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One of my favorite things to do as a kid in the 60’s was sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of popcorn and watching Ma and Pa Kettle. Many Sunday afternoons were spent laughing with this hillbilly couple as they tried to remedy unusual situations that life kept throwing them in spite of their best efforts to live the simple life. Upon winning a tobacco contest, Pa found himself, Ma with her potato sack figure, and their brood of 15 children moving out of their little log cabin in Cape Flattery and into a modern home with newfangled gadgets, providing even more possibilities for crazy antics as they settled themselves in with new neighbors, new digs and new ways of doing things. They were excited to win, but found themselves more than once longing for the old simple life in the course of the films.
Sometimes I feel a bit like the Kettles. I work hard, no doubt. I get things set up, provide processes and programs and people to make things “happen” in my business and my personal life…but in the midst of all of it, there are still moments I long for the simplicity of those days of popcorn and Sunday afternoon movies. Most often the longing comes when I have scheduled myself into a corner and left no real room to expand and breathe and just “be”. You too? Just because things are moving along, going well, seemingly getting you ahead, doesn’t mean that is what is really happening. We may find ourselves tired, run down, a feeling of listlessness we can’t quite put a finger on. That’s when it’s time to allow ourselves a trip back to the log cabin and let the quietness in our souls calm the craziness in our lives. That’s what I have been doing this weekend. Want to join me? Ok…pass the salt please. 🙂
Thanksgiving season has swiftly rushed past and we are now in the throes of Christmas shopping, decorating and baking. This time of year is reserved for reflection on days past, warm memories of those people and places of long ago, and a building of hope that the next calendar will turn over and see a bright New Year. We hear ring-a-linging bells on every corner as the Salvation Army Santa greets us, we watch as first one home then another in our neighborhoods throws light on the season with their various reindeer and sleighs, snowflakes and elves dancing along the fronts of glistening abodes and slippery sidewalks. Ah, Christmas…the time we should sit back and rest and really enjoy.
But do we? Many are working more hours now than ever before as the crush of the current economy has forced more people to find second and even third jobs. Masses of layoffs, closings and cutbacks have depressed the checkbooks along with the spirits of the working class. While embracing the real reason for the season, unfortunately love and contentment is buried in an avalanche of anxiety.
As much as we would like to see this way of life change, it seemingly is with us. Once a tide has turned it is so difficult to turn it back to simpler times, simpler truths and beliefs…not impossible…just more difficult.
As I was working from home today, I thought about how fortunate I am to do so when so many have to gird their loins and go out into the cruel world each day. I noticed too, and have been keenly aware of how “rushed” I will be and have been making a concerted effort for several months to slooooow doooowwwwwn. Not easy for this type A firstborn…but nothing worth doing is easy, right?
Many years ago I taught on this very subject in a women’s Bible Study I was leading at the time. I was encouraging us all in my teaching to take the time to enjoy the life the Lord has given us by eliminating some things from our lives that were a hindrance to true contentment and enjoyment. Several of the ladies were sharing how they didn’t “have time” to go to lunch or dinner with a friend anymore, or read a book, watch a favorite TV show, or sit on their back porch and eat an apple and listen to the birds sing and watch the squirrels run up and down the trees. Some were working more than one job, had small toddlers at home, an ailing parent or any of a number of various demands on their time. I took the opportunity to teach on “minute vacations”. So many times we are such perfectionists in our lives. We don’t do something until we can do it perfectly, and it ultimately never gets done. We don’t start a fun project because we can’t carve out an entire day to work on it, and we throw up our hands and say ” I will get to it, and my own time of enjoyment later”…and later never comes. Years pass, interest lags…and we never have anything to show for our lives but work, bed, eat, sleep a little and start over again.
How would your life change if you took more “minute vacations”? Drink a cup of hot cocoa and sit on the back porch…read 1 chapter, and only 1 chapter of your book each day…write one stanza of a poem or song…read the funny papers…feed the birds…take a walk around the block…practice the art of Simpli-F-Y.
Simpli-F-Y is anything you do Simply For You.
I recently returned from my annual trip to the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The weather was beautiful the full ten days, and rest and relaxation was the storyline. Good times with friends, much time for reflection alone, reading on my Kindle…all made for a perfect trip. Plans to go on this trip were made far ahead of time, deposits paid, my directives for staff in readiness and I was so looking forward to this trip. Then the news of an impending hurricane…Isaac…threatened to thwart all my wonderful plans.
The week before my departure, it was looking more and more like I may have to cancel my trip. I was watching a friend’s Facebook page. He lived right in the area where I was to stay, and the pictures he was posting looked fierce. When I expressed my concerns about cancelling my trip he assured me “Don’t worry, by the time you come next week you won’t even know the storm has blown through here.”
