I don’t have as rosy view of the world as Duncan does. I read the headlines and skim some articles every morning to see the latest ways things are going to hell in a hand basket. Then I spend the rest of the day practicing the art of reviving my spirits.
It’s good practice in emotional self-management. And I do think that’s an art. I agree with Thoreau:
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day—that is the highest of arts.
— Henry David Thoreau
I’m not necessarily good at it, but that doesn’t matter. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
What techniques do I try? All sorts. One of the simplest is using iGoogle, with the tea house theme, as my home page. It sends a powerful subliminal message to stay centered and peaceful.
The picture changes 12 times a day as the fox goes through his daily routine. (Click on each picture if you would like a larger view.)
We have gazillions more techniques at our disposal, of course, but this is one of my favorites. Which, if any, do you use?
One of the paradoxes I confront repeatedly is that there is a skill of being present and getting out of the way. Focusing on skill I think is a great place to start, but we also need to be able to leave this behind. Hope this makes sense.
I agree. In my post I had written:
Even when I felt pressed by a deadline I was focusing at least as much on developing needed skills as I was on preparing a specific talk. I still took time out to experiment with, and practice, new techniques so they would be there for me when I needed them again.
I think that’s what Evan meant by focusing on skill being a good place to start. I was talking about building a solid foundation, not simply focusing on the immediate goal. But I was talking only in terms of building competence in practical skills. He was saying (I think) that we need to go deeper than that.
In fact, that’s where the real action was for me in preparing that talk. I was thrown by the project because a big part of me didn’t want to do it. I wanted to be doing other things. I was annoyed at the request because the woman who asked me sounded as if she needed a speaker to talk about stress management, but she wasn’t interested in the topic herself and didn’t want to be bothered about the whole affair. She had done her part by getting me to agree. Why should I do so much work for people who didn’t care?
The answer, of course, was that it didn’t matter if she cared or not…the topic is connected to my deepest values. I just had to take responsibility for the decision I had made (saying yes) and practice what I preach: Play your part well and let go of the results.
Stay curious and open to life. No matter what happens keep learning and growing. Find what you love to do and find a way to share it with others.
—The Cheerful Monk
Life Shouldn’t Be This Way!
I briefly allowed myself to get thrown off track by the insurance incident I talked about last week. I generated more energy than I needed to tackle the problem when I fell into the “life-shouldn’t-be-this-way” trap. Fortunately I had already been there, done that, so often in my life that I recognized the symptoms right away.
It was easy enough to see the absurdity of what I was doing. I was upset because I was telling myself that the system was
wasting my time with all the run-arounds, and
making me helpless to change things.
By now that phrase “making me” is a red flag:
If the time I spent talking to the insurance company and the provider was a waste, what would I call the time I spent fretting?
And was I really helpless to move things along? Or were things just going more slowly that I would like? Wasn’t I choosing to be a victim by letting myself get tossed around by my frustration? By my belief that things “should” be going faster?
So I put a rubber band on my wrist and snapped it when I caught myself starting to play the victim. It’s a classic thought-stopping technique. The idea isn’t to snap it so hard that it hurts, but to bring us back into the present moment instead of getting trapped by the stories in our heads.
My New Role Model
And just trying to stop a thought is harder than to substitute a more constructive one, so I had to figure out what I really wanted, something under my control. That was easy, I wanted to feel centered and empowered. I’m a visual thinker and imagining a role model doing the desired behavior works well for me. I don’t have a real person I can use, so I’ve created one…the gal in the cartoon above.
I’ve used her before, when people aren’t behaving the way I would like:
And when I have more things to do than I would like:
Those two examples worked fine when I was just trying to stay centered. This time I needed something more, I needed the gal to be more cheerfully assertive. Hence the cartoon at the beginning of this post.
The strategy worked. It took me another hour and a half last Monday to get things straightened out, but I did manage to talk to a supervisor at the insurance company. It turns out they were missing some information. I had a copy of what they needed, so I faxed it to him and he promised to expedite the matter. In this case expedite means it should only take 14 business days rather than the new standard… 45 days. The provider seemed content with that, so who am I to argue?
