Barely

“It’s too hard” – the common refrain of my son when asked to do almost anything that isn’t his preferred activity at the precise moment in time, even when those things are actual solutions to the problems he is whining about.

It is difficult to remain patient in these times.  How can it be too hard, when you aren’t even trying?  

And then, when he does try, he often finds it only takes about 2 minutes.  All that fighting and resisting and whining and kicking and screaming… for way longer than 2 minutes… to avoid doing something that takes 2 minutes. 

As someone who has the same exact problem of massive procrastination and avoidance around certain kinds of work, I ought to be more sympathetic. 

But I’m not.  And perhaps I’m not because the way I get myself to do things when I don’t want to is by beating myself up about it.  “Just do it. Quit whining.  Move already.”  Those are probably the nicest things I say to myself in that vein.

Today I barely managed to barely meet the commitments I had set out to get done by today.  It was a long week, I was tired, I was sick, and a lot was going on.

But I got them done.  

Do I feel good about this?  No, I feel like I pushed myself into doing it.  

And maybe that’s why I want to push him to do what he should do, instead of whining about it.  Because I see all the same things in him that I beat myself up for.

I’ve been learning recently that we can choose at a much more fundamental level than I previously understood everything in our life.  

But I sometimes don’t want to make a choice to see things differently.  I want to make the lazy choice that lets me off the hook for change, that lets the problem keep being “out there” so I don’t have to be the one to fix it.  Sometimes I just don’t want to.

So for now, I am going to put a pin in it, go to sleep, and hope I get a little less sick and tired.  I don’t want to force me right now.  I don’t want to be operating out of that place. 

I want to cut myself some slack, so maybe I can cut him some slack too.