Stuff I'm Probably Not Going to Do in This Lifetime

I'm planning an easy day today.  So here's an easy post.

I've been thinking of my internal stress factory lately as an overtaxed computer, with too many applications and processes running in the background.  Time to "Force Quit" some of these energy-suckers.  And to "Trash" some altogether. 

By way of mental decluttering, here's some things I'm ready to let go of, from the ridiculous to the sublime.  There are certainly more dreams and schemes to divest, but this is a start.  I'm putting the following to bed:

Stuff I'm Probably Not Going to Do in This Lifetime

Have more kids

Win a Nobel Peace Prize

Win a MacArthur genius grant

Win a Pulitzer Prize

Enter the Peace Corps

Do an Iron Man

Become a concert pianist
Backpack through Europe, or India, or anywhere

Run for office

Go bungee jumping

Get taller

Get a law degree

Become a midwife

Learn to speak French

Pilot a plane

Climb Mt. Everest

Strike it rich

Bowl a 300 game (or, for that matter, break 200)

Become a singer/songwriter

Star in a film

. . .

Although it seems silly, perhaps, I have to admit that I've carried some residue of these aspirations well into my adult life, in fact past midlife.  Really.  And these are just the tip of the iceberg.  I'll need to dig deeper to return my everyday working hard drive to a cool running, streamlined, efficient state.  Purging could become my new addiction. . .

A Poem Because I Put Off Writing This Post

Putting Off a Mirage

It seems to me

we live in the myth

of choice

and control

opting

solving

conducting

our lives

Weighing one way

against another

aim

against aim

judging

ourselves

improving

ourselves

In truth

so much takes place

outside this illusion

is “chosen” or done or lived

by others

happens 

to others

and rolls down to us

What then does it mean

to procrastinate?

Life is so much bigger

and smaller

than that

Weed Reflections

I have spent a fair amount of time recently on my hands and knees.  Not praying, or begging.  Weeding.

Our backyard has been taken over by mustard garlic, burdock, deadly blooming nightshade, creeping charlie, thistles, nettles, dandelions, broadleaf, and other green and growing nuisances.  We are also plagued by upstart box elder seedlings--the devil to remove, due to the right-angled underground turn taken by their roots.

Working to reclaim this formerly habitable part of our property has sent my body into an almost permanent penitent position.  And then there are my dirt-caked nails, as soil has even penetrated my admittedly cheap gardening gloves. 

My mind, too, has assumed the position.  

To begin with, there is the guilt and confusion I feel as I wrestle with those unwanted fledglings.  How do I decide what stays, and what goes?  Do I let neighbors determine the composition of my landscape?  (Do I only imagine that they look askance at my dandelion spores wafting toward their perfect lawns?)  Do I adhere to the norms of the politically correct?  ("Mustard Garlic, invasive, bad.")  Do I consult the experts, with their lists of unwelcome species?

I have the easiest time with those varieties known to be dangerous to dogs and small grandchildren.  Nightshade and burdock, I pull with abandon.  But what about the creeping charlie, with its gingery smell and its sweet purple blossoms, which has volunteered to take over for my sketchy grass?  Why, again, do I want to preserve the stuff that requires constant mowing, and constant nagging about mowing?  

And on the other side of this yard maintenance divide are the pansies, begonias, roses, raspberries, mint, peonies, irises, forget-me-nots, mums, columbine, poppies, tulips, sedum, stella d'oro and other day lilies.  The plants I have introduced intentionally, and wish to keep.  Somehow, they thrive less happily than the so-called "weeds."  Perhaps this is how I should distinguish weeds from flowers, though that seems a bit pessimistic.

My mind is also occupied, as I yank and discard, with applying the metaphor to my life.  It comes to me that lots of what I do, and think about, grows like Topsy and threatens to take over my hours and my days.  And that much of it has crept in, uninvited by me.  And that many of the things I have chosen, and attempted to nurture, are not flourishing.

Like my novel, choked by the weeds of Wisconsin politics.  Losing its struggle for a dedicated patch of ground.

Tomorrow seems like a good day for more weeding. . . .

Married to a Workaholic (Again!)

