From the Inspiration of Babes

At what point in our lives do we evaluate everything we have accomplished so far in comparison to what we thought we would have accomplished?  Is there a point where we stop and say, 'hey, I really don't dig what I'm doing with my life,' and 'how the hell did THIS happen?' and 'What IS that on the bottom of my shoe?'  Apparently, at least in my pinhole of the Universe, there aren't too many people who are actually DOING what they thought they would be doing when they were 12.  If I could find all of those essays we had to write in grammar school about what we did over the summer, I would be a successful Dolphin Behaviorist living on a 10 acre winery in Napa with my amazingly perfect husband and 5 children, running our non-profit B & B and dog rescue facility.  So I suppose there really is no perfect time to evaluate our lives.  Only a time that we reach where was sit up suddenly from the couch, look around, and realize those aren't awards of me on the wall with my prized poetry-reading cetacean, but cracks in the paint looking more like a crinkled up road map of friendships and relationships branching off into nowhere...some reconnecting over the door frame, others disappearing into the windowsill.  Lucky for me, the cracks are only in the paint and not the wall, which means I can make as many trips to Sherwin-Williams as I want to change the color. And on one of those trips, I'm always hoping to find that one paint color that makes me stop and think.  Not just hold it next to the carpet to see if it matches, but to hold it up next to ME and see if it matches me...and if it Inspires me.