Too much good stuff...for real this time

Last summer, I started a season of reigning in the crazy.  I recognized that while I had an abundance good things in my life, it was time to take a hard look at all of the activities that I said yes to and set some priorities.    I do think progress has been made.  All of the same opportunities are still there, tempting me and shaming me into thinking I should say yes because I'm good enough to handle it all.  But I think I have gotten a little smarter, a little braver, and a little healthier.  This weekend, for example, is pretty unscheduled.  By this past Thursday afternoon I realized that and started thinking "Who haven't we seen lately?  What project have we been putting off?  How can I make sure this open time isn't wasted?"  By Thursday night I had successfully shaken myself by the shoulders and canned any ideas of filling this open time.  My entire family is benefiting from it as we glide through the hours having fun and getting moderate chores completed.

As I continue to work at being smart about over-scheduling, I am moving from a season of pruning away figurative life-clutter into a season of getting rid of actual, filling-my-house, clutter.  No one in my house is a collector, or a hoarder, but there is just a lot of, well, stuff.  The way this scenario would have played out in the past goes something like this:  Live, obtain stuff, use stuff, put stuff away in different places, lose stuff as it gets covered by new stuff, organize big heaps of stuff into more structured big heaps of stuff, get frustrated, lose my mind, snap, and spend three weeks using every open moment to tackle every single room, donating, throwing-away, and super cleaning.  I suppose life experience and parenting has helped me realize that this is not a sustainable system.  So instead I have made the very sensible decision to just take a section at a time as I go about my normal day.  When that shelf is so full that I can't put something else on it without five minutes of balancing things just right, I will take the 15 minutes required to take the stuff down, throw away what is expired, old, and over-used, start a donate bag for the items that someone else could use for a while, and have one less cluttered shelf.  You might ask why I haven't been doing that all along, but this is a paradigm shift for me.  I am fighting life-long learned tendencies to keep things because I might be able to somehow reuse them and save the money and hassle of buying a new one.  It is why I am just starting, 14 years after graduating from college, to throw away gross college t-shirts that I had just in case I needed to a dirty job.  Not even a mechanic could need the amount of ratty t-shirts I have collected.  My need for order and space is finally beating out that need to keep things "just in case."

So far:

• Expired drug-store items have been trashed (expired in 2009?  really??)
• Kitchen cabinets have been cleared of glassware (how did we ever collect enough sets of margarita glasses and beer steins to entertain an entire frat house?)
• Place-mats that have been used since we were married have been replaced (10 years creates a lot of stains)
• Another bag of clothes has been donated
• An armada of plastic grocery bags has been dropped off at the store for recycling
• At least a year's-worth of batteries was taken for recycling (did I mention we have a three-year-old who likes toys that make noise?)

Next up is a bag of old shoes that need to be taken from my closet floor to a recycle drop off  location.  Since spring is around the corner, I'm guessing something in the garage isn't far behind.  The difference between today and five years ago is that in the past, that list of what has already been done would have been forced into a single weekend and I would have been near-tears by Sunday night.  Present-day, I have completed those things comfortably over the course of the last month or so, and none of them have felt like an imposition to complete.  And yes, it feels really good to not have things come tumbling out of the medicine cabinet when it is opened, and to eat on pretty place-mats.

I am still wondering what finally changed in me that I decided to do things differently.  Clearly, scaling back has been the over-riding theme this past year, and it is a very welcome and positive move.  I'm just not sure what finally pushed me, gave me the bravery, the ability to stand up to myself, the oom-pha, to finally just do it.  I suppose that shouldn't matter, but it is something I ponder anyway.

What mountains have you scaled after living under the assumption they were just too high?  What changes are being put on your heart that you might not be paying enough attention to yet?  

It's all in the eyes

There are times when I catch a glimpse of these eyes looking back at me from a mirror and it startles me.  You probably don't see it, but since I've been staring back at these eyes for more than three decades, I notice the changes.  Sparkle.  Dull.  Bright.  Bloodshot.  Baggy.  Lively.  Exhausted.  I see it all.

I have so many blessings.  Some days I can choose to look at all of my busyness as managing an overabundance of blessings.  Many days I am much less optimistic.  No matter how I choose to look at it, I am tired.  Not just long-weekend of college all-nighters tired, but something rivaling the first three months after birthing a newborn tired.  The kind of tired that comes from trying to do it all for too long.

But I'm also tired of feeling this way.  My usual reaction to long stretches like this is to try to fix it all at once.  No patience to do it right.  So this time, I am going to systematically attack it. I am not going to try and get sleep, work less, relax more, exercise more, stress less, and spend more time playing, cooking, and reading, all in one day.  Small goals this time.  Once I accomplish one, I will be better equipped to accomplish another.

I'm starting with rest.  As much as I am tempted to move straight to the other more fun fixes, I am being smart enough to realize it just won't work without rest.  So, next week, I am setting a time to try and leave the office no matter what is left undone, and I am setting a time that my body needs to be in bed every night. Neither of those sound like they should be very hard for most people, but since I have not been able to accomplish either for about four months, they may not be very easy for me.

We all have to start somewhere.  I choose Monday.

