Life Doesn't Have to be Perfect to be Wonderful
In a perfect world, I would have an inspiring blog that
appeared regularly on my well-designed March Forth website. In that same perfect
world, I would have a line of both paper and electronic greeting cards, so
people could send hope-filled messages to one another to celebrate this day. And, in my
perfect little world, March 4th would be a national holiday.
But we don’t live in a perfect world, and I don’t have a
perfect life, so you won’t be seeing any of those things any time soon. That doesn’t matter because I live in a wonderfully imperfect world. I live in
a world that is sometimes bumpy, sometimes boring, and sometimes breath-taking.
And that makes it simply fabulous.
I was reminded of this recently when a friend asked me to locate some photos of a rock-climbing retreat that we had attended together. This would
have been a fairly normal request, except for the fact that the event was 19
years ago, and took place before we had digital cameras. To make matters worse,
I had dumped all of my photos into boxes and squirreled them away in a remote corner of a closet (to be later organized in that perfect world.)
To help out my friend, I dutifully dragged out all the boxes
of my photos, and dug through them, one handful at a time. It felt like
the last 40 years of my life flashed before me in slow motion. Several years of
memories came flooding back. None of it looked perfect, but all of it looked
wonderful.
And so now we celebrate another March Forth. How ever we
choose to commemorate the day, I hope we all pause to reflect on how wonderful
our lives truly are—even with the ups and downs. I hope we all go fearlessly
forward and remember that “life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful.”
As a case in point, the picture of the rock-climbing trip (above) shows me as a triumphant participant. But if you look closely you may notice that
I have many scraped and bruised. Mine was a clumsy and terrifying ascent. It
was far from perfect, but certainly was wonderful.
Happy March Forth!
