Albert Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. “Insanity” seems like a pretty strong word to use – “foolishness” might fit better.
I’m not so foolish to think that something in my life will change if I don’t help it along, but I do have a bad habit of putting things off for another day. And then I’m surprised at how much time has passed without making headway.
I’ve known for a long time that I need help remembering to do things. That’s why I have a huge whiteboard in my kitchen with notes circled and starred all over it. If a to-do item is written there, it will get done (eventually). But here we are in a new year, and there are still things on the board left undone – from months and months ago.
Well, I’m finally ready for a change. So lists have been compiled and a plan is in place (with the help of my very organized husband who has been patient with my piles and undone-things for too long). Time will be spent more wisely and goals will be achieved. This is my hope and dream.
And to help organize my life, I’m going to pay attention to the following online resources:
There’s an old country saying that goes something like this:
“When is the best time to plant an oak tree? Fifty years ago. When is the second best time? Today.”
Change can be scary, but it’s easiest handled bit by bit (like eating an elephant is easier one bite at a time). One step after another, and soon I’ll have reached a mile marker. Each small goal achieved will bring me closer to my bigger goals – whether it’s to have an ordered house and life or to finish my latest novel.
I’m excited to start this journey of change today. How about you?
The Going-to-the-Sun Road wound upwards around the ice-carved mountainsides of Glacier National Park in northern Montana. Forests of evergreens, patches of fading wild flowers, and the yellow-orange of still-changing foliage spread out before me along the road on three sides. Even the cliff face on my left, climbing toward an autumn sky, held beauty in its grey hues, and jagged lines and shadows. Mountain buttes hid the foothills of ridges. Ridges bowed before peaks. Each layer a darker shade of blue to purple-grey. All filled the horizon above v-shaped valleys.
I went around a curve, the traffic slowed to a standstill, and there, blocking the panorama, was a rocky outcrop with a rough-hewn tunnel leading through it. In comparison, the harshness of the lifeless stone and the spiny, leafless trees here didn’t hold the same beauty as what I’d just passed. Behind me, the view was still so awesome I could have stared at it for hours, if not days, if not years (so different from the grassy mesas and the looming shoulders of barren mountains I often hike near my home 1250 miles away).
On through the tunnel, and the vista was again wondrous ahead, this time less so behind. And so, The-Going-to-the-Sun Road shifted before and behind, in varying degrees of glorious – because, really, even the views that held too much brown and grey or not enough mountain or sky, still held perfection in their own way.
During one of those moments in my ascent when I just had to stop and stand and try to take it all in, I thought of how much looking back can ruin my present and my future. The landscape of my past is filled with both beauty and ugliness. But living in the past – whether glorious or gritty – has often been a trap that keeps me from living in the present. At the same time, working busily for tomorrow (even if tomorrow means the end of the day) without enjoying this very day, seems as much of a waste.
I don’t make true New Year’s resolutions, but one thing I’m going to try very hard to do this coming year is to enjoy my every today and hope more in the future.
What changes do you want to make in the new year?
I’ve been getting up early and going to bed late, rushing here and there, trying to finish everything necessary to make this a great Christmas. I overextended myself in November, so I’m a month behind on everything including making crafts, baking cookies, decorating the tree and the house, and shipping off packages still waiting to be filled with gifts. Not to mention the Christmas cards that need personalized notes (plus addressing and mailing out). I even had to cancel my volunteer day this week – just no time. I am, in fact, doing exactly what I promised myself I would not do again this year.
I wanted this Christmastime to be less stressful and more joy-filled than previous years. To follow a plan, check things off lists, and put my feet up the week before the red-suited plump guy slides down the chimney, and sigh contentedly that life is good.
Today, in the middle of all this craziness – and my broken dream of a perfectly planned and executed holiday – I remembered why I like Christmas. It’s not dragging out the decorations and the lights, or the annual five-pound weight gain, or the hours of shopping and stressing over the right gift. But I love the twinkling lights that make the world glow like a fairyland. I love sharing and eating holiday goodies. And I love giving gifts and celebrating the reason for the season: the birth of Jesus. All these things, plus the feeling that everyone seems jollier this time of year, add up to why I like Christmas so much.
There’s one more thing I remembered today. Life is good. Very good, despite the self-imposed craziness. I’m blessed beyond measure. I have a loving husband and children, friends who care about me, a soft bed and a warm house, and plenty to eat. And too many more blessings to count.