The main thing is I now have a better idea of how their system works…a better understanding than most of the people who answer the phone. So there’s a good chance that in the future when a claim gets rejected I’ll think of my new role model, find out what further information the insurer needs and make sure it gets there. It sure beats playing the role of a victim.
What About You?
Do you ever fall into the “life-shouldn’t-be-this-way” trap? If so, how do you handle it?
This is a picture of my inner artist, about to go on a play date.
Julia Cameron introduced the concept of an artist’s date in The Artist’s Way. The idea is simple. It just means taking time each week to do something for fun all by yourself. It’s what I call slipping into sacred space. It means getting completely absorbed doing something for its own sake, because it feeds your soul instead of for some utilitarian purpose. Why do it? I do it because it makes me feel fully alive, and it also makes me more flexible and creative. Not bad traits to have in this rapidly changing world.
What sorts of things can you do on an artist’s date? Anything that appeals to you. It can be taking a walk in nature, visiting an art gallery, playing with crayons or bubbles… anything that suits your fancy. The main thing is to do it alone, otherwise part of you will be reacting to the other person instead of getting better acquainted with the deepest parts of yourself.
One of my artist’s dates was creating the picture of my “inner artist” at the beginning of this post. Another was making the picture on the left. I can happily spend hours taking or modifying photos, and one week I even spent hours just looking at pictures of Seabiscuit. As long as it feeds our souls it counts.
What About You?
Even if you’ve never heard the term “artist’s date” before, have you ever gone on one? What effect did it have on you?
Paperwork sucks. That’s the title of this Flickr photo and it’s a sentiment I share. I’m not as dejected as the dog though..I believe in creative procrastination. Which means even though I’ve been putting off paperwork, I’ve done a lot of other chores and have written several future posts. It relieves the pressure. Sooner or later I will have to face up to the paperwork, so when the time comes I’ll pick a project that is even more onerous and will convince myself I really have to do it. Then I’ll procrastinate on that and do the paperwork instead.
This method probably wouldn’t work for everyone. I’m exceptionally gullible and easily manipulated. Even by myself.
Once when my husband came back from the land he said, “Guess what I saw today.”
“What?”
“A man-eating grouse!”
He was joking about the man-eating part, of course, but he was attacked…by the bird in the pictures on the left. As you can see from the picture of him next to my husband’s shoe, the grouse wasn’t that big…he must have been deranged to do battle with someone so much bigger than himself. My husband could easily have stomped him, but instead he tried to discourage the bird by soaking him with water from a hose. The grouse declared a temporary truce… he went over and sat on a log in the sun until he dried off.
Then he resumed the battle, so my husband got a broom and kept whisking him away whenever he attacked. He finally got the message and never did it again. He did follow my husband around, though, carefully watching him from a safe distance. When my husband went down into our underground well house he could hear the grouse strutting around on the roof, and the best part of the story was when my husband was driving down the road for home one day. He looked in his side mirror and saw the grouse triumphantly chasing our 3/4-ton truck out of “his” territory.
Not An Isolated Incident?
I’ve been thinking of that story a lot lately because of the big political scandal in the United States right now…Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois trying to sell Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. Blagojevich has taken corruption to a new level, but somehow the situation is laughable as well as horrifying. It seems too stupid to be true. He reminds me of the grouse…sometimes you just have to laugh.
My Anti-Role Model
Even though I’m not as aggressive and belligerent as those comic characters, I’m more like them than I would like to admit. When I think of the grouse playing king of the mountain on the roof of the well house I think of the times when I catch myself feeling superior to other people. And when I think of him taking credit for chasing our truck down the hill, I think of the times when I take too much pride in my accomplishments…when I take credit not only for the hard work I put in, but also for my good fortune in being born in the right place at the right time. And who’s to say that my view of the world is that much closer to reality than that of the grouse and Blagojevich? No, it’s fine to do what we can to make the world a better place, but it also pays to lighten up and have a sense of humor. The grouse story reminds me to do that…he’s essentially my anti-role model, a visual image of how I don’t want to behave. And there’s something about identifying with a deranged grouse to keep me from taking myself too seriously.
I recently read Peter Mayle’s Encore Provence, and I loved his reason for not having a garden:
It would be fighting nature, and nature always wins. It has more stamina and it never stops for lunch.
