Aspiring To Adventure

October flew by at a pace which I found perturbing.  Why?  Because I knew that November and December would be even more whiplash paced.  So now we’re here, nearing the end of the year, and I’m wondering where it all went.  

It’s Thanksgiving.  We usually host, but this year we had planned to go up to my brother’s house, 2.5hrs north of us.  The kids were really excited to see the house (we haven’t actually made it up there since our oldest was a toddler, and to hang out with their uncle, aunt, cousin, and other family members.  And to have apple pie.  My oldest was really set on having apple pie.

So of course, a couple of us got sick.  We didn’t want to get my parents sick, so we decided to stay home.  The kids were devastated.  At least the oldest 2 were.  The 3 year old didn’t really seem to notice–she’ll probably suddenly realize sometime next week that we had to cancel our plans.  It took her like a month to realize that our next door neighbors/tenants had moved away.  And the baby didn’t care.

When husband and I realized that our plans had evaporated, we decided to make the best of the day God had given us.  We made a quick plan to cook up a last minute Thanksgiving feast, made a run to the neighborhood grocery store to pick up the missing essentials (the clerk laughed at me when I asked if they happened to have any cooked turkey…apparently you have to order that weeks in advance).  They did, however, have a turkey breast (which we later realized was not entirely thawed) and lots and lots of heavily discounted chicken.  

We spent the day cooking with our children.  I don’t know if you have ever tried to cook with kids, but it’s kind of a pain.  They do everything wrong, they make giant messes, they swarm you and they fight over who gets to do what.  It’s enough to make you feel like it would be easier to just do it yourself. 

But lately, I’ve been trying to push through all that mess and annoyingness.  Because on the other side is children who are an actual asset to our organization, and who have the confidence that comes from owning a project.  On the other side is a home where everyone contributes and is appreciated.  

So I brought my 9 year old into the kitchen with me and told her to make cranberry sauce.  She’s pretty spacey and also likes to feel every single ingredient she adds, but she is also really motivated to learn to cook, willing to work and to do messy jobs, and to put up with all of my ocd control freak overcorrections.

She made the cranberry sauce.  Then I told her to make an apple pie.  This was a real labor of love (for her, making the pie, and for me…teaching her to make a pie).  She made the crust, adding way too much water after I had told her 3-4 times to stop adding water when the dough had a certain consistency.  She peeled the apples, pausing all too often to eat the apple peels, which she can’t get enough of.  She cut up all of the apples, even though she wanted me to do it, because it’s hard.  She mixed up the filling, rolled out the pie crust (folding it and making it too thick), and assembled the whole thing.  She wanted to add decorations, so I told her to roll out the extra crust very thin and cut out a couple of leaves.  I came back a couple minutes later to find big round pie crust balls around the perimeter of the pie.  It was kind of a mess, but it was wholly hers.  She put it in the oven, dutifully checked on it, then finally took it out of the oven.  She was so proud of that funny, lumpy pie.  She was so proud of herself.

At the beginning of this whole get out of debt adventure, back when husband thought I wasn’t on board, and was trying to convince me to be on board, he asked me some questions that came from his coach.  One of them was something like “How can husband show up for wife?”  That sounds really awkward without our names.  Anyway, that question got me thinking about how I need to show up.  What I need to do and be if we’re going to accomplish this ambitious goal.  And one of the things I came up with, is that I need to commit to helping my kids become more helpful.  That’s going to be really messy and annoying for a while, and it’s a whole extra thing on my shoulders, when I’m already feeling like I’m drowning in shoulder things.  But it’s worth that big investment, and will have rewards we can’t even conceive of right now.  

I think in order for them to be helpful members of this family, we have to treat them like helpful members of this family.  We have to give them real responsibilities and allow them to fail…and to succeed!  9 year old made a pie today!  She helped save Thanksgiving.  She joined us in rising to the challenge of making the best of the day God had given.  She should be so proud of herself.  We both did the hard thing and came out better for it.  Today was a win.  Thank you God for the opportunity of today’s illness.

In our theme of paying of our debts, I realized that we need to pay off the debt of learning how to deal with our kids at their most difficult.  Maybe they’re not more difficult kids than other people’s kids.  Maybe we’re just more difficult parents.

And even if they’re the most difficult kids in the world, we love that we have them.  Our life is so interesting and fun because they’re here. They are absolutely hilarious.