And so this blog post is getting out late as I’ve attempted to uncrazify my day. Christmas isn’t what makes me rush around trying to get things done – it’s my own expectations and what I think others expect from me.
I can still enjoy Christmas if I let go of a few things on my unfinished to-do list. If I slow down and focus on what I want the next twelve days of December to be like, I will have the best gifts anyone could ask for, or give – joy and peace, and time spent with friends and family.
How are you handling holiday stress?
The following is a portion of a blog post from Lisa-Jo Baker at Tales from a Gypsy Mama website. It speaks so truthfully about finding the heroic in ordinary lives that I wanted to share it. To read the full post, click here.
To All the Heroes – yes you, the ones up to your elbows in ordinary
We all want a hero…
We all want a hero to stand on a stage or a white horse or a battlefield or a football field or a bridge and declare to the darkness, “you shall not pass.”
We want to believe in courage bigger than us and the role models willing to leave their footprints behind for us to tentatively step into.
Prophets and rock stars, preachers and teachers and bloggers and poets. We want them to pour their words and point their lives like warning signs to the tired who come behind all bended over with our ordinary and expecting that others will triumph so that we can live in awe…
We want heroes with grand lives to sweep us up into their stories and propel us out to save the world through their endeavors while we stay home and fold the boring laundry.
And what if we are the heroes we are waiting for?
What if we can change and mold and challenge and fight back the darkness from our own corner of the Kingdom.
What if ordinary is heroic?
Most heroes I know wear jeans and T-Shirts most days and fight fevers more than Hercules.
Most heroes I know don’t have or care about blog platforms or their readership. They are too busy figuring out how to love their kids through a meltdown.
Most heroes I know are sitting right there in the pew behind us with their broken down daughters, their aging parents, their newborns who won’t sleep through the night, their singing off-key.
Most heroes I know are so ordinary we wouldn’t give them a second glance in the checkout line. They reek of homework and figuring out the taxes and how to squeeze a date night into another crazy week of car pool and sports and getting one more stain out of the carpet.
Most heroes I know are brave because they keep going in the face of their overwhelming fears, their worries, the voices in their heads that tell them they aren’t good enough, diligent enough, calm enough, prepared enough, or any other enough that can spit up out of the “perfect-o-meter.”
Eight women spend a morning cooking food for the friend who’s house was trashed by a hurricane, for the single parent who doesn’t have enough, for the family who will likely knock on the church door tomorrow…
There is no showmanship in heroism. There is just the next thing. Sometimes that thing might feel small – like helping your kid with his math homework. And sometimes it might feel big – like standing on a stage, or writing a book, or helping build a school or raising a million dollars or hosting a global webcast. But my guess is heaven uses a very different yard stick than we do.
So keep on, you.
Yes, you. The one up to your elbows in what feels like ordinary.
Lisa-Jo Baker believes “motherhood should come with its own super hero cape.” If you subscribe to her blog posts at www.lisajobaker.com, you’ll get her free eBook The Cheerleader for Tired Moms.
I’m presently in the throes of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) – along with over 250,000 people worldwide. In case you haven’t heard of NaNo, it’s “thirty days of literary abandon” where insane people commit to writing a 50,000 word novel in one month (that being November). Besides the obvious hurdles this kind of commitment will throw in many people’s paths – finding the time to write 1,667 words per day (especially with a job or school schedule), doing everyday chores (laundry, housework, bathroom visitation), cooking for the family, taking care of children, running errands and shopping, spending time with friends/significant others, sleeping – there is one major hurdle to contend with first.
But “hurdle” isn’t even the right word to describe this other barrier – it’s not the same kind of frame-like structure that a runner has to jump over but is easily kicked down. It’s not even a wall. It’s the mountain of the first step. Excuses are the foothills, they should be the easy part to overcome, but we often make them the hardest: I don’t have enough time or what if I can’t make it work or what if I’m not smart enough, and so on. What it all adds up to – this mountain, this dragon – is fear.