More than enough

I have reached my limit before.  In many ways, at many different times in my life, I've hit that point where it was very clear to me that whatever my limit was, I had found it.  I am confident it's not the best way to handle it, but it takes that point of explosion before I am able to finally hand over the controls.  This time, the limit reached was in regards to too many things.  Obligations, commitments, chores, tasks, work, hobbies, all of it.  It has been a frequent pattern of mine.  I say yes, I plan more, I underestimate the amount of rest I need, and it all goes great until it doesn't.

The past few weeks have brought some changes.  Work has gotten busier and later, time has decreased, stress has gone up, balls have been dropped.  Never in my life have I just completely forgotten plans that had been made.  I might confuse dates, times, need to look at the calendar a few extra times, cancel on short notice, but never just forgotten.  Until I did.  That was the limit this time around.  A kick-to-the-gut announcement that this just can't continue.  So I started making changes.  Things that I wouldn't even consider discontinuing a few days prior were suddenly the things that had to go.

I heard a story a few weeks ago about an Olympic athlete and the after-training recovery he endures.  Rather than ice packs or ice baths to soothe muscles and joints, he goes into some kind of cryofreeze chamber.  For 30 seconds, it gets so cold that the body abandons all hope for the limbs and pulls all the blood flow into the core.   When he comes out of the chamber, the blood that rushes back into the limbs has gone through a filtering process that has removed much of the lactic acid that causes soreness and swelling, etc.  I think it sounds absolutely crazy, but I like the metaphor that it creates.  I am going through my own similar process.  My limbs are important to my body, just like many of these to-do's are important to who I am.  But in a crisis, those to-do's need to be abandoned to take care of my core for a while.  And when I'm ready to start reaching out and getting back into some of those things, the energy I am able to put into them is increased ten-fold.

I am getting a lot of positive reinforcement that I am doing the right thing.  Have you ever had that experience where you hear something you've never heard before, and then all of the sudden it keeps coming up?  Ever since I decided to start pruning things, I've read blogs, seen pictures, heard stories, had discussions, all about exactly this topic.  And every decision I make to reduce the list makes me feel a little bit better.  I know I am doing the right thing, as much as I wish I didn't have to let some of these things go.

One of the blogs I read makes the amazing point that sometimes you have to get rid of some of the extraneous good things to make room to really enjoy the important good things.  That is a great explanation for myself of what I am trying to do.  I have been blessed more than I can ever understand with so many things.  Everything I am pulling back from is important to me somehow; I don't want to let it go.  But if I can't  truly be in the present and enjoying any one thing because I am focused on trying to juggle 50 things, then there doesn't seem to be much point in doing any of them.

I am on the right track and feeling better.  The long-term challenge will be maintaining a lower level of stuff so that I can go through smaller cycles of building and pruning instead of hitting the wall and sliding downward.  I'm not ready for that challenge yet.  For now I just have to focus on enjoying the important good things...

 ....and saying goodbye to some others.

Attack of the gnome

Six months ago I started to write a blog.  The blog was some extra motivation to make good changes and stick to them so I would have something to write.  Changes were made, and are ongoing, and that is good.  Looking back at my list of posts, I can see that in February that annoying little overachieving gnome started to poke holes in my happy plan.  In March, he took over.  I'm pretty sure that life has been on the downhill of a roller-coaster since then.  Not downhill as in negative, but definitely downhill as in super-speed.  I know it feels like this has been going on for a while, but when I see that I've written two posts in the last three months, it makes it even more clear.  What have I been doing?  I'm not quite sure, it's hard to pick out the shapes in the blur.  There has been plenty of fun mixed in with the work.  There has been cooking, reading, exercise, gardening, picture taking, time with family and time with friends.  But that gnome has been sprinting laps around my brain for three months, reminding me of all the to-do's that are sitting and waiting for me, and I think it's about time to make it stop.  The to-do's will never go away, and that's ok.  But that gnome, I think it's time to send him on a long vacation, and while he's gone try to figure out how to send him on a swim with the fishes.

So, today is a new day.  Thanks to a long vacation with family, I'm rested.  Thanks to a quiet morning with my son, and a leisurely walk with the dog, I'm relaxed.  Thanks to this post, I'm ready to get back to doing awesome things and blogging about them.  Stay tuned.

Limit Reached

I set out a few months ago with an ambitious list of things I wanted to accomplish.  And in true me fashion, I took that list with the intention of tackling the whole thing.  And in true me fashion, I found the proverbial wall and crashed into it with impressive force.

I have incorporated a lot of the things I wanted to do.  That includes both actions and schedule fillers and also just a better awareness for myself of  what I want to use my time doing.  And I'm happy with what I've done.  But, I'm tapped out.  All of the sudden all of the things, more prayer, more cooking, more reading, more exercise, more family time, more time with friends, more focused parenting, more time outside, more more more MORE MORE MORE MORE has gotten to the point of, well, too many "mores".  But it is also the season where it gets nicer outside and all of the sudden the schedule of things to do explodes.  But the problem is that I don't want to stop or slow down on any of the things I've added.  So somehow I have to figure out how to reorganize what I have with what is coming.  Now I have to make room for gardening and forest preserve walks and baseball games and swimming and vacations, and whatever else summer brings.  Which is all good stuff.  But my brain starts to smoke a little when I think about managing it all.  And I kind of just want to crawl onto the couch and turn it all off and pretend I have plenty of time to do whatever I want.

But I can't.  So I won't.  I'll figure it out.  I think.  Stay tuned.