My son this morning has collected all of his maps together that we got for free, seemingly inspired by our current entrepreneurial activity, and has asked me to help him set up a stand outside on the street to sell maps.  He has been trying to sell these maps to the contractors working out back for the last week, alternating between $25 and $50 asking prices, while his older sister yells “Don’t buy those maps, he got them for free!”

Our 3 year old asks some amazing questions: “Mommy, are there monsters in heaven?  Are there toys in heaven?  Can I see?  Can I see it when we go to there when we die?  Mommy what is the amount of heaven?”  When she was 2, she told me she was going to “toot me outside” (cook) and was going to eat me up.  She’s an insane little munchkin who adds so much to our life.

I’m so grateful that we have these kids.  If I step back out of the hard pains in the moments, I can see that everything about this life we have is amazing.  

Can I at the same time that I am striving for something new also truly appreciate my life and operate from a place of peace and gratitude, instead of pushing myself, and beating myself up when I’m tired?

Can I be truly grateful and operate from a place of desire and abundance?  

I don’t want to be someone who is annoyingly positive all the time.  I want to acknowledge that things are sometimes not ideal, or hard, or crazy, and help others to see the opportunities in all of our sufferings, and to see that sometimes even our sufferings are truly awesome.

Everyone always talks about how the hardest times were their favorite times.  When I was having health problems for a bit over a year, my wife and I grew closer than ever before.  My prayer life deepened.  I grew a lot.  I am truly grateful, now, that I had to go through that.

Can I have that gratitude in the moment?  When it’s hard to see how this is good right now?  

It’s a beautiful American tradition to call out a day every year where we specifically give thanks to God for our lives and every blessing He’s given us.

I want to see the blessings that are there all the time, even when they feel like a headache at the time.  To see the good and be grateful for my cold or my screaming complaining kids.  

Can I live from a sincere place of gratitude?

“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.

I had the conversation I planned to have this week with my boss, in which I was pretty transparent about the uncertainty of my plans for the future.

Telling your boss that you are not completely sure you plan to keep working at a place is a conversation I would not have had a year ago.

Why was it possible to do this now? Because I know what I want to do. And if I can keep doing that where I work, I will, but if I can’t then I am pretty sure I am going to leave.

I am more afraid of giving up on my vision for the next year than I am of getting fired. I have something I really want, and my other fears are starting to become small and irrelevant.

And that all felt really possible and good yesterday, but today I am feeling under the weather, and had to deal with 2 production incidents in the last 48 hours, deal with a home improvement project and some miscommunications with the contractor, and then my wife is accosted by an insane person at a grocery store parking lot, and… I forget what else. It was a long day.

To be honest, all of those things are the kinds of things that typically set me up for a funky mood, and a lot of negative energy, and a lot of looking for reasons that I should quit. Because I’m tired.

But I somehow still managed to write the article I intended to write, and now I am writing this blog post to wrap up the day.

Quitting doesn’t mean you get to rest anyway. At least not in a restorative way. When you give up on your dreams, you end up feeling more tired.

Life is hard and scary.  Bad things are going to happen.  Hard things are going to happen.  Something big, bad and scary is going to happen to you, guaranteed.  And once you start living your life in fear, it’s easy to find the next thing to be afraid of, and the next and the next, and so on.

Life has changed for us since that European adventure in 2018.  We’ve added two little ones to our family- we’re outnumbered 2 to 1.  Our kids are, let’s say, unique individuals,  and sometimes trying to accomplish anything feels like dragging a piano through quicksand, with all of the fighting, whining, kid politics, complex emotions, special needs and senseless destruction we have to deal with. 

It’s easy to feel like we’re spinning too many plates and there’s just no space for another plate.  But I think it’s the same as the fear thing.  When you get used to saying life is too hard or too busy or too whatever…you can always find the next thing to hold you back.  To convince you that your dreams are unreasonable, or imprudent, or too crazy for right now.  When then?  

This was supposed to be a travel blog.  In fall of 2018, I got the urge to do something crazy.  I convinced husband that we should take our kids (then 4 and 1.5) to Europe.  We thought it might be our last chance for a long time, since European travel might be near impossible if we were blessed with a third child.  It was really hard, and really annoying, and really loud, and extremely fun, memorable, and satisfying.

We got excited about doing hard things and taking our family on adventures.  We were going to travel, we were going to explore, we were going to share the beauty of creation with our children, and with the world.  We were going to start a blog!  I can’t even remember exactly what we were planning to do, because it all fell apart, and life was very hard and confusing for the next 3 years.