On the field of the self stands a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon. The battle must be fought anew every day. ~ Steven Pressfield
By the end of today, I expect to have a total of 30,000 words toward my 50K goal. And because of my commitment (which many nights has left me asleep at the keyboard after midnight) and the sacrifice of all kinds of things for the cause, I’ll have the bones of a novel when November 30th rolls around. This first draft will need months of editing, revising, and rewriting. It will take a lot more work to finish…but I don’t want to think about that right now. I still have two weeks left that need my chained-to-the-keyboard-and-no-editing attention. I have to focus on this one step (broken into smaller 30-day bites) toward the greater goal of publishing the novel that this manuscript will someday become.
If I hadn’t pushed through all my what-ifs and decided to step up and give this everything I had, I wouldn’t be feeling pretty good about my writing goals right now. Life has a way of tossing obstacles in my path, things that can throw me completely off course. If for some reason I don’t make my NaNo goal by the end of the month, I will still be closer to finishing my first draft than if I hadn’t started at all. No matter what, I will have established a writing routine, and proved to myself that I can do what I set my mind on. And I’ll have a good start going into the new year.
We often let our fears and our excuses get in the way of even starting a thing. The first step toward doing something worthwhile can be the hardest to take, but it can also lead to all kinds of unexpected rewards along the way.
According to HalloweenSurvey.com a lot of Americans love Halloween: 72% celebrate it, 50% of adults wear a costume for the holiday, and over 8 billion dollars is spent every year to prepare for it. That’s a whole lot of scary love. The reverse statistics mean that 28% of the population either don’t care about it or don’t like Halloween. But whether you love dressing up and giving yourself over to the role of your favorite other self, or think the whole thing is silly, or believe that Halloween’s roots in evil practices are cause to shun the holiday, there are a few things we can probably all agree on:
1. Everyone wears a mask sometimes. How many people do we show our real selves to? Probably only a few that we truly trust. And even if we are the upfront, this-is-who-I-am kind of people, we still have a tendency to hide our feelings. Anger and cheerfulness can both mask deeply felt pain. Remembering that everyone is wounded and scarred to some degree can make us more compassionate to those around us.
2. Each day is what we make of it. Whether you believe that Halloween is loads of fun or just plain evil, the day is ours to take from it or give to it what we will. Just like every other day. Our days are good or bad because of the choices we make and how we decide to perceive life. No matter our circumstances, we are each responsible for our part in the making of every day we’re given.
3. Life is sometimes tricky and sometimes a treat, but more often it’s something in between. We have great days and we have awful days. But life is lived mostly in the ones that fall between those extremes. These are the normal “okay” days that often seem to just creep along, filled with unremarkable hours – unless we take the time to really look for the remarkable in the mundane. Finding contentment right where we are – fun-size chocolate bars, anyone? – is something worth striving for.
How did you measure up to the Halloween statistics this year?
After my recent post about finding beauty in imperfection, I came across Ari Seth Cohen’s Advanced Style blog. According to a note in the sidebar, he roams “the streets of New York looking for the most stylish and creative older folks” to photograph. He shares these photos on his blog, as well as video interviews. He says, “Respect your elders and let these ladies and gents teach you a thing or two about living life to the fullest.”
In one post he explains that he “started the blog in order to change people’s perception of aging and show that there is much fun to be had once you reach 80, 90 and 100 years old. Women often tell [him] that after 40 they have started to feel invisible…girls have reached out to tell [him] that they look forward to growing old like the Advanced Style ladies. Older women have commented that [his] photos have given them the permission to dress up and feel good about themselves.”
He’s also working on a documentary film titled Advanced Style which presents “portraits of women aging gracefully with tremendous spirit [that] will challenge conventional ideas about beauty, growing old, and Western culture’s increasing obsession with youth.”
If my mother was still alive, she’d celebrate her 85th birthday this year. I like to think Ari Seth Cohen would have picked her out of the crowd to photograph, too. She wasn’t extravagant, but she loved color, walked with her head held high (because ladies should have good posture), owned dozens of purses and scarves, and never left the house without wearing a bright shade of lipstick and a spray of perfume.
There is something remarkable about people who dress in their own unconventional way, regardless of what anyone else thinks. It speaks of freedom and courage (and maybe rebellion). Seeing someone – especially an elderly someone – dressed in classic elegance or crazy colors and patterns always makes me smile. Not because I think they look funny but because I know they must be the most interesting people to get to know. They have stories to tell and something to say to the rest of us.
Do you know someone from the “wise and silver-haired set” who you’ll never forget because of their own special style?
Cate Macabe 