Friday afternoon

So apparently I've had a bit of blogger's block. And I'm a perfectionist. So I have thought of a million funny, philosophical, personal, random, insightful, or otherwise, ya know, significant things to write about, but have not been willing to take the time to write out "The Perfect Post" on any of them, and so have written nothing at all. And I'm bored of that. This blog is about me, and I am not perfect, so everything I write doesn't have to be the exactly perfect. And I am realizing that a desire to do something "exactly right" and "without any mistakes in it" sometimes keeps me from doing anything at all.

Cases in point:

1. Thesis writing
2. Dating
3. Budgeting
4. Doing family history research
5. Cutting my hair
6. Scheduling maintenance for my car
7. Scrapbooking
8. Cooking

OK, I think I'm a little frightened of how long that list got in about 5 seconds. I really was just going to put the top two. Moving on...

Last Sunday I had dinner with a missionary friend whom I have not seen in probably six years. We were serving in the same region at the end of my mission, and after I went home she wrote me a letter that I have reflected on again and again. I must have written to her about how hard it is to return home after missionary service and try to balance who you were before the mission to who you are now, returning to "normal" life but not regressing spiritually. She was serving at the time right near the Grand Canyon, and wrote a beautiful analogy about how the things that we do and become in our lives are different layers of who we are, like the layers in the Grand Canyon. Adding a new layer does not destroy what was there before, and does not make that now maybe partially hidden layer any less a part of us. That concept has been a comfort to me I don't know how many times. We are in the process of becoming something magnificent, but we should not ignore the "magnificent" that we are right now.

And there I go again, deleting several attempts to develop that idea further.

It's just that if I wait to live life, to be me, to do great things, to do ANYTHING!, until I have figured out exactly how to do it, then I won't ever do anything. A letter I got from another dear friend at the beginning of my mission said, in response to me saying that I didn't know how to be a missionary, "I've got news for you - you ARE a missionary. So however you do things, THAT'S how a missionary does it!" So every once in a while I take a deep breath and get ready to... and then remind myself that I am not preparing to jump into life, I am in it. ("I am the Brute Squad.")

Weird.