By Anna Moseley Gissing | Twitter: @amgissing
Exactly one year ago, I hopped in my Smart car and drove across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, to a basement apartment in Wheaton, Illinois, where I unloaded a few boxes and settled in to a new home. The next day I drove to my new job as an editor for a Christian publisher. I left my husband and two kids in Pennsylvania until our house sold and my husband found work.
A couple of months later, my family joined me in Illinois, and my husband started work the next week. We frantically searched for quality sitters and fun summer camps in a place where we knew no one and nothing.
But finding a permanent home in Illinois wasn’t easy. We moved into another temporary place but left our furniture in storage and lived out of boxes for the rest of the summer.
At last, we found a new home at the beginning of August, and we started the long process of unpacking and settling in. But we were also registering the kids for school and sorting out drivers’ licenses and doctors’ visits, now that we had a permanent address.
When our kids started school just a couple of weeks later, we thought we might make some progress toward feeling “settled.” But then I changed editorial positions within my department. The chaos and complexity of life in transition continued.
I was discouraged when I missed my goal of being unpacked by the time we’d been in our home one hundred days. Based on past experience, I knew that I should keep up the momentum. If I didn’t keep pressing forward, treating my weekend days like unpacking boot camp, I might wake up ten years from now to see those same boxes still stacked in my laundry room.
I needed to be single-minded: Until the one-year anniversary of our move in August, I would focus on working hard at my new job, helping my kids adjust to a new school, and unpacking. We could meet people and explore our new community later.
It felt like simplicity. Instead of spreading myself too thin, committing to new activities and social events, I’d do fewer things and do them well.
And then an Instagram post made me reconsider my simple routine.
Some good friends had reunited for a retreat in North Carolina. Their smiling faces caught me off guard. The retreat happens every year in early February, but I forgot. I had decided that friends were on the back burner until I was fully unpacked and settled at work.
Though there was a simplicity to my plan, it was oversimplified.
I had put off friendship indefinitely. I had isolated myself from friends far away, waiting for more time to invest. I hadn’t met new friends either—I couldn’t find the time.
In my quest for simplicity, I cut out vital parts of life. It was time to reconsider.
During Lent, I committed to connect with a friend once a week. I started with a bang—coffee out with a local friend. The next week I took a long lunch break to get to know a new colleague. Later our family connected with another family to cheer for our favorite sports teams as they battled one another.
But it was going to be tough to do something that intentional each week.
So I started experimenting. Instead of setting up phone dates with my far-away friends (which took weeks to schedule and inevitably fell on days that were super stressful so that by the time the appointment arrived, I wanted to crawl in a hole), I took chances and called when I had only ten minutes to chat. Out of the blue, at odd times.
Sometimes I got voicemail. But sometimes I didn’t. These brief calls warmed my heart and changed my days. I didn’t hear about everything that had happened in the last six months. But it wasn’t necessary. I never realized that ten minutes could change so much.
Those ten-minute calls were ten minutes that I wasn’t working or unpacking. During those calls, I branched out from my simple plan to put off friends until I had finished my other work.
And yet, I discovered a new simplicity. Simple friendship. Simple ten-minute visits.
In your life, you may not be preoccupied with unpacking or editing books. Maybe you have decided that you can’t invest in your friends while you have toddlers at home. Maybe you feel like you have to choose between friends and exercise or friends and sleep.
Perhaps you should give simple friendship a shot. Who can you call today?
About Anna:
Anna Moseley Gissing loves words—reading, writing, speaking, teaching, and editing. When she’s not editing books for IVP Academic, you can often find her unpacking or helping her kids with homework. Connect with her on Twitter or Instagram at @amgissing.
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This concludes our month on the theme “simplify.” Thank you to Anna for guest posting! Our theme for April is “Books and Writing,” and I hope to share my favorite books, podcasts and resources for new writers. I recently signed a book contract, so I am in the thick of it and have many thoughts about the writing process. I’ll also be attending The Festival of Faith and Writing in April, so I want to share some of the content I learn there with my readers. Be sure to follow me on social media and sign up for my newsletter below so you can be alerted of new posts. Please get in touch at scrapingraisins (dot) gmail (dot) com if you are interested in guest posting on this topic!
I’ll be writing a post this month for SheLoves about fasting from my Smartphone and from some social media during Lent, so you can read about how “simplifying” went for me this month.
What about you? How are you continuing to simplify? What is working for you? What isn’t working? I’d love to hear on social media or in the comments here!
Happy Easter!
xo
Leslie
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