Hey there. I haven't known what to say for a long time and my internal world is starting to bubble up and threaten a messy explosion. And here's why. See, I have this constant tension in my life between words and actions. I totally and completely admire doers. I married one and am in constant awe of him. People who can get up in the morning and first of all, just function without a 90 minute easing into the day are amazing. And then there are the people who seem to transition easily and seamlessly between one complex task (such as getting the kids out the door to school) and another (getting oneself out the door to work) and not lose their temper or forget their wallet are doubly amazing. Anyway, doers are that way because they get up and do things. They don't usually blog about it. Blogging is the opposite of doing. It's sitting and talking about doing things. Nothing gets done while you're doing that. So I have been resisting this screen for months and working as hard as I can at being more of a doer. And it's just about killing me.
I have a funny reputation in some circles for being super-organized. Here's the thing. If I don't impose a massive amount of external structure into my life, I will get totally and hopelessly derailed. And I mean catastrophically behind. The fact is that my brain, if turned inside out, would be really well suited to some artist retreat that stresses contemplation and spontaneity and talking about doing things, but not so much getting around to doing them. And I suppose there is a use for that sort of place somewhere, but I don't think it is in my world.
My world is somewhat thick. Like an Oh Henry bar, as I used to say in University. Lots of layers messily mixed together in gooey sticky goodness. It's great but it does not allow for a lot of contemplation. And yet, that is what I am good at and what I lean towards given the slightest opportunity and what drives my doer friends crazy about me. I love to dream about the big picture. The long term goals. The vision and the mission and how it would look and feel and smell sound to succeed in whatever I am thinking about at the moment. The problem is that there is absolutely no dream worth achieving that does not also require way way way WAY too much disciplined work. I have only one word to say to that. Tomorrow.
The word "lazy" always comes to mind when I consciously try to figure out a solution to this internal combustion that is constantly simmering in my back burner. I hate laziness and I fight it with all the tools at my disposal. I impose external structure. I try to be task-oriented for large chunks of the day. I take on projects that I know I will only succeed at if I stretch my physical and mental and emotional capabilities to their limit. I observe the people that are super capable in my life and I try to figure out how on earth they do what they do. And I shake my head and say to myself. I dunno. It looks to be a complete sleight of hand. Or something. For instance, I just cannot function in the morning. Not at all. Here's an amusing anecdote to illustrate. So my middle son is a morning person and is really cheerful and productive starting at 6 am. In summer. Good grief. So I stumble out of our room at about 8 am looking for the coffee maker without my contacts in and he's busily engaged in making breakfast for us. Good for him, but he has a problem. One of our precious eggs (because we sell eggs to our community of course we never have any for ourselves) has broken in the carton and is stuck. The carton is full and he is trying to figure out how to get the egg out. As I remember it he asked for help but as he tells it I just swooped in and took over. Here was my solution. I just turned the egg carton over a bowl. I don't actually know what I was thinking. I think it was something like how ice cubes are supposed to behave. Well, eggs don't behave that way. To my vast surprise all the eggs (except the broken one) obeyed the law of gravity and fell out all over the counter and the floor. I was so surprised that I didn't even immediately right the carton so as to save any slow moving eggs. My son was looking at me with his mouth open and tears coming into his eyes (the eggs really are very precious). Anyway, we managed to recover most of the eggs and hard boiled the cracked ones and still had eggs for breakfast. But I am not sure how on earth I thought that that particular action would solve that particular problem. Clearly I should have left him to it and moved directly to the coffee maker.
So here I am with three kids and lots of animals and a huge garden and a highly task-oriented and capable husband and a profession that requires constant attention and there is not really anything in my brain that makes me naturally able to keep up with all that. Instead, I like to fantasize about being one of those CBC voices droning on and on about "Ideas" that are completely unrelated to normal life but super interesting in the abstract. Who are those people and how on earth do they keep themselves fed? Because real life is just one long list of things that need to be done. Over and over again. Leaving very little time for abstracts of any description.
