Shanspirations

I was three years old, a talkative little girl with blond pigtails who was sent to bed at her normal bedtime on a bright summer evening. I couldn’t imagine going to sleep. I climbed to the end of my bed where the window was. Lying on my stomach across the foot of the bed, I sunk my little ellbows into the mattress, propping my chin in my hands. My bed was level with the bottom of the window and there was something so very neat about that to me at the time (and now, remembering) because my bedroom was on the second story and it made me feel like I was looking out a door into the big outside of sky.

That night there was a rich, warm, blazing sunset across the horizen. Up on the second story, I felt as though I were level with it. Only I had never seen it like this before. It was utterly beautiful and I was transfixed, so much so, that a joy welled up in me like nothing I had ever known. Because I was three, I didn’t have words for it, but if I could have put words to what I felt with the understanding I have now, it would have been, “I have all the beauty and adventure of eternity before me and it is so spectacular to be alive!”
The joy was so intense I wanted to laugh or jump, but so deep and rich that I didn’t want to move and have the moment pass. It seemed like the first moment of my childhood that I consciously knew I was alive and that being alive was such an amazing, wondrous thing. Whenever I remember the “first Shanspiration,” it seems as though I knew even then that I would remember it forever, that if would be a defining moment of my life.

Yet I couldn’t have. Three year olds don’t understand much of what life is when they have such limited experience! Maybe it just meant so much that later I built all my best memories upon that first that I remembered.

Throughout my childhood and now young adulthood, there have been countless of these moments when I feel suddenly full of inspiration, insight, and joy. Sometimes weighed more heavily toward insight, other times toward inspiration and other times pure joy,these moments come with dozens of other emotions thrown in besides. They are such a defining part of my personality and life that when I thought on what to call my blog, it was “Shanspirations” that leapt to mind and made me grin, bringing on a further flash of Shanspiration:)

I know that not everyone experiences life in a nearly constant flow of inspirations that propel them; my husband, who is my highschool sweetheart and best friend, and with whom I can talk with on any topic, experiences life in a calm, orderly flow of living that isn’t about moments of inspiration at all and defies my understanding. He even seems to think that most people don’t find such motivation thinking continually in terms of spurts of joy and flashes of excited thoughts (or dramatic woeful ones, for that matter).

Yet for me, “Shanspiration” is part of everything I do, from devising a new recipe to cleaning out a closet, from having a conversation with a friend to reading my Bible and thinking about God. It’s there when I think about a poem or story I’ve heard.

Or when I read. My husband reads soley for information and/or entertainment. I read for information and entertainment, too, but mostly for feeling. And when I write, I almost always care more about conveying a feeling than “mere information.” But I love great information because it gives me such a glow of inspiration, and…

I could go on, but by now you’ve guessed what this blog is about. Me wanting to share with others the things that motivate and inspire me, just as I’ve always wanted to describe that first remembered “Shanspiration” since I was three years old! I hope it will make somebody smile and think about her own “Jenspirations” or “Nycolespirations” or “Kristinespirations” (Silly me, picking friends and sister- in-law’s names for this…grin). And what about “Momspirations”? Because, Mom, at first, you will be my only reader. I hope you’re very inspired:)

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 3:19 am and is filed under Shanspiration Series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.