[Available from Zazzle.com --the shirt, not the workaholic]

If I am becoming my mother, as so many of us fear, it may have something to do with the fact that I keep marrying my father.  


The workaholics in my life, past and present, are, or were, good men.  They are, or have been, absorbed in activity that I recognize as meaningful, and morally valuable.  


My father was a doctor, the kind who made house calls and got paid in rabbits and farm produce as well as in cash.  When he kept patients waiting, it was because he took the needed time to listen to each of them, and to relate to their lives and their true illnesses.  I was used to his absences from family outings and occasions, the skid marks he left arriving late for dinner and leaving afterwards for the hospital, the interrupting phone calls and even police dispatched to our home if our one family phone was tied up too long and an emergency call couldn't get through.  His work was important, and it came first.  And last.  


My first husband was, and is, a clinical psychologist.  Like my mother before me, I spent long evenings alone with our child, since he worked late, past her bedtime, several days a week.  Unlike my father, he didn't break for dinner.  We took two cars to parties when he was on call, which was almost always since he usually practiced solo.  My sleep was broken by patients' calls to discuss their insomnia, as well as more urgent problems.  His patients were important, and their needs came first.  And last.


My second husband is a university professor and committed change agent, who commutes to work in another city, in another state.  His students and the disenfranchised community groups he works with command his energy and attention, in between writing, preparing for classes and presentations, traveling internationally for meetings and research, and fulfilling other professional obligations.  In the last few years, he has begun to provide expertise, always for the defendant, in death penalty cases.  His iPhone accompanies us everywhere, even to bed and the dog park, and can be relied upon for late-breaking bulletins and late-night and weekend calls from graduate students and project participants.  These people are important.  I should have listened when he told me that, in his first marriage, work came first.  And last.  I thought we would be different.


But why am I writing this sad saga in my blog about procrastination?  Because, for whatever reason, this pattern in my relationships with men is part of how I got where I am today.  And part of how I didn't get where I thought I wanted to be.  My husbands would tell you that my choice to devote much of my time and energy to child-rearing necessitated their focus on work, and on providing.  In both marriages, I experienced it differently.  It seemed that their fevered work paces were unalterable, and after initial skirmishes, I gave up and worked (or didn't work) around them.  Having grown up with one mostly absent parent, I felt that my children needed to be someone's first priority while they were young.  And it was clear that person was going to have to be me.  Whatever other work I took on, for pay and as a volunteer, had to occupy the space that was left.


But in truth, I can admit now that there was an element of martyrdom in my compromising. And that motherhood, for all its challenges and importance, functioned partly to get me off the hook of dealing with fears of failure and even stronger fears of success.  An even more uncomfortable confession is the naming of my own inner workaholic.  Had I known how to manage the perfectionist mother and the unfocused but nevertheless perfectionist scholar/writer in me, I might have been able to give attention to more of the work I longed to do.  


I still live with a workaholic, and our routines at this point assign much of the family and household work to me.  But I aspire, as does my spouse, to effect some small but important changes in how we share time and responsibility and freedom for our own pursuits.  My blog writing has been partly fueled by his willingness to assume the dish-washing chores--mostly--for the last few months.  After years of wrangling about this domestic task, years which saw me trying to restyle dish-washing as a meditative practice, and trying to hold my male children accountable for a job their male parent escaped as much as possible, he somehow heard me, finally.  He says it was when I pointed out that washing the dishes took at least an hour an a half of my time each day.  He thought I could do something more important with that time.  And he was right.


So I defend to the death these days his right to do this work without criticism.  When my children complain about improperly stored items or food residue baked onto plates, spoons and bowls by the dishwasher, I invite them to do better.  


I have accepted that my partner's approach to work is a product of his own demons, and not a realm for my reform efforts.  But I am no longer going to use it as an excuse to give up on myself and the use of my talents.  If nothing else, his example is a cautionary tale in my face that can motivate my own more human-friendly work balance.  And who knows?  Maybe if I stop fighting it, he may eventually come less to defend it.  As I said before, he is a good man.

Getting on With Writing

  
On Monday, I announced that "doing more writing" was my focus goal for this week.  Not very specific, you say.  And you are right, and I am, that I need to describe something that I can recognize when it does, or doesn't happen.  What would "more writing" look like?


