31 Days of Small: Introduction

My life is noisy.  

I'm a music teacher by trade and a mom of girls who inherited my (and my husband's) love of song.  Some evenings we'll turn music on to sing and dance before bed.  We will pause to listen to a great chord progression or sing poignant lyrics with the most dramatic faces.  Our eldest will sometimes cringe at our song choices, but I usually catch her head keeping time with the songs from my teenage and college years.  She can't help it--a good song is a good song.  I play my favorite Christmas songs all year long while cooking and swaying in the kitchen because there's something ethereal about it all.  I hold my youngest and we twirl around in the living room like we're at the ball because we believe in the magic of the moment.

And sometimes the noise in my life comes from things that aren't noisy at all.

An overwhelmed personal planner of things to do.

Work and church and extracurricular activities and cooking and cleaning and laundry and meetings and stuff.

Family and friends and coworkers and parents and children.

Social media and inboxes and news and more information than I can sort through most days.

Visual clutter and stimulus and maintenance.

It builds and builds until I start to physically hear it as well.  The constant white noise of a busy life.  The voices that remind me of everything I still need to do and all the things I've never done well and a long list of my failures.

I shut the music off in the car on the way home from school because I can't stand to listen to one more thing while my girls chatter on about their days.  I sometimes find myself feeling like I can't breathe because I don't have the mental capacity to handle it in addition to everything else.  

It's as if the world has suddenly become too loud and I'm not enough to be heard.

I feel tired.  

I feel less than.  

I feel small. 

to be continued (on October 1st) . . .