Loving can be really difficult. I mean, it’s wonderful and so necessary and can light us up, etcetera, etcetera, but sometimes it’s also really tricky.

There’s the balance between loving and being kind, but not being a door mat.

There’s the need to give love and show up for other people, whilst making sure that we put our own gas masks on first.

Loving from the saucer.

And then this morning I washed my car and this thought popped in my head …

You know how sometimes we over-think stuff? Look at love and how we’re showing up from all the different angles? Explore and poke at the possibilities?

What if we didn’t?

My car was absolutely filthy! It’s bright yellow paint could barely be seen through a film of dirt. So as I was driving home from taking the kids to school, I thought about washing it.

Ah, but I need to clean the inside too. Get rid of all the rubbish. Hoover. Dust. Maybe I should do that first and think about washing it after that?

All very dull and boring. The perfect job for a Friday morning – not!

So I grabbed a bucket and sponge, turned the Christmas music on and got to work on the outside.

It was actually quite fun (and didn’t take anything like as long as I feared it might.)

Rinsing it off with a hose was a giggle and then after taking it for a spin to dry it off, I even came back and picked up the rubbish and coats and shoes and random stuff from the back.

And it was about then that I thought about what would have happened if I done the boring cleaning piece first.

I’d have cleaned and hoover the inside, by which time I’d be so bored with it all, I’d have never got to the outside – the one thing that was so dirty it had inspired the whole clean up operation!

What if, instead of picking at and exploring and figuring out all the details, the best way, the most loving way to behave, we just showed up and did the easy stuff first?

Silly stuff so small that it almost feels irrelevant and like it wouldn’t matter.

What if life were actually made up of those silly, small moments?

How much easier might it be to love if we stopped worrying and just did that small stuff first?

Sometimes doing so might inspire even more action (like me picking up the rubbish inside my car after washing the outside) and other times it’ll just make someone else smile and we’ll leave it at that.

But surely showing up and doing the easy stuff has got to be a whole lot better than doing nothing?

And better than that, it might actually add up to make a massive difference. One person at a time.

What do you think? Worth a try eh? 😉