Around her plate, she painted the phrase 'Practically Perfect in Every Way,' a phrase Mary Poppins coined herself. We didn't realize it at the time, but that phrase became the theme of the weekend.
We finished off our weekend visiting a spot we hadn't been to since childhood, the Bush Intercontinental Airport Observation Lot. It's simply a parking lot located on Old Lee Road (appropriately named after our family) where families can go and watch the airplanes land. For the most part, it's a place to take young children, but my sister and I loved it. Sitting in that parking lot, I was five years old again, and I loved watching those giant birds come in.
As great as this weekend was, it also raised two important questions:
When was the last time you did something for the first time? When was the last time you really marveled at the world around you?
It sounds cliche, right? Like all I'm saying is stop and smell the roses. It's a phrase we've all heard a thousand times, but do we actually ever listen to it? I can honestly say that it's rare for me to ever do anything outside of my comfort zone. I am all schedule and responsibilities, and, in my constant quest for success, I am never about slowing down to appreciate anything. But this weekend was different.
As we watched those airplanes and drove through the skyscrapers of downtown, I couldn't help but think that those monuments were once just a figment of someone's imagination? At one point, it was simply a dream to even travel through the air, and now trans-atlantic flights happen daily. At one point, they were truly a monument of modernization; now, they're simply a convenience. With that kind of progress, it's easy to forget how special things like that are.
After pondering those planes for a while, I realized I've been forgetting much more than that. There are so many beautiful things in our every day lives that are so easy to miss if you aren't paying attention: the smile of a new friend, the laugh of a child, or the feeling of sunshine on your face. If we don't slow down and really look around, if we don't take a chance and try something new once in a while, we are bound to miss more than we ever imagined.
I'm not, by any means, saying that life will be perfect, because our weekend was anything but. You see, it turns out that the macaroni was terrible, the macarons were chewy, you get weird looks for singing Christmas carols in February, and we drug our arms through our paint more times than we cared to count. Life will be exactly the same way. Whether you're doing something for the first time or the fifteenth time, there's a chance you could screw it up. Things will get messy, but there is beauty in the mess. The imperfection is perfect. Because when we try something new or when we just slow down long enough to see the beauty that's already in our lives, we realize that Mary Poppins was right all along. Life is "practically perfect in every way."
Stay happy, my friends.
