I was really frustrated on the drive home from work last Friday. The day had been a jumble of frenzied stress and obligations and demands that I struggled to meet. After the previous four days of attempting to maintain a graceful juggle of both work and personal chores, I was half-burnt toast — brittle and easy to break. And I had a white elephant Christmas party to attend that night for which I had yet to buy a gift or a make a dish to bring. I have had a lot of weeks and days like this. I think they are included with the grown-up package to keep us humble. And slightly, if not entirely, crazy.

I rounded a corner out of the parking lot and I thought about how, at the expense of trying to neatly manage everything, I had missed so much along the way. I had forgotten to stop and take notice of the beauty in the form of sparkly strands of Christmas lights on the rooftops and the wintry, cornflower blue of the four o’clock December sky, and the way the cashier at the grocery store nearby my office smiles and tells me about her grandchildren when I go in for a bottle of water and a yogurt on my lunch break. I had gotten through the week but had pretty much missed it altogether.

Again.

This happens to me quite a bit. Movement without mindfulness. Playing the game without paying attention. Piety without proper posture of heart.

I don’t know much about life a lot of the time but one thing I do know is that this is the perfect cocktail to suck down if you want to not enjoy it. And while I know this in my head, I do not always live as if I do. Instead, I suck back the cocktail that falsely promises a sense of control and stupidly expect different outcomes each time I do.

Sure, I am self-aware enough to see these trends in my life, but the problem is that it is so easy to live this way. Too easy. To live differently costs more than I am willing or want to pay sometimes.

The holidays seem to highlight this in my life more so than any other time of year. It is the time when expectation is highest and ambitions are loftiest and any perceived defect in our life is glaringly brought to our attention — dysfunctional families, shaky finances, emotional baggage, loneliness, or the inability to bake or cook or decorate anything that requires more than three minutes of time and any sort of creativity. And the noise, the retail store rush and stalled traffic and long lines and grumpy shoppers — the drowning sounds of December — it can be enough to sever our spirits from the wellspring of jingle-bell-joy that we are supposed to feel this time of year and render us miserable. If we let it.

Now back to last Friday…

I was not in the mood for potluck dinner conversation and gift swapping. What I really wanted to do was go home and peel off my pea-coat and boots and bury myself beneath three blankets on the couch in a big tee-shirt with a plate of sugar cookies and trash magazines and Home Alone 2 on the TV. But alas, I pulled off an exit and into a parking spot in front of a CVS to pick up a present. (Gift shopping at a pharmacy — I know). As expected, the store was crowded and the lines were long — between the Michael Buble Christmas music and moms screaming at or trying to bribe their kids to stop crying or running around or begging for Skittles, and the tired voice of the pharmacist over the intercom calling people’s names to come pick up their meds, the experience was shaping out to be yet another trigger for frustration and annoyance and resentment toward the whole “business” of Christmas.

Later on at the party I got to talking with a friend who offered a fresh take on the whole holiday run-around and hoo-ha. He confessed he felt the same way that I did — like it was all entirely distracting and anxiety-inducing and unnecessary. Until he changed his perspective. He told me a story about how someone challenged him last Christmas to utilize all of the “wasted time” spent waiting and standing in lines and fighting traffic to his advantage by taking that time to simply be still and observe and savor what’s around him.

Standing behind two dozen people at Target with a basket of stuff you forgot to buy for present wrapping? Instead of moaning about it or staring coldly at the person who just had to use seventeen coupons for their purchase, use that time to look around and notice things. The faces of the people in front of and behind you. The words to the Christmas carol playing in the store. The way the cashier smiles at every customer despite having been on their feet for so many hours scanning toys and gift wrap.

“The thing about it is,” my friend explained Friday, “those rushed moments force us to slow down. They give us no choice but to sit and wait, so why sit and wait and be miserable when you can choose to feel something different by changing your focus?”

He was totally right.

Why not, as my friend suggested, shift my focus? Why not view the holiday mayhem as a gift in that it offers me a unique space to absorb the world and observe and be still with my thoughts, impossible as it may seem to do — rather than a trigger for stress and anxiety and feelings of inadequacy? What could it hurt? I pose this question knowing that it is easy to talk about doing but hard to actually do.

The paradigm of the commercialized, materialistic Christmas that we all loathe might begin to shift when we learn to experience the frustrating parts of the holiday with the same sense of reverence and awe and mindfulness that we do the church services and family gatherings and the sacred yuletide traditions we hold dear. To view the waiting and the sitting in traffic and long hours of shopping of cooking and cleaning as a gift of the season rather than the burden of it, could be the thing that makes Christmas a different experience than what we have previously known it to be.

For me, it is at least worth trying. Because as I previously stated, struggling to stay in control and failing miserably at it is a part of the package you get when you become an adult. And it can (and likely will) make us crazy. But in choosing to shift our focus, we subsequently shift the paradigm. The paradigm that sometimes looks like rushing to a CVS for a white elephant gift on a Friday night when you’re hungry, have to pee, and aren’t in the mood for Michael Buble’s  version of “rockin’ around the Christmas tree” being played over the sounds of kids throwing fits in the candy aisle. For that is the paradigm of life and adulthood. And a paradigm that begs the question ”so why sit and wait and be miserable when you can choose to feel something different by changing your focus?”

