Enjoy

Go outside. What do you see first? Is it the sky? Is it the grass, or trees? What do you hear first? Is it cars driving down the road? Maybe it’s birds? What about smell? Does it smell like chimney smoke? Or does it just smell fresh?

Maybe you have roses by your door that are still in bloom this late in the year. I know mine are. My mint is still growing like a weed too.

I don’t spend nearly as much time outside as I did when I was in school. Now, most of my free time is spent catching up on my inside chores.

This weekend however, I took a chair outside and sat on my porch for the first time in three years. I didn’t pull weeds or water my flowers. I didn’t sweep the leaves from my sidewalk or driveway, I didn’t even pick up the trash that had blown into my sage.

I just sat there.

I sat there and watched the sun rise.

And I remembered why I love being outside.

Being an adult means having to take on responsibilities that you didn’t even know existed as a child. Like pulling weeds in the garden or scrubbing the base boards in the house. These little responsibilities add up and they add up fast.

My husband and I are what I like to call, chaotically clean people. What I mean by that is, you could eat off of almost any surface in our home, but it will for sure take me seven to ten business days to fold my laundry after it has been washed.

Now I have come to the conclusion that having a little bit of chaos in your life is a must and anyone who claims that their life is chaos-free is most definitely lying.

Life deserves to be lived and those who choose to try and exterminate the chaos from their life, must not have much time to do the actual living.

I, like a dummy, have been doing this for a couple of years and didn’t even realize it until this past weekend.

I have been spending so much of my time and energy on trying to play catch-up with the house work, or with work, or with social interactions, that I haven’t just… stopped.

But I took my lawn chair outside this weekend. I sat outside for absolutely no reason other than to sit. I sat there for over an hour.

During that hour I smelled my roses that I have worked so hard on. I smelled my mint and my sage and my rosemary and basil.

I watched the sunrise. I could hear the OSU marching band practicing.

I watched my “pet” orb weaver spider (her name is Gertrude) spin a new web to hold her eggs.

I got to see my elderly neighbor come outside and pick fresh flowers for his wife.

All of these things I have been missing for years. Because I wanted clean baseboards. Or clean light switches. Or an organized pantry.

Well guess what?

I did all three of those things too.

After I sat outside and just enjoyed everything, I went back in and I completed everything on my to-do list, and then some. I purged my closet and donated thirteen bags of clothes, shoes, and other things that either I won’t wear anymore or are no longer of any use to me.

I was able to even spend time with my husband and watch movies with him that night.

Life is meant to be lived.

Life is too short for you to worry about the baseboards. They will get done when the time is right.

If I, Allie Prater, the worlds biggest worry-wart, can put life on pause to enjoy the sunrise, then so can you.

So go outside.

What do you see?