So after thinking about it for a few days, I decided to take my chances and not cancel my trip. I was hoping for the situation to change exactly as he said it would. And it was the right decision. The storm hooked, moved past the area, the bit of messiness was cleaned up in record time and I arrived to find a beautiful white sandy beach and all things in their rightful, safe places as I always had in the past.
On a particular day during my visit I was sitting quietly watching the children play and the pelicans swoop down for fish. I thought back to the wisdom of my friend’s advice and how it relates to life in general. I also thought how the beach is a beautiful example of the ever-changing life we are called to lead. I also thought back a bit further…
In high school,as an aspiring Journalist, it was quite natural that I would choose Creative Writing as one of my electives in my senior year. That year our class self-published a book full of some of the best of the literary works written by its students. The following work was chosen to grace the cover of the book. As I sat on the beach that day, I thought back to the words of this poem:
The secrets of the earth are written in the sand.
Each grain a different story, for those who understand.
The author is the ocean who left her book on shore.
Her waters hold the copyright, and now…just as before
The sea keeps on writing and her waves keep on churning,
And even now as we speak, another page is turning…
I pondered the meaning here and the words of my friend from the week before and how it related to my life at that very moment. So many of us are given a book of life, so to speak. It is full of pages of memories and moments…some laughter, some tears, some good times and some not so good, but they are all a vital part of our own book. Sometimes we have a book that others convincingly perceive as so perfect, that even we begin to think it is perfect and indestructible. Then a storm brews, the clouds lay low in the sky, the wind picks up and before we know it the tempest has become a full-fledged hurricane leaving debris and wreckage in its wake, and perhaps taking away buildings, a pier, the white purity of the sand and replacing it with seaweed and blackened piles of wood and mess. It is as if the book of our own life that was so beautiful one moment had pages ripped from it, and the remains were tossed on shore like flotsam, and forgotten.
We may deal with many things in our own book of life….the loss of a job, death of spouse, divorce, cancer or other illness, betrayal of a friend. We may feel as if our perfect life at that moment had an unrelenting storm blow through, crushing us, ripping a page from our life…and we find ourselves wondering if our book of life will ever be normal and whole again. Many end up turning to outer means to salve the inside heartbrokeness. They look for the missing pieces in another person, frenetic activity, a bottle of pills, or a martini glass. And they realize no matter how many things come into our life on the outside to cover over the sadness, the page will still be missing…but… it’s ok to have a missing page. It doesn’t mean you no longer have a book…
How many times do you keep going back to that same spot in your own book, looking for the missing page, and ignoring all your other beautiful and joyful pages in the process? How many of the other pages appear pristine and look as if no one has ever visited them? Shouldn’t they be lovingly dogeared, thin from where you have handled them, reading and re-reading the wonderful parts of your life, and remembering? Isn’t your life to be like the sea…getting written over and over each day with new stories, new experiences, new opportunities to cover up and
wash away the harshness that is the missing page?
Perhaps the secret…is in the sand…
I am one of the unfortunate sufferers of arthritis and osteoporosis. The effects of both these conditions have pretty much been a part of my life in one way or other since my late teens, early 20’s. At first, my parents thought it was traditional “growing pains”, so we pretty much ignored it as such and went on. But as I left my teens and entered my 20’s I started having some really odd pains…most mornings it was hard to get out of bed.
I found I couldn’t do the common things of a 20 year old…it was an effort to pick up my baby, my hands would “give out”, or my upper arms some mornings had virtually no strength in them, seemingly overnight. My feet had what I called heel spurs, but looking back I can see it was where the osteoporosis had set in. Not the normal physical life of a 20 year old. I plodded through it and played more with my daughter on the more mobile days, and cut back activity on others when we sat and read a lot or watched the tube, due to my aching joints and bones. But once I entered the 30’s, the pain had become debilitating more days than not, so off I trotted to the doctor, and thus the diagnosis all those years ago.
Several different medicines have been tried, but not being much for synthetic answers, I pretty much have just “adjusted” to the pain and difficulty in my body as the years have rolled on. Now at the age of “over 50”, there is pain every day, all day, in more than one spot of my body and that is my norm. Frankly most of the time I push through it and don’t even really notice it until it gets outside the pain level I have grown accustomed to all these years.
This week, I decided to change my daily routine. I had begun working at home the last couple of months pretty much exclusively and although I am a very organized person, I kept finding myself kind of drifting from one activity to another during the day and not getting as much accomplished as I desired and knew I could complete. I also seemed to be running out of time to just be myself and do some personal things I love such as read the Kindle on the back deck. So I sat down with pencil and paper, jotted down a tentative scheduling of my time and necessary daily activities, and placed those in general slots of time during the day. I wanted to create a new “normal” schedule for myself since the “normal” I have had for many years was no longer existent when I came back home to work, rather than going to an office every day.
