This Glorious Adventure

The weather has been perfect this weekend (love how I’m starting this post talking about the weather haha!). Clear blue sunny skies, the temperature has been in the mid 20’s (high 70’s for those of you reading from the states!), it’s just been really beautiful out.

Saturday we spent cruising around in our truck doing various errands, windows rolled down, music turned up!  We bought a huge Majesty Palm for our big empty fireplace in the living room, then went and dropped it off at home, and went back to town to get some groceries. We walked around the local outdoor store, popped into the antique store, and just had a really relaxing morning/afternoon. Oh. Except for one thing. Little bear. She cried pretty much the entire day. About anything and everything. And it wasn’t sad crying, it was mad crying. We didn’t do what she wanted to do, we didn’t buy popsicles, we went places she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to walk, she wanted to be carried, and on and on and on.  And this perfect beautiful day I was telling you about? Well, I couldn’t enjoy it. I spent most of the day feeling so frustrated with my little girl, and I was just in a really bad mood. But y’all, it got me thinking.

There’s almost always two sides to life, two ways of looking at everything, two different points of view you can take.  I could have ended with how lovely of a day it was, and it would have been true, because overall, it was a gorgeous, fun, happy day, but it was also stressful, frustrating, and I wasn’t perfectly happy all day. See, people now-a-days seem to be crying out for others to “be real” (whatever that even means). We all look at all the perfect posts that are accompanied by the perfect captions talking about their perfect lives, and we say, but that’s fake, no one’s life is that perfect. It’s posed. It’s filtered, it’s just not real!  But is it? Is posting a gorgeous photo and talking about the bright side of your day really fake? Or is it just showing the beauty that was already there? Now, don’t get me wrong, I get it.  I really do, it’s nice to know that others have crappy days as well, and it is over the top sometimes, people can take it way too far and pretend like their life actually is perfect. But I also don’t want to scroll past picture after picture of dirty homes, ugly weeds, garbage cans overflowing (oh, that only happens at my house? Haha oops), etc.  I want to see beauty. We are surrounded by beauty in nature, we strive to make our homes beautiful places, we brush our hair, put on makeup (most of the time!), buy clothes that flatter our bodies, and keep our homes tidy, why not make our social media posts just as beautiful? We don’t walk around shouting to the world about how bad our day was, about what awful people we are, and what crappy lives we have, and we don’t want that to be all we hear from others either. There’s a reason these accounts with all the gorgeous photos have so many followers. We love beautiful things, and we love hearing beautiful stories. I think the key here is balance. Post the beautiful photos, but balance them with a touch of the other side of life, the “behind the scenes” things, write the inspiring lovely captions, but also write about what you maybe struggled with that day despite how  otherwise lovely your day was, and remind people that you’re still human. Let them know they’re not alone in their struggles, but at the same time, let’s not abandon Beauty in our search for reality

(also, as a side note, I know when I choose to focus on the good and not the bad, I am a much happier, way more pleasant person to be around !!  Just some food for thought J )

Hope the rest of your weekend is everything you want it to be!

Thanks for reading y’all!

~L.