Peter Mayle is a wise man. His quote reminds me of a friend of mine who said one spring:
I love this time of year! The new plants are spouting and growing…before they get eaten by the deer and beaten down by the hail.
And that was down here in town, where the elevation is only 7200 feet.
So I suppose some people would call our garden in the woods, at an elevation of 8800 feet, an exercise in foolishness. The picture above shows me walking down the path to the garden. The figures slightly to the left of center are Kaitlin and (probably) Andy looking at the garden.
In fact, it was a fun adventure and we were successful for a while. We carefully hauled down sacks and sacks of sterilized manure each year and rototilled them into the soil. And we did produce some lush cold-weather crops…crops that needed more warmth didn’t do as well. We harvested most of our tomatoes after the first snow flurries, while they were still green.
Unfortunately just growing crops isn’t enough.
Animals Don’t Understand Sharing
There are a lot more animals than humans up there. Now we didn’t mind sharing. We thought it was cute when we saw a pile of pea pods, neatly stripped of the peas, under the leafy protection of Kaitlin’s pumpkin plant. We didn’t even mind the ground squirrel chattering at us when we stayed in “his” garden too long. But he eventually ignored us and came in to harvest even though we were there. (We tried two different fences, but they couldn’t keep him out.) It did bother us when we were admiring our handiwork and saw a wheat stalk topple over in front of our eyes, And the last straw was when we watched a bean plant disappear into the soil, to be replaced by a gopher hole.
Andy’s solution was to set traps and kill the animals, but I didn’t care about the produce as much as watching the plants grow. And killing animals does not make my little corner of the world a friendlier place.
The Greenhouse
Andy had always dreamed of having a greenhouse, so we decided to spend the money and have one built. The garden was about 30 feet by 50 feet, and the greenhouse is 25 feet by 75 feet… big enough to do some good.
The walls are cinderblock and the roof glass. The left wall in the picture of the inside is about 7 feet high, the one on the right 9 feet high.
The second snapshot shows how the higher wall is nestled into the slope of the land to conserve heat.
We asked the contractor to save all the precious soil we had laboriously built up, but he forgot. It ended up buried under the concrete porch. So we built up more soil by growing “green manure”, crops that nurture the soil when rototilled in. It didn’t take long before we producing good crops again.
We had several years of bountiful harvests before the drought hit and our well couldn’t produce enough water for the plants. My husband has great hopes that the drought will eventually end, but I’m relaxed either way. I’m glad we did it, but I’m happy to move on.
A Waste of Time?
Was our garden in the woods a waste of time and money? Were we foolish to do it? Not in my book. For me growing a garden is like raising a child, I do it for the joy of being involved and watching things grow. I do it for the process, not for the end result. When we bought the land we knew it could be devastated by forest fires at any time. The fact is, we’re been lucky to have had that many good years up there. We managed to have some good harvests, but even more important we had a great shared adventure and have years of precious memories.
What About You?
Have you ever done something that other people might have thought foolish or that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped? How do you feel about it? Are you more focused on productivity and achievement than in enjoying the adventure of life? Do you think the two approaches are incompatible?
jbpics. With permission. Owner reserves all rights. jbpics. With permission. Owner reserves all rights.
He had an intelligence and understanding almost spiritual in quality.
—From a Seabiscuit memorial.
My favorite time management book is Alan Lakein’s How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. Lakein’s emphasis isn’t on getting more and more things done, it’s on getting in touch with the things you really care about and devoting most of your time to them. He talks about prioritizing activities, of course, but the part I’ve integrated into my life is his famous question: What’s the best use of my time right now?
I thought of that question a lot last week as I spent hours on the web looking for pictures of Seabiscuit. Only my version of the question was: Is this really the best use of my time right now? It was an honest question, and the answer was always yes. I didn’t have to justify it, it just felt right so I continued until I was satisfied.
Why am I so enamored of Seabiscuit? I came across Hillenbrand’s history a few years ago in my local library and was taken by his personality and by the rapport between him and his trainer and jockey. Until I listened to the book (audio version) I hadn’t realized that he was one of the top ten news celebrities in 1938, along with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. I also hadn’t realized his triumph-over-adversity story gave hope to millions of people during the Great Depression. But it wasn’t the success story that resonated with me…it was what he was like and how he related to people. It’s the same reason that I’m touched by interacting with the dogs at the local shelter. It’s not about success and fame, it’s about the connection between living creatures.