I don’t know much about life a lot of the time but as I get older I am learning how not to enjoy it, and how exactly I can. And one of the ways I can is by slowing down the rush internally to be conscious and reverent of what is happening externally, no matter how frenzied and chaotic. Because as my friend last Friday suggested, there is wisdom in savoring, rather than resenting, the Christmas-time chaos. The first step is changing what we see and shifting the paradigm back in our favor, so that we can recognize the holiness and meaning and glory in this seemingly ordinary existence. Not only during December but every day and in all corners of life.

Bio: Jamie Berube is a recent transplant to Southern California from the South where she works as a social worker and freelance writer. She misses the boiled peanuts and thunderstorms and her mama’s lasagna back home in Florida where she spent her childhood as a barefoot tomboy but have learned a lot from the mysteries of the Wild West. Writing is her passion. She seeks to use every opportunity she has and view every life experience as valuable to her growth as a writer. She blogs at:Everydaydolce.com and tweet at @jamberube

Sometimes when I sit down to write I have nothing to say. Sometimes I can think of no words and no cute attention-gripping anecdotes or funny stories to share with whomever out there in the world might stumble across my words here. Sometimes the well of creativity and ideas and inspiration in my head feels like it has run depressingly dry and I am left waiting for the drought to pass.

But it doesn’t.

So I sit and I wait for it to happen. I wait to draw from the well. And if too much time passes, I know that I will grow ridden with anxiety and insecurity and irrational feelings about my adequacy as writer and a woman and it will feel like the world will come to a catastrophic and horrific end because I can’t string five words together to form a sentence. And if too much more time passes and the cursor has still not yet moved from the same spot it has stood, blinking forebodingly at me from the screen, not only will the world end — my career and passion for writing will also have ended and I will slap down my laptop screen convinced that I got it all wrong. I was never meant to write. I was meant to make scrapbooks or bake gluten-free cookies or collect buttons. This writing thing was big, fat mistake. This self-induced inner temper tantrum usually lasts a couple of hours. Maybe even a whole or half a day. But then I eat a cupcake and watch some Seinfeld and cry to my best friend on the phone about how it is all just-so-confusing-and-hard and why did we have to grow up and become adults?! and I typically feel better.

Sometimes you just have to let it out that way.

Once I feel more like myself and have recalibrated my thoughts to better accommodate rational and realistic thinking, I then sit back down and do what I know I need to do.

I try again.

Perhaps this time the words come to me and flow forth in perfectly poetic prose from my fingers. Or perhaps they don’t and all I can think to write is “I want spaghetti,” or “Angelina Jolie isn’t really that hot, is she?” or “I should probably not still be in my pajamas.”

Either way, to know I have sat down to try again is where I can take solace and feel a consolation for my efforts, whether or not there is any return. Because sometimes, chasing and pursuing something isn’t the way to get it. Like a rabbit or a butterfly, it is sitting in patience and peace and quiet that will possibly attract it into your path. Running after it will only scare it away and burn you out and leave you unsatisfied. But to sit in the stillness of the moment and discipline the mind to wait and welcome whatever comes or doesn’t come to us is often more effective and inviting. And a lot more sane.

Being a writer can be really exhausting in this way. I don’t always have a story or a point or purpose when I sit down to write, or at the time that I wish I did most. The temptation to give up or fabricate and devalue my work by playing fake and phony rather than doing the work required to get to the meat of what needs to be written and to the core of the story that needs to be told is hard to resist. Playing pretend is a lot sexier and much easier. But sexy and easy are not what I’m after.

One of my favorite quotes and pieces of advice on writing belongs to Ernest Hemingway. And that is this: “all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

When I sat down to write today I did not know what I would write about. I had nothing. But even when I think I have nothing, I always have the truth. The truth is always there, fluttering it’s wings through the breeze like a butterfly waiting to find a quiet, peaceful place to land.

I can always draw from the well of what I know to be true.

And what is true for me today is this: I am imperfect and broken and sometimes frustratingly uninspired, in my life and in my writing and work. I am prone to pity myself and question my identity and abilities and worth as a woman and a wife and writer. I am not good at being still and living in the moment because much of my life and dependency on the superficial is designed to escape the moment rather than to embrace it. What else is true? It is true that despite these things, I am still okay. I am still loved, wanted, and accepted by God. I am still extraordinary. I am still uniquely beautiful in my own way. I am still human. Scuffed-up and scarred and starving for connection and purpose and growth, just like you — I am still human. Some days it is not easy to sit with this truth. Some days I simply fail at believing it. But just as it is with writing, I have a cupcake, watch some Seinfeld, and maybe have a good cry and then get up and do the only thing that makes sense.

I try again.

And therein lies the difference between the courageous and the cowardly. Courage lifts up her head when she is unsure and broken with no well to draw from. Cowardice lays in the muck and waits for the well to magically fill. And when confronted, she plays pretend in favor of what is sexy over what is true.

Failure is a painful and difficult teacher. Because in the same way that sitting down to write when I can think of no words teaches me to keep at it and keep trying to find that “one true sentence” as Hemingway says — failure begs the question “will you stay down or stand up and start over?” How I live my life depends on my response to this. And today I want to stand and choose courage. Because I want that to be what is most true about my identity as a writer and as a woman who is just trying to get it right, both on paper and in life.

Bio: Jamie Berube is a recent transplant to Southern California from the South where she works as a social worker and freelance writer. She misses the boiled peanuts and thunderstorms and her mama’s lasagna back home in Florida where she spent her childhood as a barefoot tomboy but have learned a lot from the mysteries of the Wild West. Writing is her passion. She seeks to use every opportunity she has and view every life experience as valuable to her growth as a writer. She blogs at: Everydaydolce.com and tweet at @jamberube