Wildflower Writes

Photo by  Lesly Juarez  on  Unsplash I love working with ideas. I enjoy working with people. Words are my favorite tools. I don’t enjoy working with my hands much. As I tried to create something for a Christmas ornament exchange last month, I kept muttering, “I hate crafts.” So it is something of an accomplishment this afternoon when I put together a bookshelf all by myself. I followed all the directions, used real tools, and it looked like the picture when I was finished. Jay Shetty suggests trying one new project or hobby a month to discover one’s purpose. He calls it sampling. It’s similar to the way your mother may have insisted you try new foods. You don’t know what you might like unless you explore something new. Very few of us can say we took on the career we wished for as a child. We grow and change. We can’t know what it is we enjoy doing, what brings meaning and fulfillment unless we try out different things. Many of us still don’t know what we want to be ...

I enjoy festivals . It’s not the crowds, because I could do without that. It’s the celebratory atmosphere, the neighborly chats, and the break in the everyday humdrum. I just came back from the Wakarusa Maple Syrup Festival. Even though it was cold and wet, my children and I had a really nice time. After several years of festivalling with my children, I’ve learned a few things. 1. Know where you’re going. I spent a half hour traipsing all over a small town with young children because I was too proud to get a map and too cheap to pay for a shuttle. These days almost everything is online. You can look up schedules, directions, everything. You just have to plan ahead. 2. Dress for the weather. And walking. I always make my kids where tennis shoes and socks, even if it’s scalding hot. Hot is better than blisters. I also try to prepare for the worst. It was fifty degrees outside today, but if we hadn’t all had long sleeves and winter coats, we would have frozen. Ponchos would have ...

Pre-Mapquest, for those of you who don’t remember, finding an unknown address relied on memory, hastily written notes on a napkin or scrap of paper, or a hand-drawn map never made to scale. With Mapquest, or Google for you non-traditionalists, you could get step by step directions, and an accurate point by point map. With recent upgrades, you can map out up to 10 locations on one trip. You can avoid certain roads if you know they are under construction, or if you don’t like toll roads. Even with such fantastic technology, it’s still fallible. Mapquest relies on the information that it receives. It doesn’t always know about new roads or closed roads or flooding or changed street names. Sometimes, for one reason or another, it’s just plain wrong. I think the success people experience in life is decided largely by the set of directions they go by. Some people don’t have any direction. They just wander through life, letting detours and the influence of others determine whe...