When my life is really hectic and busy, I long for quieter days where I can putz and roam at “will.” I dream of a day where I can delve into a project or have everything around the house caught up on, so that I can read for hours with my children or play game after game with them without worrying about the time.

But then when those slow days seem to come, it seems like I look around me and feel like everyone is doing something exciting in their life but me. I tend to feel like maybe I’m boring or maybe I should look into a new opportunity or activity in my life.

Have you ever felt that way? We tend to always want what we don’t have. Have you ever stopped to wonder why that is?

I think it’s because we don’t know how to be content with what we have and where God has placed us in our lives. We take our eyes off of the road He has placed us on, and we look at someone else’s road. We fail to take into consideration that that someone could be looking at our road and wishing for our set of circumstances as well! We just carry this mentality of thinking that we need to be doing (or not doing) what the rest of the world is doing!

We trip ourselves up a lot with this way of thinking. I know there have been many times where I have wallowed in a little bit of self-pity only to remember later on that I had asked for that certain situation or set of circumstances to come up! And when it did, I was only ungrateful.

The grass is always going to look greener on the other side of that fence if we continue to look at what everyone else has instead of looking at how much we have to be thankful for. When times are busy, we can be thankful for friends who invite us to activities, or healthy children who are well enough to participate in sports. And when they are slower, we can be thankful for those times to recharge, catch up around our homes, and spend extra time loving on each other.

I think it’s all in how we look at it.

Dionna Sanchez is Founder of EmphasisOnMoms.com and freelance writes. She also blogs at Beauty in the Storm.