Love When You Can, Cry When You Have To

It's not that there's been any crying. I just kind of got this Dan Fogelberg song stuck in my head, and it occurred to me that it actually applies to a lot of things. You see, aside from loving and crying, many, many things happen in a day, in a week, in a month. Work and home situations, both expected and not, both desirable and not, seem to surround us, forcing us to process more than it sometimes seems is possible. How, then, do we do justice to everything? How do we survive the ups and downs of work? How do we manage the tasks, both significant and mundane, of parenthood? How do we keep a household running, despite things that break and schedules that change and challenges that, well, challenge us?

It seems to me that the most efficient (and successful) method must have a little of this lyric to it. In a freelance life, sometimes there is no work, other times, too much. So you work when you can. In a family life, there are schedules and emotions to be managed. So you stress when you have to. And, of course, in either life, you're best off when you let yourself do the things you can while you can and allow yourself to cry over the things you need to when you need to.

I find myself writing quite often about control and about the things we can do to feel just a little more in control of our out of control lives. Maybe Dan Fogelberg had it right--to gain some feeling of control, perhaps we simply start with "love when you can, cry when you have to."