It’s been a weird week. First there was the Sunday night return from the big city. It’s always disorienting to flip cultures so quickly. Plus, I was exhausted from all the gallivanting and missed sleep. I started the week playing catch up.

(While I was gone, my husband knocked a big hole in my son’s bedroom ceiling and installed pull-down stairs so now, after eight years, we can finally access the attic without shimmying up door and wall and through a little hole in the ceiling á la Spiderman. Then he added a bunch of insulation and put flooring down in the unfinished half. His productivity—with four children under foot, no less—made me proud. It also made me exceedingly grateful that I had been in NYC for the duration of the renovation. I hate renovations more than I do traveling.)

Monday was slow. We skipped the studies in favor of bunches of reading and catch up cleaning and cooking. That evening my younger daughter took off with her grandmother for the week, my older daughter came down with a nasty cold, and my older son went skiing and busted up his knee.

So. Tuesday found us in search of crutches and with two separate trips to town to chat up the doctors. One, a retired doctor who used to attend our church, invited my son into his home and straight up onto his dining room table for a good thirty minute-long exam and thorough explanation about all things ligament. He even called our GP on our behalf and then lined up an afternoon appointment at his previous place of work. There, my son got a couple x-rays, another exam, crutches that actually fit him, and a fancy knee brace. Tentative diagnosis: a partial ACL tear. Next up, and MRI, and then, if it is indeed a tear, surgery. Yay us. (My gut tells me it’s just a sprain, but I don’t know how to ask intelligent questions or push for the lowest intervention possible while still being safe. So I’m just doing what they say and hope we’re not going overboard.)

In the meantime, my daughter spent the day laying on the sofa, coughing, hacking, honking her nose, and worrying that she was going to throw up. Her younger brother ran wild and never changed out of his pajamas. In between appointments, I made a monster batch of sweet rolls to pay back all the nice people doing nice things for us: the neighbor lady who gives us milk (well, her cow does that, but you know what I mean), the friend who coaches me on knitting, and the unbelievably kind and generous doctor who let us crash his home.

By evening, what with a third trip to town to make deliveries and an older son who was coming down with the same nasty cold and a daughter who was a giant heap of uselessness, I was turning into a spinning top.

It was about then that I realized how much the children actually do around the house. With the two bigs laid up, there was no one to haul over huge wheelbarrow loads of wood, empty the garbages, wash the mountains of dirty dishes, vacuum the floors, carry the pans of sweet rolls out to the car, feed the dogs, etc. Plus, they weren’t just unavailable, they were needy. Juice, tea, cough drops, hankies, and medicine—you name it, they needed it.

How encouraging to realize that all the training, nagging, and enforcing has actually translated into concrete benefits!

How discouraging to realize that my man-sized helper may be out of commission for a number of weeks!

(At least he can read books and play chess with the youngest wild thing. That’s something.)

Yesterday I decided that getting to our studies was simply not going to be a priority this week, and we went to the grocery store and library in preparation for today’s snowstorm. This morning I woke up at five, looked outside and saw that it was crazy windy (the tin roof wasn’t banging all around as is its windy-weather custom thanks to all the snow piled on top), and rushed down stairs in a dread panic that the power would go out before I made my coffee or washed my hair.

So far, so good: it’s snowing and blowing and we still have power. I’ve baked bread and a cake, cooked beans and boiled eggs, made a pot of hot chocolate, and knitted up a little storm of my own. My husband is home from work. He plowed the driveway, but the roads haven’t been plowed yet so Oh darn, guess I’ll have to go take a nap by the fire.

One more thing: there’s been a spate of robberies in our little hamlet and some neighboring towns. The kids are on the sharp lookout for suspicious activity. Any time a car goes by (as of 2 pm, there have been three), they rush to the window to see if it looks robbery-ish. Part of my morning involved talking with the investigator assigned to the case.

It’s been such a weird week.

This past weekend, I attended a Fresh Air Conference in New York City. We stayed at a fancy hotel and ate fancy food and watched the fancy Olympics and went to a fancy nightclub and used fancy little bars of soap and rode in fancy elevators.

It was nice.

But after three days of sitting in conferences, milling around the city, eating, eating, and more eating, and spending hours on plans, trains, and metros, I was done. I missed my ordinary existence. I missed making stuff. After awhile I started to feel numb. I was slowly turning into a blob.

There were only a couple times I felt truly alive.

1. At the nightclub, I pulled out my camera and started fiddling with the settings, trying to figure out how to capture the opulent darkness. For a few minutes I was absorbed in what I was doing. It felt good.

Actually, that’s the only time I can think of. There were many enjoyable moments—listening to stories, good conversations, figuring out the art of train travel (trains are awesome)—but there was only that one time that I got deeply absorbed in doing something.

Is this odd?

I don’t consider myself a busy do-do-do person. I have no trouble putting my feet up and being waited on. I’m quite fond of sitting on my arse.