A month or two after we got back from our Europe trip, husband got sick.  And he was sick for the next year, on and off.  His mysterious health issues took over our life for more than a year.  I was afraid to plan anything, afraid to commit to anything, lest I have to cancel and let people down, or change the arrangements I had made.  And I was afraid he would die.  The mysterious health problems eventually mysteriously resolved, but by then, we were in 2020.  And we all know how that went.

Stephen Covey in the 7 Habits lists Habit 2 as “Begin with the end in mind”. This means keeping our end in mind when we set out to do something. It’s hard to do a particular thing if you don’t know what it is, but you will do something even if you don’t know what you’re doing simply by doing at all.

So if you want to accomplish a particular thing, you must have that particular thing in mind when you begin.

But this, I am learning, is not enough. You must also keep the end in mind.

When you begin on a path that is long, it is easy to forget what you are trying to accomplish, and to get off track. To start doing good but less important work. To start doing side quests that feel like you’re taking action, but are not strictly essential.

You must keep referring ALL of your decisions back to the end you are pursuing, or you will likely end up somewhere else, or end up where you’re going much much later than you could.

Sometimes, there are long side quests needed. Perhaps before you can start a new business, you need to read a few books about a particular topic. Perhaps you need some expertise.

But do not be tempted to think that there is no such thing as wasted learning.

I once knew a man who in the process of trying to learn to code learned 4 different text editors. After he had settled on a favorite editor, he decided he wasn’t typing fast enough, so he learned not just one, but two additional keyboard layouts.

There is definitely wasted learning that we do – learning that gives us a new skill that does not in any way affect the bottleneck, or attack the actual obstacle that is in our way.

It’s important to ask “Am I making progress, or just making myself busy?”

When you can’t figure it out, it’s better to do something instead of obsessing about making sure you’re doing the right thing. But a quick check-in on your plan every day or week can save you a tremendous amount of wasted time, or time doing things that are totally irrelevant to your purpose that you don’t actually need to do.

Last night 1 year old and 3 year old apparently conspired to keep us from sleeping.  To be fair, we helped the cause by staying up until 10:30 watching a movie.  I got maybe 3 hours of sleep last night, and I feel pretty exhausted.  

But I took a shower!  And I cleaned my stove.  I worked on one of our business ideas.  I made a whole meal for a family that just had a baby.  I fed my family and rallied the kids to clean their “zones.”  And I wrote my blog post.  Today felt like a fail because we were so tired, but we managed to drag ourselves (or allow God to carry us?) through the discouragement and exhaustion and get a few things done and mostly just not completely lose heart and give up.  So that’s something.

If you are reading this blog, you likely do not know that its posts have been living in a Google Doc for almost a month.

Why?

Because rather than put up artificial barriers to the commitment of writing every day, we decided we would just start writing every day, and start putting the posts out when we finally got everything set up.  

As of this writing, I am still writing in a Google Doc.  

But now, instead of it being a way to keep momentum, it is feeling like a huge momentous task to transfer these over, and it is becoming less real rather than more real, sitting in this Google Doc.

As a small act of faith that our efforts are not entirely pointless, we are committing to publish this.

And if you’re discovering this blog, and never saw this post, you might not have known the compromises we made at the beginning to just get started.  

By the time you read this, you may never have seen the “Sample Page” in the menu we left for at least a month, the fact that we didn’t change from the default theme for (when are we doing that?), etc..

It’s so easy to see things done in a finished state, and look at that massive gap, and say “I can’t do that”.  

A big gap is just a lot of little gaps all stacked up.  If you start crossing each one, you’ll usually find there’s a place in the middle of every jump to land.

I bought the thing I want to sell online, tried it out, and discovered that I hate using it.  So that’s an opportunity.  If I hate it, others probably do, and if I can make it just a tiny bit more pleasant to use, then that’s a problem solved, and an opportunity to market it effectively.  But right now it just feels like, why would someone ever want to use one of these things, and why did I think it would be a good idea to sell them?

On top of that, I sat down the other day to work on some rough designs for artwork for the thing I want to sell online, and I discovered…I’m not a designer.  I’m not sure if this is one of those moments where you should realize your limitations and focus your energy in other directions, or you should just push through and be the best bad designer you can be.  Is it hard because I need to work at it, or is it hard because it’s not my particular gift?  Husband said something the other day about how if you force a fish to climb a tree, he’ll be really grumpy…or something.  Fish are meant to swim, and if you judge them by their arboreal scaling prowess, of course they’re going to look stupid.  But we also just feel stupid when we try something for the first time.  I think maybe I’m overthinking again.  

