Time: All We Have; All It Takes

 

Hello invisible audience,

I’ve been meaning to write, but the things I want to write about are all the same, and I don’t want to be accused (even by myself) of beating a dead horse. Nevertheless, you are invisible and I have been pondering quite a bit lately, and I find that there are a couple things that I need to get off my chest – again.

One: time. That precious little gem that is really all we have. The one thing that we bargain for, that we trade money for; that we use to buy possessions. How many hours of work is my car worth? How much of a day am I working to pay for my phone bill? How much of my precious commodity am I trading in now in the hopes that the money I make will support my leisure time in the future?

That leads me to pondering number two: why do I worry so much about what others think about how I spend my time, or where? Even more important, why do I think others are even interested in how I spend my time? Yesterday I told my mom that I felt pressure to conform: pressure to want the things so many people seem to want, or already have: stability, 9-5 jobs, company-paid health insurance, houses, kids. “But, you don’t want that,” she said, looking at me with a puzzled frown.

It’s true! I don’t! So why the heck am I constantly berating myself for not wanting these things? It is related to another one of Mom’s statements. “I hope someday you find somewhere that you really like and want to settle down and stay there.” I wanted to hang my head in shame, not because she said it, but because I constantly catch myself thinking the same thing. Yes, that would be great. It would be great if I wanted to stay in one place. It would be great if I wanted a life that was readily accessible to me without any sort of social clash. If I could convince myself despite what my soul is shouting at me, what I am yearning for, that my happiness is found in a house with a yard and a job with x amount of weeks of vacation a year and a benefits package, I WOULD HAVE IT ALREADY. I can’t. Each time I get settled into that groove, I feel more unstable than when I have no idea where I’m going next. I feel hemmed in, fenced in, terrified and depressed. I feel less alive.

I’ve been reading a book that makes me feel guilty about this. You can change, it tells me. Any time that you say you can’t do something, you’re subscribing to your own limited behavior. Except I’m not. I’m trying to buck a deep trend, and move on. I’m trying to let go of a lifetime’s worth of shoulds and have to’s and live authentically, just for me. And God damn it, it’s harder than it looks.

In the soul searching I did this summer, I realized first that I had been listening to a lot of what I thought other people wanted or expected of me. Not even what they said out loud, but what I thought they wanted me to be. This was a big step, but the bigger and scarier one was when I realized that I had been welcoming these impressions, because I could use them as excuses. I kept trying to fit myself in the box because it was easier to complain about how I felt different from inside of it. I have tried to live a life of responsibility and fun based on other peoples’ definitions because it was easier than having to admit that I found nothing they did fun or rewarding. And that leads me to horse-beaten point number three: I got myself here.

And just like I got myself here, I am the one that can get myself out. Over-stated point four: I have to choose to be authentically me, not just once, but over and over (and over and over) again. No one can do this for me. No one else is going to come to my rescue and tell others what I want and need. The only way to meet like-minded people is to continue living and know that my lifestyle will lead me to them. They’re not in the box, so why do I keep looking for them there?  Not only that, but why am I focusing on people in the box when I have so many more friends that are bucking the trend in their own way?

There’s really only one answer: time. I am going over the same things in my head and revisiting the same mental real estate because these realizations are still new and they haven’t quite sunk in yet. I am still in the phase where I am unsure about what I’m saying, no matter how good it feels. At one time I didn’t know anything about writing a recipe; now I could teach a class about it if I wanted to. In between then and now, however, time passed, I learned some things, and I gained the necessary experience to feel confident that I know what I’m talking about. I’ll get there with these poor dead-horse points, too, invisible audience. All it takes is time.

Love and time-filled kisses,

Morgan

P.S. No horses -- dead or alive -- were beaten in the writing of this post.

Procrastination vs. Priorities

I know this statement is going to incite hate mail, but here goes anyway: I can’t procrastinate.

In college, I turned in my honors thesis a month early, while many of my friends stayed up the entire night before the deadline to get theirs done. I also got all my homework done before it was due, and never crammed for tests – I studied during the semester instead and got the normal eight hours of sleep the nights before finals. When I did an internship at a newspaper in Guadalajara, I didn’t know the meaning of “on deadline;” all my stuff was turned in hours if not days in advance.

Despite what you think, I am not saying this to brag. I am in fact somewhat envious of people who can procrastinate, or at least people whose heads are not torn apart thinking about what they have to do before it actually needs to be done.

You see, the down side of the anti-procrastination gene is that you are constantly trying to get EVERYTHING done: you make a list and think, “There’s no reason why I can’t get all 35 of these things done today.”

It’s easy to forget what little things might get in the way of finishing off your checklist in one fell swoop: eating, sleeping, exercise, personal time, and oh yeah, the time it actually takes to complete a task. When I think about completing a task that will take a fair amount of time, I resent it, and I start it, even if it doesn’t need to be started yet. Suddenly I am up to my eyeballs in things I’ve started that I can’t finish, because I couldn’t prioritize them – I was too busy worrying about procrastinating on them. (If you start it, you haven’t procrastinated on it…right?)

