Do your best; rinse, repeat

After I unpacked the groceries, started tonight's dinner, and said aloud what I was planning for dinner tomorrow, I realized I had forgotten to buy fresh parsley for the next night's meal. So, I went to my packet of scrap paper, pulled out a pencil and started another list.

I write lists all the time, and that's how they usually start--with one thing I'm out of or have forgotten, and then I add in all the usual other stuff. I can put my hand in the pocket of a winter coat six months from now and pull out a list and will need most of the stuff on it. But I'll notice the one thing, usually the first thing, that was not "normal," the thing I needed for one recipe or a meal. In fact, I often will remember the whole scenario around starting that list.

And when that happens, I have asked myself why I even bother writing lists. If they're always the same except for one or two I-need-this-now items, why even bother? And that could lead to discouragement that my life is pretty boring. The same list from six months ago works today. Not a whole lot going on there.

But there's another way to look at it.

Life doesn't change much really from month to month, season to season, year to year. Yet, of course it does. Yet, of course it doesn't. You know what I mean. Sometimes a huge change happens -- a new life, a death, a job, a marriage, a breakup, a move, a retirement...a change of some major kind. But in between, it's day-in-day-out, same-old-same-old, comme ci comme ça, rinse and repeat. In other words, life does not always have big moments. In fact, it mostly does NOT. But that does not mean it isn't meaningful, or important or worth your attention.

Life is always worth your attention. It's worth your attention when it's exciting or infuriating or boring or routine. Life is always worth it. So, always do your best. Again. And again.