I used to be such a pen connoisseur. Pencils, too. I was super picky about the feel, the look, the material, and of course, the way they flowed across the page. Ticonderoga, being the gold standard in graphite writing utensil, just holding one in my hand, as yet unsharpened, was enough to give a tiny thrill to my young soul. The eager flow of ink, black and lustrous across a starched blank spiral bound canvas was a tiny phenomenon, repeated often, that gave a quiet fulfillment to a craving inside me. Not that plain ballpoint was such a disappointment, it just always seemed such a luxurious accommodation in the mundane litany of writing required of me, to have a pen in my hand that seemed to snuggle in comfortably, then in an attitude of noble servility bow to the page and turn my history of civ. notes into a transcendantly superfluous calligraphic endeavor. Bliss.
Finding joy, finding something that does indeed "thrill my soul" in the tiny little, most would say inconsequential, accoutrements of the thrifty life, has always been an unspoken goal of mine. I don't know if it is my humble upbringing or just a quirk of personality, but I have always been just a little uncomfortable surrounded by "extravagance", especially if it was for me. And all of my quilly expounding being in the past tense tells you that my life has passed on from finding little pockets of hidden fulfillment in the exceedingly simple, to now feeling as if my extravagances are crowding in on every side. It seems rather a betrayal the mindset of the hidden blessing to have so many blessings so flagrantly surrounding me.
For example, I am sitting in a room filled with books; children's books, board books, coloring books, school books, theology books, phone books, history books, dictionaries, science texts, atlases and novels. As I said- flagrantly surrounded. And on the subject on writing utensils, with a flick of my baby blues, I can see scads, myriads of colored pencils, crayons, markers, pens of every kind (mostly bearing the Brown's Pools logo), and also- the crowning achievement of my productivity today ~ a blue pencil case of freshly sharpened pencils. Which reminds me of another thing that used to make me smile irrationally. Pencil Shavings (see above). I have always loved the delicate, swirling tracery of wood and paint, curling down and around, uncovering the beautiful potential in a pencil. It seems such a shame to just throw away something so symmetrically formed.
Now "What...", I know you're thinking, "...do pens and pencils and books have to do with being flagrantly surrounded by blessings???" Well, it's what all of those things represent that overwhelm me with the truth of my cup being filled to overflowing. Being surrounded by books and markers and such means I am in a room, in a safe, spacious house, filled with happy, healthy, inquisitive children, and a husband whom God has provided with a job that pays for all the books and house and food to feed the children. Beside the room, attached to the house, is a garage in which sits a van with gas in the tank, and if you stand by the garage and look a little farther away you can see the house of family, which means my happy, inquisitive children can get out now and then, and they are growing up with their grandparents next door. All around me are the clear evidences of the abundance in my life.
So, I think sometimes I forget to look at the little things that use to give me joy because I have so many big things. Am I becoming inured to the little blessings? Am I becoming ungrateful? There are times when I am reminded of the little things that used to give me as much joy as the big things I have now- like looking at the pencil shavings, and I realize that most of the time I am no longer a person who even notices the little things. Is it growth, or degradation? I am inclined to think the later and this makes me wonder what I need to do to get back to an awareness of ALL the blessings in my life, big and small.
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