When I was working at a sales job in Bellevue, my manager
asked me if I had any floss.
“Why did you ask me?”
“You seem like the kind of person who’s prepared for
anything.”
I pulled a travel-sized floss out of my purse and handed it
over.
In college, one of my friends gave me what she called a
“shack it brush,” a toothbrush I could carry in my purse in case I ended up
“shacking up” with someone. She didn’t need to, though: I already carried a
travel toothbrush with me, not for shacking up, but simply in case I ate or
drank something and felt a need to brush my teeth afterward.
Here in Boquete, where I am usually without a car and
dependent on taxis, rides and buses to get me to and from home, I carry snacks
with me to ensure that if I get hungry I have a choice of something healthy to
eat.
Maybe floss, travel toothbrushes and a bag of almonds are
all a good idea in the long run, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg as far
as my preparation is concerned. I recently started to realize how often I do
this with everything: how often I am anticipating the worst and spending all my
mental energy trying to plan for that eventuality instead of letting myself
live in the moment.
I call it sandbagging because sandbags are heavy. They take
energy to move around and set up. They require thought and planning to put into
place, and they are supposed to help keep out the floods, the natural disasters
and inclement weather.
They also only work if they’re placed at the right place at
the right time.
It’s definitely ok to have a contingency plan; an escape
plan or an understanding that things may go wrong. However, I have found that
I’ve been sandbagging so many parts of my life – planning for so many disasters
– that I am so caught up in future could-possibly-kill-me-moments that I forget
to look up and see that there’s no flood, actually, just sunshine and chirping
birds. I call it sandbagging because of the energy it takes, and yet it’s
ridiculous to spend all my precious energy planning for a future that may not
come; to take all my valuable resources and put them toward protecting myself
from an unlikely torrential downpour.
When I sandbag, I don’t just pick the most likely place
where the water will come through. I sandbag the whole fucking house, because
if I’m already expending the effort, I may as well work a little harder and
make sure the whole structure is a fortress. Oops, I forgot to leave an
entrance for supplies, and for me to get in and out. Oh well. For now it’s safe
in here. I’ll just hunker down and wait for the flood that will never come.
I spend a lot of time and effort anticipating an attack of
one kind or another, so I prepare myself for the worst. I expect people to want
all my time and attention, so I automatically limit how much of myself I give
to ensure they can’t take it all, regardless of who they are or whether they’ve
shown themselves to be psychic vampires. I expect I will eventually run out of
money instead of trusting in my own ability to make it (despite years of proof
otherwise) so I hoard what I can while I can and beat myself up when I can’t. I
expect one day the bottom will fall out of the work I have done, so I live in
constant fear that it will be taken away. I’m waiting for the other shoe to
drop, invisible audience, and it means that every good moment looks like it has
a shadow.
There are going to be terrible moments. There are going to
be unexpected tragedies; unexpected expenses; unexpected emotional turmoil.
However, what if instead of sandbagging, I simply let myself remember that I
have the resources and the capabilities to handle any problems that come my
way, and instead of spending all my time building defenses, I simply let myself
enjoy the good that came my way?
Well, my life would be much better, wouldn’t it? I’d be less
stressed out. I’d have a lot more mental energy; I’d be a lot less wary. If,
instead of hiding behind my sandbagged defenses, I stepped out into the world,
what would I find? Probably a lot more wonder; a lot more love and a lot more
space.
They talk about how worry doesn’t actually help anything. Anticipation
of potential problems and outcomes is helpful in planning, but actually
worrying about something makes not one damn bit of difference to its outcome.
It’s easier said than done, but I want to let go of the worry: the parts that
make me feel like there’s nothing I can do but spin the worst scenario out in
my head over and over again; that imagining how it won’t work is somehow
useful.
More than anything, I want to be able to put down the idea
that I failed if I was unable to see the outcome of a situation before it
happened. I want to be able to not just forgive myself for not seeing a
potential failure, but dismissing the idea that that was ever my job. If I had
known that ultimately I would end up with a bunch of cookbooks in a storage
unit that hadn’t sold, would I have done anything differently? Damn straight I
would have, but I had no way of knowing that the books that had been selling so
well would stop selling. I had no way of knowing I would run out of steam; that
other things would take precedence in my list of priorities; that one day I
would realize that I had to choose between my own happiness and future and
those damn books.
I couldn’t have known. I have no reason to keep beating
myself up for not knowing that. I have no reason to beat myself up for not
knowing relationships were going to end before they started; for not knowing
that the longer I stayed away from the States the less I would want to go back;
for not knowing a year ago that one year away would really only be enough to
scratch the surface of the new path my life is taking.
The sandbagging hasn’t worked. Not only did I build dykes in
the wrong places, I beat myself up for not realizing where the weaknesses were,
without knowing what they would be. I have beat myself up for not knowing what
I didn’t know, instead of having the experience, learning from it, accepting
what I’d learned and moving forward with that new knowledge. I tend to beat
myself up a lot, invisible audience, but now is the time to stop.
I can’t know what I don’t know, and spending my whole life
trying to anticipate every last possible outcome not only takes the fun out of it,
but it also negates all the lessons I need to learn along the way. Now that I
know, I treat my business interactions a lot differently. I divide the money I
make into different categories: living expenses, savings, paying off debts, and
business expenses. I never would have learned to do that if I hadn’t done it
differently when I was selling my cookbooks. I never would have learned what
doing what I loved felt like if I’d never done what I hated for money instead.
I never would have known what happiness was without experiencing real sadness.
When I sandbagged, I not only wasn’t letting in the flood, I
was also holding back the sunshine. It's time to step out of the fortress and know that there's a lot more to anticipate than just a flood.
Love and sandbag free kisses
Morgan
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