What If? And What Is.

I made my way to work, same as always. (Okay, it's not actually always the same, as I throw in errands and detours and parent responsibilities almost every day. But I digress). So--as I made my way to work, not quite the same as ever (ahh, that's better), I found myself noticing new buildings, and wondering what it would be like to work in those buildings (the work perhaps being totally different than what I do now) and signs for new stores, and wondering how my path might change with the opening of those new stores (in some glorious expanse of free time that wasn't accompanied by a depressing expanse of no income). Suddenly, a trip to work became a trip into my imagination, an exercise in "what would happen if..." Why, I wonder, when we work so hard to achieve normalcy--an almost unattainable goal, as a parent or as a working person--do we find ourselves so curious about change?
 
I continued heading to work, where much was normal. I faced the normal challenges, inserted my own creative voice when necessary (sometimes) and my own efficient pace when appropriate (pretty much always). And in the midst of the "normalcy," I fielded calls and emails to handle the breaks in normalcy from the other parts of my life. And I realized how "okay" my normalcy was. While the imagination journey, my walk of "what if?" on my way to work, had been freeing, my day of relative normalcy was actually freeing as well. We can't help wondering "what if." Wondering keeps our eyes and ears and mind open, and that is rarely a bad thing. But in the midst of all that imagination, the normalcy of where we are now can be freeing too--freeing us to manage what is never a normal life, freeing us to enjoy seeing that we can do what is needed, freeing us by letting us work with people who have come to understand and appreciate us.
 
There's nothing wrong with imagining--it keeps us one step closer to whatever may come our way, and that much more alert in what we're dealing with now. But while we go freeing our minds to imagine "what if," it's not a bad idea once in a while to enjoy--and appreciate--a little bit of "what is."