It Doesn’t Look that Bad To Me

I’m not exactly sure how the thread got started. I think it was my friend Maureen who first posted a picture, vulnerably revealing the damage of one of the rooms in her house after a day of momma taking a break and four kids having their way with their energy. The thread was in a private Facebook group with the mom’s in our homeschool co-op, and Maureen’s picture was followed by several others. Dirty kitchens, dirty living rooms, bags of groceries, scattered laundry, some clean and some not, a hodge podge of messes, deposits of living an active life.

It was about a week after the posts, when I was feeling a bit overwhelmed in my own kitchen, that I remembered Maureen and I decided to take my own picture. No lie I took about 10 – 15 pictures. Each time I would capture the disorder in the little rectangle screen on my iPhone and then I would stare at it, blinking hard and then looking up to see the disorder in real life. Something wasn’t working. My iPhone camera just wasn’t grasping the chaos.

I tried backing up. I tried zooming in close. I tried flipping my screen to landscape because portrait wasn’t portraying it correctly. But landscape didn’t help. My camera was failing my eyes. It was as if in the snapping of a photo the mess cleaned itself up. The click of the camera was anti-climactic. I was getting frustrated that my mess didn’t look messy enough.

The external tool just wasn’t capturing the internal waves of overwhelm.

The next time I saw Maureen I thanked her for her confidence to start a vulnerable, “Hey! Look at me! I’m messy sometimes” thread. I showed her my picture. She laughed. “That doesn’t look that bad to me.”

“Ugh! I know,” I groaned, exasperated.

“The same thing happened to me when I was taking pictures too. Why doesn’t it ever look nearly as bad as it feels?”

“Oh, so you noticed that too,” I was relieved. What’s that about?! There’s a lesson in there somewhere.”

Maybe the lesson is that our messes aren’t nearly as big and embarrassing and harassing as they seem. (My friend Teresa would say, “Everything does not have to be a crisis” OR “I will not whine.”)

Maybe the lesson is that our eyes sometimes miss what our souls perceive. And we need to pay attention to the condition of our soul.

Maybe the lesson is that everyone has messes.

Maybe the lesson is wabi-sabi from the forgotten trenches of the Messy Canvas archives.

Maybe the lesson is that when we frame our chaos in that rectangular perimeter, we are erasing all the excess, leaving us to focus on solely one pixel of our life’s display. And one pixel is hardly overwhelming.

And now, with some distance from the moment, I can laugh with Maureen at my zooming and my panning and my flipping of my camera. I can laugh at my anxious activity to prove, “Hey, it’s messy over here, and I’m drowning in it!” I can laugh and shake my head and say, “Really? Is this all? It doesn’t look that bad to me.”