There are few daily joys more pleasurable than picking my nose. If I don’t have a pinky fingernail long enough to pick the boogers from my nose, that takes some of the fun out of it. (Maybe this is the real reason I have always preferred to keep my nails long.) If a booger comes out dry I usually drop it wherever I am or flick it across the room so I don’t have to be responsible for its unknown landing place. But when the dry part comes out trailing some not-so-dry stuff, I have a real dilemma. If I’m sitting down it’s out of the question to rise from my chair simply to get a tissue. But neither do I want to stick this rubber cement from my nose on the furniture. Sometimes what I’m wearing has a perfect hem to fold the booger in, where it can reside unnoticed until it is washed away in the washing machine. When I’m outdoors the options open up quite a bit. I can hide a booger in grass, camouflage it on a tree trunk, or stick it on the bottom of a picnic table.

For the first few years of my marriage, all boogers I picked in the car were stuck on the side of the upholstered seat, down near the lever that moves the seat forward and back. My husband protested loudly enough about this crusty collection that I now keep a napkin in the center console for booger-collecting purposes. If for some reason the napkin isn’t there, I can usually find a straw wrapper or a receipt. I may have stuck a juicy booger on a coin once, when that was all that was available. Some people I know eat their boogers, which removes all the trouble of having to find a place for them, but booger-eating has not been one of my secret pleasures.

In addition to picking my nose, I also enjoy picking a guitar. Growing up with a guitar-picking father—who played his classical guitar most of the day and often far into the night—picking was the soundtrack to my life, long before I owned my first guitar at age fifteen. Not long after I learned to strum a few chords I learned different picking patterns. In high school I played around with song-writing, and my dad recorded an album of me singing and playing my songs, titled “Searching.”

My childhood was also chock-full of picking fruit. In addition to the 45 fruit trees, three grape arbors, and bursting vegetable garden, we grew and harvested many kinds of berries: red and black currants, gooseberries, josta berries, raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, strawberries. I picked everything from green beans (somewhat tedious) to zucchini (a little poky) to asparagus (quick and easy). I picked weeds from rows of corn; grapes from their stems, for juicing or freezing. I picked flowers from our wild flower garden, and from my own little flower plot. Nasturtiums were my favorite, and I gave special attention a miniature rose bush I received for my birthday one year.

I also picked up sticks—hundreds of sticks—every year after my father painstakingly pruned those 45 fruit trees and three grape arbors. Grape prunings were the worst. They twined into a tangled mass under the grape arbor and my sister and I would wrestle them in flailing, unmanageable, rolling piles, to the burn heap. When the sun went down and we were cozy inside by the wood stove, we often pulled out pick-up sticks. I spent hours on the floor in the living room playing games of pick-up sticks with my sister or mom.

There are at least two things I haven’t picked: a lock or a pocket. I’m also not big on picking my teeth. I have occasionally picked someone’s brain, but my passionately curious husband far outdoes me on this one. He is interested in everything from bee keeping to philosophy and enjoys picking brains about almost anything. He is also better than me at picking up his feet, and placing them. I have fallen down three different flights of stairs at our house and my spacial awareness is below average.

I have picked at my food, picked over tables of used books for sale, picked off ticks, picked at lint on my shirt, picked on my children for making messes, and picked up the pieces of broken plates and cups. I have picked my way through the mess on my daughters’ bedroom floor in the middle of the night, and I have picked a bone with my husband over the proper use of a Sunday. Too many times I have been the pick of the bunch—valedictorian, Washington State student employee of the year, rising staff member of the year. I’m sure someone told me this is how it works: being excessively responsible results in a life that is excessively easy. I am disappointed and angry that this has not been the case, and have picked to pieces the concept of responsibility.

I have never picked a fist fight, and I’m not quick to pick a verbal fight, but I have certainly picked at a lot of things that ought to be left alone—hang nails, broken things, people I don’t know well enough to criticize, dried-on gum, sunburns, people I love. I have also picked apart my self until I am riddled with holes, and I have picked apart the human beings closest to me. I have looked down on them, or refused to look at all, forgetting that dignity is not earned, it just is.

I have been free to take my pick, of schools, boyfriends, produce at the grocery store. I have wondered whether this freedom to pick and choose is a really a freedom, or if it’s more like a train wreck. I watch myself choose what feels good in the moment (but not five minutes later), choose to hurt someone else so I can feel better, choose to point out what’s wrong instead of what’s right, choose to leave when staying would be true loving. Who decided it was a good idea to leave the picking up to me?

I have picked a hole in my own heart and then wondered why I find it hard to fully love. I have led an untroubled life in regards to upbringing and circumstances, but I have created trouble by looking on myself and others with judgement, and ruminating in the ensuing shame. I have been slow to pick up on this, not realizing that a life well-lived is lived not in good behavior but in a safe heart. Abundance happens when I let my own heart be a safe place for me to reside, and when I offer my heart as a safe place for those around me to enter in. When I am good company for myself I become good company for others. Love is big enough for all my yuck. I don’t have to pick myself clean. I will be messy, and I will be surrounded by messy people, and I will still pick me, and I will pick the person in front of me.

Photo by Joaquín M: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-close-up-on-a-hand-picking-a-daisy-9815822/