Happy Tuesday, Friend!
It’s the last week of March. This time-flying business is getting to be ridiculous!
I was thinking recently about how many choices we have. I mean, choices for everything! TV channels, for instance. When you were a kid, did you ever think we’d have as many options as we do now? Remember when there were only three channels? And at our house, we only got two. For some reason, we didn’t get ABC at our house.
Please observe a moment of silence for the mourning of my poor childhood. I couldn’t watch The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch. Dark Shadows or Bewitched. No Addams Family and no Mod Squad. I know what you’re thinking—How did she survive? Am I right? Or to say it as Shakespeare did: “O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day! Most lamentable day, the most woeful day that ever, ever, I did yet behold!” Gosh, I love drama.
I scraped by with the two channels we did get and made it safely into my teen years. That’s when my friends and I started to wear makeup. And once again, we were presented with just a few options at our local drugstore. Pouring over the cosmetic section of the Rexall Drugstore was our favorite pastime in 8th grade. Basically, we had Cover Girl, Maybelline, and (maybe) Revlon. That was it. Occasionally, there would be some funky stuff that would come out that we’d all go wild over. Bonnie Bell’s Lipsmackers, for example. They came in wild flavors like “Root Beer” and “7Up.” One might have to go all the way to Duluth, Minnesota, to procure such a coveted prize. In dire circumstances, we might raid our mothers’ Avon supply, an act of utter humiliation.
Then, there was a line of makeup that went by the catchiest name to ever emerge: The Thing. There was The Thing for Lips, The Thing for Eyes, The Thing for Cheeks. Each came in a little round sphere that opened up to reveal its magical innards. The sphere was in a clear plastic cube. Spheres, cubes—now this is how I want to study geometry! I had The Thing for Eyes in lavender. Let that sink in . . . lavender eye shadow. Dear Lord, what was I thinking?
Now, here we are in the year 2025 and, dang!, there are so many more choices! I mean, have you been to a Sephora? Or Ulta? There are so many brands of makeup! How on earth are we supposed to know what to buy? Each one claims to be the one to change our lives! And now we have the added layer of social media and influencers telling us what “we didn’t know we needed.”
Bring me back to Rexall Drugs and my lavender eye shadow! Life was so much simpler then!
Sorry, guys, for the makeup talk. Let’s talk about something more manly. A few years ago, Kevin and I redid our bathrooms, and our contractor sent us to a store to pick out the tile. We trotted off to the store he mentioned, which was Floor & Décor.
Holy Toledo! Or should I say, Holy Tile-edo!
We’d never seen so much tile in our entire lives. The choices were overwhelming. It’s like we both lost the ability to even talk when we walked in. “Can I help you?” we were asked. Our reply went something like this: “Slkj efjalkjd nwlhenaodifu alkjf llkj we aslke jipaklej.” If you are wondering what that means, I have no idea. It’s just what our brains came up with when presented with that many options. Thankfully, there were interior decorators there, and one took us both gently by the hand and led us through the process. (I’ve since realized that stores with no “ceilings,” just open rafters up to the roof, are just too big for me.)
Is it good to have so many options these days? We all love options, right? But is there such a thing as too many? Does anyone else get paralyzed when presented with so many choices? I kind of think three is a nice number. It may be because it harkens back to my childhood: three TV channels (well, at other kids’ houses) and three brands of makeup. It also worked out pretty well for Goldilocks. She was presented with three choices three different times, which turned out to be—just right!
News sources. There’s another thing. Again, back to my childhood, we had Walter Kronkite on CBS, and Huntley & Brinkley were on NBC. (Don’t ask me about the ABC news; you know I didn’t get to see it!) Now, there are what seems like unlimited sources for daily news. One person may watch a certain channel and claim that all others are “fake news.” Still, another person will watch a different source and claim it is the only true source. Iy-yi-yi! Too many options!
I’m having a hard time finding encouragement in my own letter that is supposed to offer precisely that! Perhaps it is this: While scrolling through those endless news channels, I’m sure it isn’t hard to come across a scene from another country where there aren’t all these choices. Where people don’t have the options we do. What would they give to be sitting in our shoes and have the options at our fingertips. I know I need to be more grateful for the myriad of choices I make every day. Choices other people in so many other places don’t have. One need not look any farther than their own grocery store to know how many choices we have!
I hope that this week, as you ponder the decisions you have to make, you will take a moment to be grateful that you have the choices you do and offer grace to those who choose differently than you.
Written with love – – – Patti XOXO
“In a world where you can be anything,
(choose to) be kind.”
Clare Pooley