All week, I have been on schedule and now that it is Friday it is actually starting to kind of feel “normal”. I marvel over the things I am accomplishing. I am marveling more over being able to stop at a certain time of the day, just like in an office setting, and fix my dinner, watch TV, read, rest or whatever I want to do for a slot of hours in my evening, rather than working till bedtime because I took 5 minutes here and 15 there during the day and “got behind” on things I really needed to complete for the day trying to grab moments of personal time of reflection and rest. I am more focused, I am more energized, and even my body is responding by getting more physical rest in longer segments, which could do nothing but aid in my health issues, right?
What I have found most interesting is this…
I have spent years working in my business. Many hours were willingly put in and very much enjoyed because the business was growing and so was I. I was meeting new people, being recognized in my community and among my peers, becoming a spokesperson for my industry. My new “normal” was getting up, working till bed with a few moments sprinkled through the day here and there of personal or family time, and doing it all over the next day. Prior to this working career, I had been a stay-at-home mom that worked at home, was in my yard and gardens for about 30 hours a week ( my passion), worked in my church, cooked every day, made bread, and did all those things that I adored doing for my family. A sad divorce forced me into the work world, and I adapted to it quickly and loved it, too…but the things that were once “normal” for me became the “abnormal”, and stayed that way for many years.
When I got up this morning at 6, I started thinking about my life now, and what my “normal” is now…and more what my “normal” today should be. As I took my morning walk, I thought about how my joint pain over the years had grown to a point that what was once thought of as terribly paralyzing “growing pains”, were tiny compared to the pain I now feel in my body as the norm each day. It truly does paralyze me in many ways and make me incapable of living a “normal” life for my age. I had let pain and difficulty physically become my “normal”. Nowadays, some pretty severe pain has to come along to slap me and say “hey you, you have some real physical issues here that need to be addressed. This isn’t just something you have to go through…a “growing pain”…it is out of the NORMAL…do something about it”.
How many of us, I wonder, have let sad situations, people who are jerks that consistently disrespect us by their words or behavior, or personal hardship and fear become our “normal” because it was looked upon as a “growing pain”…just something you have to go through, everyone does… it is “normal”…
Maybe it’s time for each of us to take a good long look at the life we lead, who we allow into it, what activities and priorities are part of the DNA of our today. Have we allowed people, emotions, beliefs or any number of “abnormal” things become our “normal” through disregard of the pain they may be causing us, and have caused us over the years? Is it time for us to change our perception? Or, even more… is it time to take a look at our pain head on, decide what has taken the value of our life and turned it into a devaluing thing…and then make a shift back to our kind of “normal”?
It might be that going back to our “normal” is the real growing pain we need to experience today.
Wow…June at Gould’s Salon is my new best friend. I got a massage today and she is really great. I spent a good portion of the day trying to figure out how I could convince her that she needs to live with me. It was supposed to be an “in office” day, but once I left Gould’s…and June boohoo…I swung by Goodwill to see if I could find some shelving or cabinets or something to use in the TLC room , but nothing turned up so I wandered on to a few other errands including a run by the library for a book I had on hold, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh ( pronounced Shay), former young CEO of Zappos.
I was already fascinated with the company and its mild-mannered leader, so when the book came out it was a must read for me. Imagine the excitement when I found out it was the next Book Club pick for the cleaning industry group I am a member of.
I can hardly wait to read it then pick the brains of those who have read it also to see how we can bring to life the same customer service phenomenon that he has helped create in his companies in our own businesses. After my errands were complete, I made the last stop one of my faves, Nagoya Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar near my office. I reveled in the clean atmosphere and clean food, as I began to turn the pages of the book for the next hour, while I ate a solo lunch. I don’t get to do so often, but today seemed, well, right for it. Upon returning to the office, we received a call from a lady wanting to get a cleaning bid, and I could tell by the conversation my office manager had with her on the phone, it was a sad situation that drove her to call us. As it turned out, the young woman’s husband had been ill for about 18 months, and the house had been a far second priority to her spouse’s care. The husband unfortunately had passed away 6 weeks before, and now she needed a great deal of help to get her surroundings, and life, back together. I hadn’t planned on doing any more bids this week, but the sadness struck a chord, and I went to meet her and view her home. The whole property inside and out was pretty much a totally neglected mess. It reminded me of Miss Havisham’s home as described in Great Expectations, almost as if the clock had stopped on this family 18 months ago when the husband and father fell ill. The woman was pleasant, but as we went through the home she became quite tearful, and so did I, as I saw the pain she was obviously going through just thinking about having to get things moving around her home again; this time alone. We set her up to get cleaned on Monday, and she looked relieved to know we could fit her in quickly. And, she looked a little hopeful as I left. That really made me reflect on the name of the book I was reading, Delivering Happiness. You know, it just doesn’t take much to make someone happy. Sometimes it just takes a Special Delivery.