I have needed to have several things contracted out at our home recently. It has been a struggle to work with their time frames … they are narrow and not so accommodating. As a result, in order to work with them, I had to cancel or shift around several of the things normally in my schedule. Which made me feel bad. Rude. Inconsiderate.
This began with a shed, which was part one of a hay effort; they told me there was a 3-5 WEEK wait; so I moved ahead with the other factor - I was going to have the hay delivered on time because we all know that you 'make hay while the sun shines'. And 'the early bird gets the worm' – translated, this means, if you don't buy your hay when it's available, it goes up in price and may actually run out before you get it.
So now I arrange for my hay to be delivered before the shed and rearrange my life to be there when it comes. The shed company calls and says, "We will be there Thursday sometime between 12 and 4." (which is in five DAYS, not weeks). Sigh. I cancel my cello lesson. I rearrange meetings. I postpone the hay. (Which, consequently means I now have to ration it, as I am very close to being out). I have to contact tractor-guy post-haste to level the ground, because shed-guys don't do that sort of thing.
Tractor-guy shows up a half hour early, which means I am not even home and I get to pay for the time he was waiting.
Shed-guys show up THE NIGHT BEFORE at dusk and ask if they can put it up at 7 AM? I say, "No, can you come back at 8?" They say, "NO".
Sigh once more. Now I cannot water my lawn / field, because their behemoth truck / trailer will destroy the ground if it is wet. However, we can only water every other day and we only have enough pressure from 3:00 am to 8:00 … furthermore, I should tell my cello teacher that I actually can come, because it is frustrating on her end for me to cancel and reschedule etc …
In the end, I got up at 6:30 and shed guys didn't come til 8:30. Then hay guy came three hours later, instead of three days later as scheduled.
When people say they will do something in a certain time frame, and then they don't, the ripple effect is pretty substantial. So their inconsideration now becomes MY inconsideration.
My daughter is home from her first year of college … she has been home about four days and she says repeatedly, "I miss my people."
My son has left for a week-long camp. It's rare for him to be gone from home and I feel his absence.
As I think of my various friends, each has a rhythm of their connection with me – for some, it is weekly, for others semi-annually, and everything in between. When their particular interval is stretched, I feel it and I miss them.
Connection is like an appetite. When I have the right amount with the right people, I feel satiated. When it is not enough, I become hungry.
Part of living deliberately is knowing your connection needs and taking responsibility for them – it is not the other person's job to know when you need to be filled.
This is your task: To know yourself well, to invite others onto your path and to give them grace if they can't meet you where you are at the moment.
Have you ever noticed how much energy it takes to form a new habit?
In the initial stages it's all new and the novelty itself affords a fair amount of impetus and drive.
But then …
… Entropy.
Like slogging through viscosity,
each effort
becomes exactly that:
EFFORT
Which makes it easy to forget. Or become distracted. Or just choose not to do it.
Take flossing teeth, for example.
Or changing an eating pattern.
Saving money.
I think the key here, at least for me, is to remember that an individual failure is singular; A one-time mess-up that doesn't reflect on my overall character. It was just a tired moment where my energy to push into the new habit became MIA for the moment- but not dead.
There's been a lot going on recently and I haven't been as consistent with the Blog as I would like to be. Sometimes I think about just letting it go.
But then, I choose to remember why I am doing this in the first place, and then I say, "well, get back in the saddle and write something".
In a nine-part series on personality types, Richard Rohr uses the word "Equanimity" to describe the "purified fours" (my type). I had to look that word up and was surprised to find that it is commonly utilized within all of the major world religions to delineate a desirable state.
e·qua·nim·i·ty
ˌēkwəˈnimitē,ˌekwə-/
noun
mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.
"she accepted both the good and the bad with equanimity"
How have I never really been familiarized with this word before?
What a wonderful thing to aspire to!
But more importantly, my understanding is that this is not what you are 'trying to be'; rather, it is what 'fours' become as they surrender themselves to God. I love it!
If you are interested in his whole post, you can see it here.
And if you are curious about your own type …
[Type one (the need to be Perfect), two (the need to be Needed), three (The need to Succeed), four (the need to be Special), five (the need to Perceive), six (the need for Security) , seven (the need to Avoid Pain), eight (the need to be Against), nine, the (need to Avoid)]
Why is it that we pressure people who are different from us to be the same as us?
What is it about our view that makes us think that we are the right one?
And why do we persist in engaging in behaviors that don't work? Even when we have used them over and over and they never worked the first time, let alone the fifteenth.
We humans are odd. If an animal is frustrated, they will try all sorts of different behaviors, trying to find the one that gets them the outcome they are looking for. When people are frustrated, they revert to behaviors that often are self-sabotaging. And it is a rare one who learns from their mistakes. Mostly, we just repeat them.
Practice random acts of kindness, and senseless acts of beauty.
It sounds good doesn't it?
Dallas Willard, in the Divine Conspiracy, challenges this (and other such popular sayings)
He disparages the saying and asks instead:
"What if you 'practice routinely purposeful acts of kindness and intelligent acts of beauty'? (italics mine)
He says our world has degraded to where what is truly profound is seen to be trival or boring and what is trivial appears to us as the profound. He says we are flying upside down.
When I see professional athletes being paid with so many zeros and we can't get decent teachers to stir up the minds of young people, I think he's right – we're head-down on a lot of subjects.
Or literally millions of pets being euthanized yearly, and a similar amount being created through irresponsible breeding …
Or land being gobbled up by lonely condominiums that stand empty, along with vacant office space …
