Saturday, October 03, 2015

Socks or Symphony

Life is an endless tension between the mundane and the glamorous. 

It’s a Saturday evening, and the night sprawls before me like a blank canvas waiting to be painted. For simplicity’s sake, I have limited my choices to two possibilities: going to the Minnesota symphony with my friend at a discounted ticket price or going to the nearest retail store and buying socks. The romantic and adventurous side of me tells me that this is a no-brainer: “You will have an unforgetable night at the symphony with your dear friend” but the practical side of me shouts loudly from the soles of my feet: “Don’t forget about us and how uncomfortable it is when one toe sticks through.”  The Dave Ramsey voice inside my head also reminds me that “you need that symphony money for buying socks.” 

And so on this Saturday night, I chose a compromise of the two:  I convince a dear friend of mine to go sock shopping with me, and together we hit up the local retail store and do some sock shopping. It’s not exactly living it up on a Saturday night. It’s just living. It’s just doing life together. There’s nothing glamorous about buying socks. But life isn’t only composed of the glamorous. Most of the time, in fact, it’s just an accumulation of the ordinary and mundane.  

My friend and I talk, we browse, we compare sock prices and styles, and we limit our purchase to 3 pairs of socks each. This is life; this is the tension between living it up and just trying to make it through the month. We are constantly choosing between the two, and each circumstance may warrant a different choice. But on this evening, I am happy and content with my choice, and I have a hole-free pair of socks all picked out for church tomorrow. 


1 comment:

Rachel said...

haha! I hope you didn't invite your friend to the symphony, only to later say, "could we just go buy socks instead?" :)