supporters for the I.T. project in LA. Wow you'd think I was some sort of blogger for a middle-aged housewife magazine or something! Truly I'm not, but it was fun to be able to help around the farm and house without a constant schedule/plan of places to be, things to do and people to see.

However, I don't think that problem is unique to me. It's a disease of our society, and it's also really hard to change. How do we slow down and learn to soak up life rather than letting the idea of life soak up us? How do we take a time-out and look around us to realize all there is in this world to be thankful for despite our constant discontentment with something or someone? How do we live intentionally rather than letting our jobs, our bank accounts, our wants or our to-do lists consume us?

I don't have the magic, universal answer. If you do, fill the rest of us in. But I do know that we don't deserve to complain about it if we aren't willing to change it. I mean, the entire last semester I've hated how much I run from one activity to the next. One appointment to the next. One coffee date to the next. And yet I wasn't willing to say no. I wasn't willing to think of my life in more than hour-by-hour spans of time. And life is what happened when I was busy making plans.

Now I'm in LA for seven weeks - one of the busiest places in the world when you think of crazy city drivers, pace, everything. But I don't want to be so "American" anymore. So go go go. Got a huge dose of what that felt like to slow down in South Africa and loved it. Got another small one the last month or so at home and loved it. And someday I hope I can do that no matter where I live. The next seven weeks out here could be quite fast paced and intense, but my goal is to make the most of my free time rather than feeling obligated to fill it. Because I feel like it'd be ok if our society slowed down. Just a little bit. And then maybe we'd have time to enjoy life beyond our immediate plans.