Somewhat less than amazing

We can get used to striving to be amazing. We can have the best shoes, hair, job. We can walk into a room with the best dessert, the best wrapped present, drive the nicest car. We can get hit with bad news and continue to smile and wear lipstick and our prettiest earrings. We can keep striving to be amazing, but at some point the striving starts to cost too much. We start to make our amazing cake icing and realize we don't have the right sugar. We don't have enough birthday candles to decorate it. We can't find the matches to light the few candles we do scrape together from the bottom of the kitchen junk drawer. Each setback leaves us breathless and frazzled. We don't get the looks we are used to, we mumble "Sorry" and tear up when we think of what we could have done, but were not able to do. We stumble in this foreign land, the land of less than amazing. When the applause dies down and people drift back to their own lives and we are left with the lingering joys of having accomplished something we will probably never do again. This life has it's own pleasures, each amazing in it's own way. The effort to rise, and shine, to smile, to taste a little ice cream, all still amazing, even if somewhat less than it was before.