102: Little Jolt of Joy – What Is Most Important

Experiences Don’t Wait, Housework Does

I want to share where I disappeared to recently, and the lessons that came out of it. I took my mom to see her mother in DC, coordinating flights across three cities so I could fly the leg with her myself. My grandmother is 92 and doing beautifully, but we hadn’t seen her in two years, since we surprised her for her 90th birthday right before the world shut down. You never know what life has ahead, so I wanted to make this happen while I could.

There is no perfect time to disrupt your schedule

I did not have a clean, empty four days to give this trip. I genuinely missed some things to make it happen. But the real question was never whether the timing was convenient, it was whether this was important enough to prioritize anyway. Friends had come into town the same weekend I left for the airport, something I couldn’t help since the trip had been planned first. My answer to time with family and friends is always yes, because I can clean my house back up eventually. I don’t know if I’ll get another chance to see my grandmother again.

Waiting for the perfect, organized moment can cost you what actually matters

If I’d waited until my schedule was flawlessly planned or my house was perfectly organized before saying yes to visiting friends or taking this trip, that moment might never have come. It’s easy to look at other people who seem to have it all together and assume that’s why they get to do these things. I don’t believe that illusion. If anything, I think the more rigidly scheduled among us sometimes miss out on spontaneous moments precisely because they feel everything has to fit neatly into the calendar first. Being a little more spur-of-the-moment has let me experience things I’ll never regret.

A lesson in what’s actually necessary

My grandmother lives with my uncle now in a small townhouse, and what he brought for her was simply the essentials and her photographs. That’s genuinely it. My mom went through a hard downsizing a couple of years ago and grieved some of what she had to let go of, but she’s since moved past most of that, and now she’s the one actively looking to strip down even further, recognizing how little of it actually mattered. When you’re struggling to let go of something, it can help to measure it against what actually matters when life narrows down to its essentials. You need far less than you think.

Say yes anyway

Say yes to the visit, the friends, the family, even when the timing feels imperfect. Experiences don’t wait for you to get everything else in order first. Housework does.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.