Extreme Makeover...Me Edition

No, I am not planning on shaving my head bald, totally re-doing my wardrobe and moving to Calcutta. (Although a whole new wardrobe would be cool) What I want is to find some peace and quiet.

I'm a mother with four kids. I'm not sure literal peace and quiet are possible, except, of course, for those two mornings a week when all of the kids are at school. And even then, if I have Drakkin that morning, quiet isn't always on the schedule. So, if a literal peace isn't on the menu, what am I going to do?

I can find a figurative peace. I can quiet my mind.

My mind is always going about a million miles an hour. Nothing travels faster than thought, not even light. My thoughts can flit from one end of the universe to the other in time so fast it's unmeasurable. They can amble down the street and hike a mountain before I can blink. And yet, there are times when I can feel them slow down to take in something new, learn, grow, become.

I want to become something more.

I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a friend and a teacher. I am a maid, a chauffer, a cook, an accompanist, a singer, a reader, a homemaker, a seamtress, a knitter, a writer, a composer, a sister, an aunt, a favorite aunt, a niece...when do I get to be just me? If I wait for my world full of people and things to tell me "Now is the time" I don't think it will ever happen. I think I have to take the time. I think I need to forcibly wrest a few minutes out of my schedule and use it to relfect, ponder, meditate even. Maybe then I can find that peace and quiet I so crave.

And maybe, just maybe, if I can do this every day, or nearly every day, I can find the person I'm meant to be somewhere in the tumult. Maybe I'll find that I don't need an extreme hairdo, or a new wardrobe, or to move to Calcutta to be something more. Maybe I'll find I am more, and have just forgotten it. I'll bet that's the secret. We are all more. But for some reason, we don't remember, or we haven't discovered it yet, or life has beaten it out of us. Well, I'm taking it back.

Extreme Me! Real Me! True Me! Don't fret! I'm coming!