“Life is messy and we are taught to button up.  But what if when we’re messy, we open up?  It’s better to be messy than dishonest.  Sometimes you have to get truly messy to get truly clean,” JB Copeland.  This past week has taught me some lessons that, while I knew them, I didn’t really incorporate them.  First, there are different reasons for life getting messy.  Sometimes the universe is simply messy.  Sometimes we mess it up.  Sometimes we have the best intentions and it still gets messed up.  Sometimes things don’t go as planned and sometimes we completely fall apart.  Regardless of where we fall on that spectrum, many of us are taught to hide that messy.  We don’t want the world to see the dirty, the behind the scenes, or what it takes to get to clean.  And it is true that we are often taught to keep things that way, keep them quiet so others can’t judge or see us.  But there are times when we need help, we need to be seen, and as uncomfortable as it is, we need to be vulnerable.  In vulnerability we get the help we need.  Some burdens truly aren’t meant for us to carry alone and the only way we can get help is to let others see where we are.  People can surprise us and often they have wisdom from their own experiences that we don’t learn unless we let them know where we are at.

Dishonesty creates a whole other layer to this where we cover mud with paint and hope it dries fast enough so people only see the pretty.  But mud will never let paint dry, and soon, no matter how pretty the color we paint it, the mud will mix with it and make it dirty.  Sometimes we have to learn to wash away the mud, spread it out, let it dry, and then we can see what we are working with.  Then we can lay the foundation or we can plant a garden—either way it’s a matter of clearing the mess through exposing it.  Being dishonest pushes us further back from any chance we have to clean up or have help cleaning up.  We are humans and as creatures with the ability to think and project, we often put our feelings onto other without knowing the full truth.  We tell stories, stories about how we think other people will think or feel/react without actually telling them.  Sometimes we may be right about a person’s reaction, but often people surprise us.  So there is no need to be dishonest because we will either get the help we need or we will see a person’s true colors.  When people show themselves, we know.

The last part of this is understanding that it is ok to be messy.  Sometimes we have to get messy to get clean because the mess tells us/reveals to us what is important.  We see priority in mess when it gets to the point of digging out.  That isn’t to say we need to seek out mess or create mess, but we can learn from mess.  We don’t need to fear it, we don’t need to fear what people think of us in mess because everyone gets messy.  In this life no one’s hands are clean and I think we are at the point where we can stop pretending that anyone is perfect.  We don’t even know what perfect is—but we can all agree that we can learn to accept ourselves as inherently perfect and enough.  The more we accept our humanity and the mess that comes with it, the sooner we can learn to accept what and who we are.  Sometimes the mess is too much, but sometimes that mess shows us exactly who we are. Sometimes it’s there to teach us what we are capable of, what we need to focus on.  That doesn’t mean we need to intentionally create mess, it just means that when the mess happens, we can trust ourselves to fix it and know when to rely on people to help us out when we need it.  Make friends with our ability to deal with the mess and learn from it rather than be angry that it happened.  Better, learn to share the mess because we can figure out how to clean it up together.