Back to this blog. I have been thinking and thinking about it and wondering if there is any justification to using it as an escape valve for all the ideas that I have that don't seem to really need expression in my life. Because that would be kind of nice although still somewhat self-indulgent. Anyway, who wants to read about abstract ideas in someone else's head? So if I use it in that way, I should have some kind of organizing theme or question or project to talk about to provide external structure to my messy interior. Kind of like Julie and Julia. Only I have less than no interest in cooking.
The problem is that I am interested in so many things that are unrelated to each other and resist an organizing theme. I am also fairly reactive to being pigeon-holed and so any attempt by my own self to put me in a category sends me reeling into a withdrawal sort of tailspin. You see here that I am trying to treat blogging like a task and yet the essential qualities of blogging that I like and which I am drawn to are exactly those that are not task-like. But I know that most of the world is task-oriented and understands sequences better than spatial descriptions and so to communicate I am trying to fit the inside of my head into those parameters which just makes me frustrated. Aaaagh!
It all comes back to the fact that I have an existential problem with being who I am. I wish fervently that I had different qualities than the ones I have because I admire those qualities in others and I see how very very useful they would be in my chosen life. And yet my whole life I have tried to cultivate those qualities and achieved what could only be described as a very low average showing in them with gaping holes and frequent burnouts and this is despite effort that seems way above what people who are naturally capable seem to put into their much better performances.
If I worked at being who I actually am, I would spend a lot more time thinking and writing and imagining. I would also pay more attention to the feelings of other people and my horses and the world in general and its overall emotional status. I experience everything so deeply and richly and in such colour but mostly it just gets in the way of getting anything concrete done. It's not that I don't like who I am. I really do. I just don't know how to justify the time it would take to process life if I was to do it at the speed and depth that I really want to do it in. And I do realize that time spent being has to be paid for by someone. Usually someone who is doing, not being. And that seems to me to be unfair, so I should limit "being" to times when everything else is all done. Which is exactly never.
This, by the way, is exactly why I love working with kids with autism. It is a time when I can totally justify being myself. To enter into their world and communicate with them on their level all I need to do is just relax and totally be myself for a change. It is so great! And it is even better to do this as a job where someone values what I am doing enough to pay me. The problem is that this is ethically not sustainable unless I can transfer what I am doing to actual caregivers, and because it is such an integral part of me it is really really hard to put that process into words and sequences that a task-oriented person could follow and succeed at. So then I think that perhaps I shouldn't again be self-indulgent, but save that particular intensive connecting energy for my own kids and husband who also need it. Because it is true that that type of being is work for me, just enjoyable and natural and easy in terms of technique. It leaves me drained but happy.
So, to follow this circuitous blog from beginning to end, I think that I am temperamentally not designed to get a lot done in the physical world. There probably is lots I can do in other realms, but because my lifestyle and culture really are centred on physical realities such as lots of food being consumed by our family every single day, I'm not sure where to put my natural abilities in terms of time allotment. I will probably continue to try to work against my nature as hard as I can for most of the day. However, it would really be nice to write about what is inside me and at least express part of the internal world that is always pushing at my boundaries. To organize my thoughts thematically would be nice but may be impractical, given that I resist organization in words. I do categorize thoughts and feelings and impressions by colour, and that may work to at least give some headings. Hmm.
Okay, here's what I could do. I could describe magical moments as I experience them. I think this is what I try to do with my poetry but it would be a nice stretch to use prose to really capture in a more understandable way the parts of life that I think are worth keeping. I'm thinking about Philippians 4:8 and 9 where it says:
"Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable; if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things."
This is such a good idea and it goes a long way to helping me switch my naturally critical tendencies to looking for the positive. It's a good recipe for mental health in general, probably, but like most good ideas, it is harder to do than to read! However, I really believe that we can link with God when we really see something He made or hid or put into an object in the physical world, or a person. I think what makes each one of us irreplaceable is that we all see different things that He hid, and if we are prevented from seeing them, then no one else will see those particular things.
So maybe I could write about what I see. Sometimes when I express that, I realize other people around me did not see exactly that, and so maybe it would be worth it to share. Worth the time it would take from the rest of my day labouring to get stuff done.
Okay, I like that.
And I feel much better now.