But I need a creative outlet: writing, cooking, making lists, scheming. My much-loved non-productive times are normally measured in hours, not days. And I like my independence; tourism, public transportation, and conference attending are all about being dependent. Or at least they involve a different sort of independent.

On the train ride home, my friend commented that she doesn’t know anyone else who dreads travel as much as I do. It doesn’t matter where I’m going or how much I want to go, for days in advance, I get depressed and sluggish and cranky. It’s like there’s a dread weight pressing in on me, a dark cloud at the end of the tunnel.

My friend, on the other hand (and everyone else I know), looks forward to trips. She savors the planning and anticipation. I think she’s nuts. She thinks I’m weird.

Do I just not transition well? This could be it, I suppose. Come to think of it, I dread most things. I dread hosting and appointments and busy days. Once I’m out and about (or the guests have arrived and the event has started), I enjoy myself completely. I get a rush from the activity and love the settling-back-into-my-life tired feeling that I get at the end. The accomplishment of Having Done feels good. But I don’t look forward to events. (Unless it’s something really different, like auditioning for a play or teaching a class or going out all by myself for a morning of writing. But then again, those are creative outlets.)

What about you? Do you dread trips and events and anything that requires you to shift gears and go out? To be contented, do you require the constant pressure of creating?

Humans are rather fond of moralizing lifestyle choices. We proclaim we do things because it is The Right Thing To Do. We have one car because we want to minimize our environmental footprint, say. Or we cook from scratch because it is healthier. We volunteer at soup kitchens because Jesus told us to. We save money because it’s smart and responsible. We homeschool our children because learning happens best at home. Or maybe we send our kids to school because it’s our social responsibility to mingle with the masses.

Our reasons for doing what we do are usually pretty good. Sometimes our reasons are even noble. But I don’t think the reasons we give are the primary reason. I think we do what we do because of something much more basic: it’s what we want.

Think about it: there are a plethora of good lifestyle choices out there. It’s impossible to do them all. So we pick and choose how we live our lives based on our interests, gifts, challenges, experiences, and opportunities and then we slap on the moral rationale to make ourselves feel good.

Problem is, our rationales are riddled with inconsistencies. We grow our own food to save on the environment but then invest in jugs of the best oils shipped from the Mediterranean. Or we tithe the requisite ten percent and ladle soup into bowls once a month but then buy a fancy new car for the same amount that it would cost to outfit a mini metropolis with running water. Or we encourage our children to be themselves but then lash judgement on other people when their perspectives don’t match ours.

No matter how much we’d like to think otherwise, not a one of us has the moral high ground.

Last week I had a meeting with the Sunday school committee. We huddled around a table in a chilly room at church, talking about how we might go about wrapping up the last Sunday in our series on education (which isn’t till the end of the month). Should we bring in more speakers? Introduce another perspective?

“What if we’d just have a response time?” I suggested through chattering teeth. “We could give people a chance to share what they’ve heard over the whole series. You know, what’s challenged them, what hasn’t made sense, what they appreciated…”

I trailed off, uncertain. Open-ended sharing wasn’t exactly the style of this particular class.

Personal sharing was a good idea, the group agreed, but, they wondered, what was the point of undergoing the education series? How did the ideas about education that were raised in the Sunday school class “inform our interactions with the world?”

Which left me scratching my head because whatever happened to storytelling for the sake of simply understanding each other? Must all our experiences and ideas be proven and proclaimed? If someone finds something that works for her, does that mean that everybody else’s methods are failing? Can’t there be more than one right way to do education?

Were we trying to build some sort of staircase to the moral high ground through a carefully crafted summary?

“If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a heretic, then you are not growing spiritually,” said Thomas Merton.

The me of five years ago would be surprised by some of the things I think now about education. I’m so glad that my husband and I sent our children to school last year. At the same time, I’m more adamantly pro-homeschooling than ever before.

I have no idea what new experiences and ideas are coming at me down the pike. I may be in for some real yanking around. This is a little scary, for sure, but mostly it’s exciting. I’m more at peace with my ideas now, and this gives me hope. What an adventure!

The other day I read a post about education and immediately wished I hadn’t. Not because it wasn’t good—to the contrary, it was very good—but because I’m mad that I didn’t write it myself. (Guess I wasn’t a worthy portal, grumblegrumble.)

In the post, Heather Sanders writes that Education Is For Everyone. No matter how parents choose to educate their children—public, private, or homeschool—the parent is the one ultimately responsible to see that the learning happens. Every educational method has pitfalls, and every method has potential to yield stunning results. It’s time to stop pointing fingers, she says, and play our part.

After reading her post (and please, I’m imploring you, go read it), I decided there was nothing left to say.

Except this (because I always have something more to say, don’t you know it):  all of life is learning, and everyone learns differently. Let’s not be afraid to:

Claim our choices.
Tell our stories.
Listen deeply.
And whether we believe This, That, or The Other, let’s be gracious.