In Appreciation of the Mundane
Practicing Gratitude for Our Everyday Life at a Danish Homestead
As the leaves are falling, and the year is wrapping up, I want to practice my gratitude for the everyday life that we have now. It is a mundane, slow and steady life, and probably also a bit too slow, too mundane and too steady for some.
But we have no intentions of going on any vacation to the sunny south, or do anything really out of the ordinary. We intend to stay here, buckled up for winter and the slow and dark days it will inevitably bring.
Truth been told, I myself have been in a bit of a ruffle with this somewhat bleak future of ours and my everyday life. I have been bored, and ungrateful. Mostly I have been unsatisfied.
I’m a full-time stay-at-home-mom, and Herluf is a full-time web-developer in order to economically sustain us. Our lives sometimes seem to hang in a fine balance where I do almost all of the childcare, and Herluf does all of the paid work. Sometimes it seems overwhelming, and I wish we could share our burdens between each-other more equally.
But this is not our reality right now.
The feeling of being unsatisfied is not new to me as I, above anything else, am a dreamer. I will go for days, even weeks and make plans and dream of everything that is to come, only to look up one day, and find that everything is absolutely the same.
I still have to take care of my two year old every day. Brush her teeth, regulate her emotions over getting her teeth brushed, make a breakfast she does not want to eat, and take her out, against her will, to some kind of activity that she will in-evidently not want to go home from.
Despite all of my planning and dreaming, our house will remain almost the same. Right now, we simply cannot afford any drastic and dramatic renovations. With another baby on the way, we don’t have the time.
In reality, we simply do not have time between us to do work on the home as fast as my mind can dream up ideas.
Herluf needs to work full-time in order for us to have money for the rising price of nearly everything from milk to diapers. We have another baby coming in the new year, so I will have to be either a stay-at-home-mother or on maternity leave for at least a couple of years more.
We are working towards good things, and the balance we have right now should not be meddled with. This I know.
That’s why, I want to come up with a new dream. I dream that does not require our money or time, but is rooted in where we are right now. I want to dream of what we have, instead of what we could have.
So, how will I do it?
Well, it is simply really. When I go to bed tonight I will try my best to dream of days with murky rain and the brisky winds finding its way through leaky windows. I will dream of the pancakes, I will be making with my child in the morning from our simple, but functioning kitchen. I will dream of Herluf coming home from work late in the afternoon, making us a warm supper and collecting firewood for a fire in our masonry oven. I will dream of winter, fast approaching, where the dark days will set a tone of passivity.
This is how I will practice my gratitude: By romanticizing our everyday life as it is right now.
Oftentimes I can get so caught up in the future of things, that I completely forget the now, and even the past: Where we came from, and what drove us to the everyday life we have now. An everyday life that was my biggest dream just a couple a years ago, where I wanted nothing but to become a mother and share my days with a little child. Where our homestead was only a figment of my imagination.
If only I pause for a moment and look at where we have come to, and what we have achieved, I see: We are already living in my dream.
A dream from many years ago, of building a family, building a home, building on my creativity and writers dreams. I’m already here, and that is enough.
Autumn has a way of teaching us the hard way: The time for growth is not right now. Instead it is a time to look back and see how far we have come, to be nostalgic, and above all: Grateful.
Read the next chapter of Our Homestead Journey:
Novembers Teachings on Time
The last day of October brought an autumn storm to our little Danish homestead. It took all the beautiful orange, brown and red leaves off the trees, and left us in with the bare and quiet that is the month of November.
It is so easy to forget what we have now in persuit of having more. I am guilty of this as well! Your writing encouraged me to pause, look around, and remember that this, too, was once all a dream. A dream that I still can’t believe actually happened.
Thank you for your inspiration!
"I’m already here, and that is enough." Love this line and snippets of your life calming my soul! What are those knotted buns called?