The high altitude of laundry and Zumba

This week has been a lesson in drainage. Not the kind where water flows neatly into a gutter (which it did), but the kind where your physical and mental batteries hit that flickering red line.

It started with ten minutes of “Beginner Zumba” on YouTube with my son. I’m giving you a fair warning: if a video claims to be for beginners, they are lying. Two days later, my body is still filing a formal protest. My abs are sore, my legs feel like lead, and my arms are tight enough to snap.

I’m beginning to think “beginner” is just code for “will make you walk like a penguin for forty-eight hours.” And to add insult to injury – it was only 10 minutes long!

Then there is the mountain. Not a scenic one with hiking trails, but the laundry pile that has reached base-camp status. Mount Everest base camp – 5,364 meters (17,598 feet) above sea level.

I kept planning to do it “tomorrow.” But tomorrow became a rainy day, and the weather app—which is about as reliable as a chocolate teapot lately—didn’t warn me. So tomorrow turned into another tomorrow, and now the pile is high enough to have its own weather system. Maybe somewhere started its own little ecosystem, too.

The list just grows. The car battery is whispering that it’s ready for retirement. The dog food is hitting the bottom of the bag. The school snack stash is a ghost town. It never rains; it pours. And when it pours, the laundry stays wet.

On the lighter side, I escaped the chaos for a Ladies’ Tea at church. The speaker was from a local radio station, and she was hilarious—specifically her linguistic deep-dive into what the proper Afrikaans word for “cleavage” should be.

But between the laughs, she dropped a heavy stone into the pond: “You will not be happy if you don’t find your goal or purpose in life.”

That’s a big thought to carry home while your head is filled with to-do lists. And it got me thinking. What is my goal? What is my purpose?

Three days later, I was sitting on the couch with my husband and son, watching The Middle. The mom in the show was on the same frantic hunt. She was trying to “finish her business.” She tried beading, she tried volunteering, she tried everything to find that one thing that was hers.

In the end, she realized her “business”—the thing that actually made her happy—was going to church just to take a nap. Her family was too busy with their own lives to notice, and that quiet, unintended solitude was her “me time.”

Maybe purpose doesn’t always have to be a grand, world-changing mission. Maybe sometimes it’s just finding the rhythm in the mess. Or it is the idea constantly whispering in the back of your mind. Cheering quietly – “Do it! Do it! Do it!”

My friend and I, recently won ten free Zumba lessons. We start next week. It felt like a little nudge from the universe—a sign that we were meant to be in this place, at this time, together. Even if we end up walking like penguins for the rest of the month, at least we’ll be doing it as a team. But it is something exciting and something to look forward to.

So, I’m looking at the laundry mountain and thinking of the dying car battery. I’m acknowledging the chaos without fighting it today. I know it is there. I know it needs love and care. But I don’t have the energy to deal with it just yet.

Maybe my purpose for this afternoon isn’t to conquer the mountain. Maybe it’s just to find a quiet corner, sway to the silence, and accept that tomorrow will be another try. Maybe the sun will shine, and the birds will sing even louder than today.

Maybe the mom from The Middle will find a new purpose tonight.