Having carried the idea of being a writer with me from childhood, I have a plethora of romanticized notions of what that means.  I first externalized my writing persona by creating a warm-weather garret above my family's garage, separated from my bedroom by a small second-story sunporch.  I dragged a worn armchair, a rough table and a wooden chair into the barren space.  For light, I had the single bulb on a pull string.  I was Jo, in Little Women--without the hardship of a Civil War, and the single-minded effort that produced her serial stories, the "art" she traded for money.  I wrote mostly poetry, to some notice.  The only serious character I created was myself.


When I was in graduate school, and engaged, more or less, in writing a dissertation, I drifted back to writing poetry.  I submitted poems, and published a few.  I savored the "personal" rejections that encouraged me to send more.  I hit the Poetry Slam scene, with some "success."  I was accepted to my state's Fellowship of Poets, and began to make time for writing workshops and groups and conferences.  I dreamed of writing a novel, but disciplined myself not to begin until I had finished my Ph.D.  


Not finishing was something that took years.  It wasn't over easily, or clearly.  And when it was done, finally, there was a mourning period for my doctoral self, and then immersion in the drama of my expanded and extended families.  I wrote sporadically, and submitted only a couple of commentaries intended for public radio.  Eventually, I completed drafts of two children's books, some decent poems, several essays, a song, and the beginning chapters of a novel.  When my husband would identify me as a writer, I would resist, saying that a writer writes.  I was instead, like my father before me, someone who wanted to write.


My shelves are filled with books that belong to such a person, a would-be writer.  I have spent many years preparing myself to write.  And only in these last months, since beginning to write this blog, do I begin to feel entitled to the name.  I am a writer, because writing is something I do.  Regularly.  And with conviction.


I have surprised myself by the tenacity with which I have kept this new commitment.  All the usual roadblocks have shown up over the life of Put it to Bed, but I have clambered over them, driven around, and even blown up a few.  I want to do this, and for once, I am allowing myself to put something I want first.


But now it's time to grow this part of my life.  I acknowledged in reading what I wrote yesterday about procrastinating that I don't procrastinate about everything, and that, in fact, I might seem quite productive to others.  But what makes me a procrastinator, in my own view, is having spent a lifetime not getting down to writing--not giving this dream, and my talent, its due.  


As I try to "operationalize" my focus goal this week, I am torn between plunging back into my novel; sending off my children's book manuscript; making a regular time to write poetry; and resurrecting my abandoned practice of "morning pages," Julia Cameron's (The Artist's Way) recommendation for dealing with writer's block.  


In the past, morning pages have sometimes been the only thing I was writing in my long dry periods.  While I kept to the practice religiously, sometimes for a year or more, the unpublishable tablets and notebooks filling and accumulating, it was not very satisfying as my only outlet.  And my perfectionistic demons dominated.  Julia said three pages, and by God, I was going to do three pages, even if the pages I'd provided myself were outsized, even if it took 45 minutes or so to fill them (instead of the prescribed 15 minutes), even if carpal tunnel syndrome made my writing hand numb before I was finished.  


But I have decided, for the rest of this week anyway, to try again with morning pages.  It seems like a good routine to add to my established blogging schedule, and a practice that might have some benefits in dealing with the grief, depression and anxiety that are probably not going to enhance any other writing.  I am due for a major change in my paid work schedule at the end of the school year, and am anticipating having one less needful household member in the near future.  Those changes should better accommodate more "productive" writing.  


So morning pages it is.  And a smaller notebook.


(My husband goes on record as objecting.  He never liked morning pages, and considers my blog a glorified form of the same.  According to him, it's just another dodge.  I persist, nonetheless.  This is my train, and he is not the engineer!)

If Service is the Rent We Pay, I Need a Rent Party

Marian Wright Edelman is most often cited as the source of the saying "Service is the rent we pay for living." In her book  The Measure of Our Success : Letter to My Children and Yours,  she credits her parents with teaching her this view.  Her parents may have been quoting Shirley Chisholm, or Harry Strunk whose paraphrase was engraved in stone on the front of his newspaper building, or Lord Halifax, contemporary of Churchill and Gandhi.  But the issue of provenance is less important than the compelling weight of the phrase.  Edelman goes on to say that service "is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time."


