The Whole Time
At my job at the grocery store, hanging price tags consumes a substantial part of every shift. Zigzagging up and down aisles laden with everyday pantry staples, a lot of my time lately has been spent combing shelves for this particular flavor of lunch meat or that distinct brand of pickles. It’s tedious yet pleasant work—but often an item comes along that I just can’t seem to locate.
The other day, it was a certain kind of store-brand soup. Quickly scanning the labels of the items before me, I found easily Campbell’s steak and potato, and soups in bags that you simply add water to, but no generic chicken noodle that matched the shelf tag I held in my hand. It was frustrating. In recent months, I’ve about memorized where everything is in the store—a very good thing, considering I once shuddered any time a customer approached in search of nearly anything besides soda or chips—but occasionally I do still get stumped.
After several moments of searching and coming up empty-handed, I decided it would probably do me well to just walk away. A few minutes out of that 8-foot stretch of canned goods was likely the key; a chance to clear my brain (and uncross my eyes) before attempting to find that particular item again. So I went ahead and pressed on for a while, hanging tags for barbeque sauce and instant pudding and granola, before circling back to aisle three and that formidable soup section again. Quite interestingly—astonishingly, really—that very chicken noodle was the first thing I saw! Though I’d rightly suspected that stepping away might be helpful, I still couldn’t believe how it suddenly jumped out at me—how had I not noticed before? Painstakingly I’d searched for something that had been there the whole time.
I do this concerning spiritual things, too. In recent years my husband and I have been raising teenagers. While it’s usually here I’d be tempted to offer some quip about having kids of double-digit ages in the house, like how they eat a bunch and leave dishes everywhere—all true—sometimes it’s good to acknowledge that this phase of parenthood can be so complicated you just want to cry. (And, meanwhile, we know this is merely that lovely thing called the circle of life as we caused our own moms and dads the same heartache when we were teens not that long ago.)
