Transformation Tuesday

Lisa Modur
Communities for Recovery
www.cforr.org

Recovery opened my eyes to life.
Not to the rush and the hustle and bustle and trying to be somebody but just regular, ordinary life.

Butterflies on the breeze.
My friends laughter when we recall memories of our youth.
The feel of my children’s hands in mine.
The smell of dirt in the spring.
The pounding sound of my hiking boots on the trail. Yes, I hike now.

A simple, regular, ordinary life.
Sometimes we can strive and strive to live extraordinary. I did for far too long.
In that process we can lose touch with what truly matters…..we can lose touch with our soul. We can be so super focused on finding and becoming extraordinary that we don’t notice the life that we are living right at this moment. Sometimes we have to slow down and quit reaching for the stars, put our feet to the earth, and notice the warmth in our friends smile.

To me ordinary does not mean boring or regular or mundane. It means noticing the way birds make a nest in the same tree every year. It means feeling gratitude for a day out in nature hiking with my kids at Pedernales Falls. It means finding joy in washing dishes, spending the day in our jammies and planting a summer patio garden even though I have a failed green thumb.

I learned what a life is truly built out of. It’s built out of ordinary days filled with life. 

Life is not built out of awards, how many likes we get on a social media post, or how high we climb up our career ladder. Life is built out of love and love comes from our family, our friends, and those birds that build nests in our tree year after year after year.

It doesn’t matter how many followers you have on social media, how fancy of a car you drive, or how hard you think you can party on a Saturday night.  I don’t have to be some big, hugely popular writer to make me happy. I am already happy right now inside of my regular down-to-earth life. I am happy with my daily work and being of service to others.

I desire a slow, simple, and ordinary life. I want to feel love in my heart on each and every ordinary day. I want to plant a garden. I want to find new hiking trails. I want to lay in the grass. I want to sit in the sun.

Let me grow old in a small house filled with big love.
Let me watch my children learn and grow and give me the hope and strength to watch them leave the nest one day and spread their wings.
Give me a good man who I can trust and is true to his word. When he says he loves me? Let me believe him. I don’t need fancy dinner dates and out-of-this world love letters. Give me someone who says they will never leave. Give me a man who stays beside me until we have grey hair sitting in our chairs on the front porch. And if God doesn’t have this in the plan for me……Give me strength and grace to sit on that porch alone with a content heart. 

Recovery made me fall in love with honesty, stability, and truth. There are things in my life that only being in Recovery taught me. There are things in life that I only could have learned about myself and about life through becoming a Mother. 

Recovery whispered in my ear and said, “Be grateful that you are alive. Notice the small things. Find the extraordinary inside of the ordinary and if you can do this? You have found the secret to true joy.”

When death comes to take us? All we can take with us is the love we felt.

When I’m an old woman with long grey fabulous hair and death comes to take me from this earth; I hope that I am grateful that even through everything…..I hung onto the beauty and the astounding feelings of an ordinary life.