Lately, my rent has been going up.  And spare time?  What's that?


In the form of volunteer leadership in the nonprofit community organization to which my church belongs, my "rent" has risen over the past two years to take up a good half of my working hours.  The meetings I bemoan are, for the most part, occasioned by my membership in no less than six task forces, collaboratives, teams, committees and subcommittees related to the work of this organization.  I am up late, and up again early most days, discharging one obligation or another incurred as a result of this affiliation.  And I have been mostly happy to be thus engaged.


When I joined a Unitarian church after spending all of my adult life "unchurched," I welcomed the opportunity to become more involved in social justice work.  Four of my church's seven principles underscore this value.  UUs (Unitarian Universalists) "affirm and promote"  

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

In the course "Building Your Own Theology," which I finally took after about six years in my church, I constructed a personal credo centered on service. Doing peace and justice work is the major way that I have experienced anything remotely resembling "the sacred" in my life.

But I'm beginning to think I may have gone too far.  And I am having trouble placing this major consumer of time in the context of procrastination.  Is all (or some) of this absorption in the needs of others a dodge, at least partly a way to avoid working on my own goals and dreams?  Does it balloon as a result of the difficulty I have in saying no, and in setting and maintaining sensible boundaries?  Am I (shudder) globally codependent?  How do I balance "the work of this church" with the work of this woman?  Have I become, as my children assert, a "church lady?"

The amount of grumbling and swearing I've been doing this week and last, as I slog through the final details of the huge annual fundraising project I've somehow been left in charge of, are probably telling me something.  Above and beyond is where I've been going for quite a while, and I recognize the need to tether myself a bit more securely to the ground of my limited self before I leave the stratosphere.  

The way this organization (and probably most others) works, there will be precious little respite between this now-routine crisis and the next.  So, in the words of Ron Weasley,  "she needs to sort out her priorities."

Freedom--It's Gaining on Me!

I never really got around to reading Erich Fromm's 1941 classic Escape from Freedom--which was interestingly published in England under the title Fear of Freedom.  But I do own the book, and I have read several synopses, so that should count for. . .not so much, probably.  


In any case, I find his premise compelling.  Powell's Books sums it up this way:

If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. 

Fromm, according to people who have read the book, wrote of the anxiety and emptiness many of us experience in the absence of imposed controls.  Been there, felt that.   And he distinguished between "freedom from" (bad) and "freedom to" (good), which are, in essence, the horns of the dilemma I have been straddling for a good chunk of my adult life.


For many reasons, some profound and most serendipitous, I have existed largely outside the formal labor market for most of my "working" life.  This is not to say that I haven't worked, and even held jobs from time to time.  But in and out of formal paid employment, I have "enjoyed" a great deal of freedom.  I have had jobs that involved setting my own schedule, determining my own assignments, and traveling over fairly large geographic areas.  Jobs with night and weekend hours which were "comped" into hours off.   And this explains why I was reading Alan Lakein's How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life all those years ago.


The latitude to decide what I'm going to do, and when I'm going to do it, has been a benediction and a scourge.  Rita Emmett, in The Procrastinator's Handbook, writes of the dangers of drift, the subject of Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project video this week, and particularly troublesome for those of us in relatively unstructured work situations.  Researchers tell us that our overtaxed brains are buckling under the weight of too many choices and "decision fatigue." Pursued by freedom, I am tempted, as Erich Fromm warned, to flee into the waiting arms of authoritarianism. Maybe I should "get a job." Or maybe I should approach my life like a job. Create routine. Generate lists. Boss myself around.


Of course, Erich Fromm would have me brave the storms of cowardice.  Turn and face the opportunities in my freedom.  Use that "freedom to" connect with the world I find myself in, and join my creative effort to the project of improvement.  Theoretically, this way of experiencing freedom would assuage my anxiety, replace the emptiness with purpose, and avoid the need for arbitrary structure.  


At the end of all this reflecting, I am left with my choices.  I still have to figure out what to do today, and where to begin.  (My dog just volunteered to take this decision from me.  He knows what I should do first.)