Balancing priorities

A bad habit that I've gotten into lately is mooning over the past, as though hankering after something could make it manifest. Particularly as I work my allotments and enjoy being outdoors again, the past that I miss the most is the precious few years we spent living in the countryside while the girls were young. I can still, very easily, think of half a dozen sensible reasons why we left, and why it was the best thing for our family, but still in my heart I miss it so much and feel that given the choice to leave again, I might not. I remember when we eventually did move back into town, trying to reconcile the loss by imagining it as an opportunity to adopt different priorities. We bought the boat, we bought nice stuff for the house, we filled our lives up with all of the things that were out of reach before. I think now, five years on, all of those things have run their course, and all that I'm left with is my craving for the the only 'thing' I have ever really wanted - a garden.

This is about the point in the conversation where I will invariably take a deep breath and straighten myself up and say 'well, mustn't grumble'. And I mustn't - there is no changing the past. Right now there is really very little we can do to even change the present or future. The only thing I really have any control over is my approach to the situation at hand. You can talk about grattitude and mindfulness, but practically, if you have a fixed idea of what a beautiful life looks like, and if you have lived it, how do you then bring the flavour of that into your life today? This isn't a rhetorical question, it is one I am working on answering, certain that there must be an answer.

I am more sure than ever that 'stuff' is not the thing, I think I've said that enough times by now, so having the cute little house or the perfect potager garden should be irrelevant.

I don't know if I'm just falling victim to the times, now that being a stay at home wife and parent is becoming less sustainable. It's hard to stand on my soapboax about this anymore since it seems to just no longer be an option for basically everyone. No longer a matter of just making a few cut backs but remembering you're still rich in soul - people need to eat. Perhaps the lost times that I think wistfully of is that recent past where we were still poor but happy, and not yet poor and worried.

Whatever it is that I'm trying to get at here, I think will just need time to unfold. This summer is likely to be one of change - either something changes in our circumstances that allows us to continue on in our usual way, poor but happy, or I have to find work and assess then what is so important to us that it shall earn a portion of my scant spare time. All of the things that I do - the allotment, the meal planning, the sourdough, the mending, it all seems to fit into a previous life where those actions built something and became greater than the sum of their parts. Living in the city, it's very easy to see how one can slip into having shopping delivered, getting a dishwasher and a childminder, and doing very little for yourself at all, since that seems to be the overwhelming norm. How bizarre to think that one of our greatest gripes of living in the country was that our immediate community didn't share our values, and that we expected that to be different anywhere else.