Showing Up

The other day a friend of mine linked to an article entitled "Showing Up". It was much-needed encouragement for me. I work on writing novels -- I have several works in progress, and hopefully someday soon I'll finish one of them. I've always known that as great as it is to write when I feel inspired to (and that's when some of my best writing comes), I never really make progress unless I make myself sit down and write a certain amount every single day. So much of our work, whatever our work is, is simply showing up and doing it.

So, since I haven't been very good about writing lately (it's something I love, but it's also one of the first things that gets pushed to the back burner when life gets out of control), I decided I needed to renew my goal to "show up", and write a certain amount every day.

While I'm at it, I decided I needed to do the same thing for this adoption process. I've been frustrated with the lack of news from our daughter's country, and our resulting inability to move forward with many things. I realized, however, that there's still a lot to do, and rather than spend my time being frustrated, I just needed to do my part. So every day I'm going to "show up", and do something to work on making this adoption happen. Some days it'll mean paperwork (there's lots of that). But even when I don't have paperwork, and am waiting on others in that regard, I can always do something -- cook freezer meals for whoever's going to watch my boys while I'm gone, make cards to sell to raise money for the adoption, or work on learning a little more of my daughter's language. So far it's going well, and it's giving me some satisfaction and direction in this whole process, even though we're still in limbo.