Structure in the Chaos

Recently I heard an amazing woman named Nancy Messege-Downing speak at our church women's conference. She had this poem handwritten in sweeping strokes on a giant paper at the front. After talking about how tangible blessings we enjoy sporadically (car, job, education, money, etc.) pale in comparison to eternal blessings which anyone can enjoy anywhere, anytime (ordinances, covenants, prayer, etc.), she turned to the poem. She analyzed its meter, diction and understatement to show how finding or creating a mathematical structure to the ups and downs in our lives can bring peace:

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Let me give Nancy's theory a try. The mathematical structure of my day today:

1 Conference talk

2 prayers

1 breakfast served

2 lunches made

1 load of laundry put away

3 potty accidents on the carpet cleaned up

3 books read aloud

4 phone calls

1 conversation with a favorite friend

1 mopped floor

1 room dusted

1 bed made

2 music classes taught

3 conversations with music moms

27 composer bucks paid out

1 canner transferred to another ward

1 pot of daal cooked

1 mile biked

1 flat tire

1 mile walked

1 PTA meeting

1 inherited fat folder: "PTA Newletter Editor"

3 conversations with new friends

17 frozen blueberries

1 conversation with Rich

3 snuggle-cuddles with 3 boys in bed

3 prayers

 

"Focus on the moment. And most moments are delightful, aren't they?"
Nancy Messege-Downing