I may be unable to procrastinate, but I am also unable to prioritize. Often, I get sidetracked working on a project that is not as pressing as others on my list, or does not need to be done at all. I get worked into a flurry thinking about all the things on my list, without actually going through the list and moving the things that can wait to the bottom. I set incredibly ambitious goals for myself, and I am inevitably let down when I can’t meet them.

Thankfully, there is something I can do about this: I can learn the difference between procrastination and prioritization. This means writing it on my list, but picking 2-3 things off the list to do a day, and letting the rest shuffle up the list until I can get to them. I can remember that it’s ok to only do so many things a day, a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime, and that if I do it this way, I will be healthier, happier, and most likely, a lot more productive.

I am learning that nothing is a failure if you learn something from it. Therefore my über-busy, burned out past does not mean that I couldn’t hack it; it simply means that I couldn’t prioritize it. When I think about it, I can’t say that I know what the hurry is with many of my tasks – what would happen if I didn’t get my list done in a day, a week, a month? Oh yes: it would mean I was human, and doing the best I could while continuing to enjoy the process of living.

Love and procrastinated kisses
Morgan

There's No "Super" in "Human"

I’m guilty of taking on too many tasks all at once and burning myself out. It’s something I’ve always done, and I used to think it was a good thing. It may have been that I felt a pressure to be this way, but it’s more likely I created my own pressure to do too much for too many people.
For a long time, I was hoping someone would notice and tell me to slow down, but ironically any time it actually happened I only used it as a reason to push harder: if they think I’m working hard now, how impressed would they be if I worked even harder? Unfortunately it’s easy to confuse any attention with positive attention.
But no longer. I am determined that my time in Mexico will not be overloaded. Yes, I will be working down there, but not all the time. Working inside while it’s beautiful and sunny on the beach outside is not something to aspire to. Instead, I want to find a work-life balance that I can carry with me when I come back.
In Mexico they work hard, but when the work’s over they let it go. I have wished before that the U.S. were more like this, but there’s really nothing I can do about that. Instead, all I can do is decide that my life should be more like the Mexican life: that life should be about living through every day, not about going through the motions and hoping eventually you’ve accrued enough of whatever you’re supposed to accrue to be happy.
So here’s to soul searching, naps in the hammock, long walks, short stints of work, and living life as a human.

Love and human kisses
Morgan

My Personal Insanity

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I only heard this saying recently, but it has struck a chord, and I find myself very often realizing that, according to this saying, I am in fact insane.
I have become increasingly busy lately, due to a number of factors. Primarily, I’ve been busy marketing my book, and doing everything I can to make sure it sells. I have done such a good job of this that I have already sold out of my first run and reordered. Obviously I am ecstatic about this, but it means that I am now putting most of the profits of the first run into printing the second run. Therefore, I still work as a substitute teacher to make ends meet, and I work for the local ski area, a job I thoroughly enjoy and that is starting to ramp up for the pending ski season. So basically, I have three jobs, one of which is my own brain child but makes me little money thus far, and two others that I enjoy but not as much as the brain child.
I am busy, and I am tired. However, this does not exactly make me insane: carving out your own niche is hard, and I am perfectly aware of that and grateful that I can have other part-time jobs that allow me to pursue my dream as well and help support me until I become financially solvent.
What does make me insane, however, is how much I try to do in one day. For as long as I can remember, I have been capable of packing a lot into a single day of work, and that has never been more apparent than now. While it is certainly helpful, there are many commitments that I make and many things that I do today that really honestly could wait until tomorrow. No one but me would notice the difference between today and tomorrow, and no one but me would notice that that difference would mean that I got more sleep, or more time for a run, or a healthy meal, or an hour to read my book. No one but me would notice that I was not popping Vitamin C like candy to make sure that my busy life wasn’t making me sick. No one but me would notice that I was successfully or unsuccessfully fighting off insanity.
On the days that I am running 100 different directions and juggling 100 different responsibilities and trying to efficiently handle 100 tasks, my heart rate is permanently elevated. My mind is racing back and forth as quickly as I’m driving from here to there, and when I go to bed after those days I have restless nights full of dreams of all the tasks I did or didn’t complete. Ultimately, these days don’t help me, and I usually don’t even get the satisfaction of feeling like I accomplished something because I’m too exhausted.
I recently listened to an interview on CBC with Timothy Ferriss, the author of The Four-Hour Work Week. Timothy’s premise is that you can whittle down your time at work by being more efficient, and that it is possible to get more done in a shorter amount of time by changing a few ways that you deal with your responsibilities. There were two that he mentioned in the interview that stuck with me: 1) don’t put things on your list simply so you can cross them out (guilty as charged) and more importantly, 2) pick one thing that MUST get done today, that will make you feel like you accomplished something if you complete it, and DO THAT.
Perhaps completing one single task a day will not quite work for me at this point, but I could certainly learn a lot from Timothy. I could learn, for example, that perhaps I shouldn’t substitute teach on days that I already have multiple prior commitments, and that even though I don’t see the money today for my efforts, it doesn’t mean that it won’t eventually pay off. To reach that pay off, I don’t need insane schedules and multi-tasking up the ying yang. For that, I need patience.