I could go on and on about Seabiscuit…if you’d like to know more just ask! But this post is really about spending time on “unproductive” activities. I was partially looking for photos to use in the post, but I continued exploring long after I found the pictures I’ve used. I had slipped into sacred space. Looking at the pictures and remembering Seabiscuit was feeding my soul, it was connecting me to my deepest values. Was that really the best use of my time? Oh, yes.
I’m already grateful that I spent that time because
It gave me courage when the news of the financial crisis broke later in the week. It didn’t keep me from being frightened, but that was all right, my inner core was still firmly connected to something deeper and more important.
It gave me patience when I dealt with an insurance matter for the third time. I had believed the matter was resolved a couple of weeks ago, but no. So I phoned again and got a young fellow who didn’t know what he was doing. We must have spent an hour while he tried to figure out what was going on, putting me on hold, etc. He finally said he didn’t want to take any more of my time. He would talk to his supervisor, get it straightened out and phone me back. Which he did. It was a good experience because he was so sweet and was doing his best and I had a chance to practice my values…to make my little corner of the world a friendlier and more loving place. (In fact it hadn’t been a sacrifice for me because I sat at my computer writing yesterday’s post at Transforming Stress when I was on hold.)
As I said, when I was looking at the pictures of Seabiscuit earlier in the week I didn’t try to analyze why…it just felt right. By the end of the week I understood it better. Basically I had been meditating on love and getting that experience deep in my bones, to be drawn on when I needed it. Was that really the best use of my time? Oh, yes.
What about you? What activities are the best use of your time?
Stay curious and open to life. No matter what happens keep learning and growing. Find what you love to do and find a way to share it with others.
—Cheerful Monk
He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning.
—Danish quote
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science
—Albert Einstein
This picture represents what I’m aiming for in life…the joy of learning new skills with no ego attached. The baby has no qualms about asking for help, and it doesn’t bother her that other people can walk “better” than she can. She’s not comparing herself to others or worrying if she’s learning fast enough. Learning to walk isn’t a goal with a deadline, it’s simply something she’s committed to doing. That’s me… I’m committed to lifelong learning, and to doing it with joy. There’s no external reward at the end, it’s the process that counts.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, at the moment I’m learning HTLM, CSS and some WordPress. My stack of resources…mostly in the form of books, but also information from the web…has grown. I don’t feel obligated to read every page of every book…they’re not on a TO DO List. They’re more like a group of friends willing to lend a helping hand when I need one.
So like the little girl in the picture, I’m enjoying my first baby steps. I’m well-supported and savoring the moment…and ready to take the next small step.
What about you? What are you learning at the moment? Are you enjoying it? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
Thanks to traveler for commenting on last week’s post.
Pathfindar. Used with permission. Owner reserves all rights.
When this boy saw the dog obstacle course he couldn’t resist trying it himself. He’s a great reminder that obstacles in our paths aren’t necessarily bad … they’re a great way to test and develop our skills. It reminds me of the Zen master Dogen. When asked how he reached enlightenment he answered, “It was just one mistake after another.” And one of my favorite fortunes was, “You have a great capacity for learning from your mistakes. You will learn a great deal today.”
That’s a good summary of what this past week has been like for me … just one mistake after another. Most of those “mistakes” have been mine, but I did spend several hours last weekend trying to figure out why I was having so much trouble accessing my web site. After a lot of detective work and many phone calls it turned out to be an incompatibility between my hosting service and DSL provider. It was a great exercise in staying patient and centered while I narrowed down the problem, then worked on something else while in the fullness of time they resolved it. As Shilpan said in a comment last week, letting go of expectations and having faith and patience is a great source of happiness.
That doesn’t mean we can’t savor the rewards, too. For me those rewards are increased understanding and skill development…for the squirrel in this video it’s peanuts and candy bars. The important thing is to enjoy the obstacle course as well as the reward at the end. To me that’s what real success is.
What about you? How do you feel about the obstacles in your life? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
