People are constantly confirming with me the fact that assessing and editing another person’s belongings is so much easier than tackling your own.

“I mean, I can go over to my friend’s house and help her–no problem. Then I come home and it’s just like, uch…where do I even begin?” They’ll say.

It makes sense, of course. Eyes free from the cloud of familiarity and the bias of attachment tend to more definitively and accurately see things as they are.

Where in the world of stuff, another person’s might feel totally tackleable while yours feels insurmountable, there’s a wonderfully ironic twist that occurs outside of that tangible realm. When it’s a matter of emotional situations, relationships, career predicaments, broader questions and wonderings about life, there is nothing like another person’s crazy to make your life appear utterly sane in contrast.

After you listen to your friend unload to you about her dysfunctional marriage, you can’t help but to regard yours as blissful, all things considered.

An afternoon at your brother’s house–or zoo–pushes you to your limit; the incessant, high-pitched yapping of little dogs and squawking of brightly feathered birds echoes endlessly through your brain, while the scent of reptilian creatures and cat litter boxes threatens to haunt your dreams for the next month.

Wouldn’t you like to fathom a guess about how welcome the sounds of your shrieking toddler that greet you as soon as you open your front door are.

Even another’s perfectly normal, entirely unoffensive way of living and being that isn’t your own can serve to ignite an appreciation for the life and home that is yours–in its every nuance, in its deliciously customized composition.

Each of our lives is like a language only we fully understand. And that understanding, that imbued-ness–we take comfort in it. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, and so on and so forth.

All it takes is the tiniest step into someone else’s life to remind you of the world entirely your own you’ve created. To fill you with an appreciation for the chance to live in exactly the way you wish, to fill your space with precisely the items you love, to travel to the destinations you yearn to explore, to feed the relationships you have chosen to form.

But what if you cut out the middleman and just got to appreciating what you’ve got right now?

Your life is the one you have chosen; any challenges and opportunities an extension of those choices. They aren’t merely marital arguments but your marital arguments. They aren’t merely odoriferous creatures, but your stanky pets. It isn’t merely a well-kept, well edited home, but your space.

Every single person on this planet-thing has unique challenges and preferences.

I say love your imperfect-perfect life because it’s your own. Love your challenges because they are, too.

Mostly, work on figuring out what certain blend of crazy feels to you as though it isn’t–feels to be the most centered, joy-producing, spirit-nurturing, path you can conceive.

And then don’t give two hoots about whether that path is someone else’s very definition of life-long punishment. Given everything, it’s sure to be. For someone, anyway.