Finding beauty in the messiness

Are you like me? Do you get sucked in to the latest strategy in social media articles?

3 Steps to Letting Go
10 Steps to Finding the Man of your Dreams
5 Steps to Happiness

It seems that everyone has all the answers and if we follow their magical steps we too can be happy or successful or whatever we happen to want.

Why the heck am I so drawn to these articles? I mean seriously? I get sucked in.....Every. Single. Time.

I've thought a lot about why that is. We all want simple and clear answers. We want to be successful and we want it yesterday. And we want to know exactly how to do it. Articles that profess to have all the answers organized in clearly defined steps are so tempting. If we follow the steps maybe we can have the happy life or the hot guy.

But the truth is, few things in life can be captured in clearly defined steps.

Life is messy. Very messy.

And it's in our own messiness that we have to find our own clarity. Wisdom often comes only when we make our own way through the messiness.

A lot of times we feel like we are just bumbling along. We try different things. We make mistakes. We make them again. And maybe again.

What works for me may or may not work for you. I think the better way to meet our dreams or goals is to embrace the messiness. Connect with other people's experiences rather than following their self prescribed steps. Sometimes we can work really hard and we can follow all the steps and still fail. Sometimes we can spend 20 years following what we think are all the right steps and doing all the right things for everyone else only to realize we've neglected our own self and we haven't grown. We can put all our energy or our love into repairing a broken relationship and still end up getting cut by the pieces when all is said and done.

I decided on my run today that life is really just like this beautiful blanket of leaves. I was so drawn to it today. I somehow resisted the urge to stop and lay down in them! Yes, I really considered that had I not been on Main St :)

They were colorful and scattered and I wanted to be like a kid and bury myself in them. On the way home I decided I'm going to try harder to embrace my own messy life. Like the blanket of leaves, there's beauty in the messiness. There's also beauty in bravely letting go of the branch and falling to a new place. And sometimes, like the leaves, it's only in the letting go of the branch that we can realize our own bright colors.