I’m going to go draw some pictures.  I committed to making 3 rough designs by this afternoon.

So I realized yesterday that this blog probably feels like a lot of navel-gazing over the last week or so, as I haven’t been sharing anything I’ve been working on.

And that’s because we’ve been blogging about our experience of what we’re doing.

You might be tempted to think that all we’ve been doing is navel-gazing, since that is most of what we’ve been producing as content.

So I wanted to report on the actual actions we have been taking.

I scheduled another call with the VP of Engineering to make sure I will be able to use experience and IP I develop working with teams here if and when I move on.  If not, I guess I am going to move on a lot sooner and find another way, because I am not willing to give up on this dream.

I set up a meeting with a contact who was CTO of a company so I can validate some ideas, and ask some questions.

I noticed that nobody responded to my original email that I sent out about doubling team performance.

I pulled a list of measurements for the software performance consulting so I can start with my own team.

I got feedback from another friend who was VP of Engineering on my pitch ideas, and the concepts, and found some unexpected resistance to some of my ideas, which was really valuable.

We came up with an e-commerce idea I love, and we came up with 50 ideas for initial products we could sell, and I looked up pricing information and how we can make it easily (and have an idea to execute on all the marketing).

All in all, I have not been doing nothing, but I am going to be honest – are these activities real progress, or just the illusion of progress?

What can I commit to that would be a quantum difference?

Maybe just moving the e-commerce into reality by setting up the stores and production relationships and automations and social media, which will be a good jumping off point for at least 2 business ideas?

If I can get confirmation that I’ll be able to keep the performance consulting IP as my own, then I will be off to the races in my current job.

So those are the 2 big things I can do to move it forward.  

Let’s go!

I’ve been working on a blog post, but 3 year old keeps jumping on me, and she just ran off with a basket of clean laundry.  

I’m discouraged.  Writing is hard.  Writing while actively parently 4 children is…painful.  Literally.  3 year old just smacked me.

Why does it matter if I take a shower?  Why does it matter if I choose to choose the choices I tacitly choose?  Why does it matter if I find peace in my vocation?  Why am I writing about this stuff on a blog about paying off a million (ish) dollars of debt?

3 year old is sitting on the piano keys.

Because it’s foundational.  On the one hand, we can’t hope to achieve our goals if we don’t have our lives in order.  

But on the other hand…and I’m struggling to find the words to make sense of something that I feel to be true…Our goals are the field on which we become who we were meant to be.  Our desires fuel movement toward something, and it’s that movement or action that allows us to learn, change, and grow.  If we don’t allow ourselves to want something, then why do anything?  Why try anything?  Why not just sit in complacency and stay who we are?

In order to become more, you have to learn.  You have to experiment.  Having desires to work toward gives you something to experiment about.

Right now, 3 year old really wants my attention.  She is running endless experiments on how to get that attention.

After she had experimented with climbing over the baby gate and under the piano, squishing her brother with the play couch, climbing up my leg, running off with the baby’s sippy, absconding with the 9 year old’s collection of decorative gourds, biting my pillow, and then climbing up my leg again, I reminded her how to get what she wants:

“Mommy, may you please pay attention for me?”

Ok, 3 year old.

“The gap is too big.  I can’t see the path.  I don’t see how it all fits together.  Maybe I am making a mistake.  I don’t really want it anyway.  It doesn’t matter if I do or I don’t.  The outcome isn’t important.  It’s fine if it doesn’t happen”

These are some thoughts I pulled out (or rather they spilled out).  They were things I was thinking when I was feeling a bit low a few days back, and I finally got around to processing them.

I’m going after something really big.  Perhaps some people don’t have to convince themselves that they can in fact do big things.  At one point, it seemed obvious to me that I could too.  But life has a way of making you… tired.

Kids, jobs, responsibilities, a constant buzzing stream of distractions and little things.  Do you really want to put in another effort to get that one thing done today that might make a difference?  Maybe it _can_ wait until tomorrow.  Maybe you can wait until you’re in a less busy season of your life.  Besides, you’re going to die anyway, and you can’t take it with you.

The problem with thoughts like these is not that they’re false.  It’s that they’re not very constructive.

Yes, things can wait, but if you are in the habit of always waiting, then you will also be in the habit of not doing a whole lot.

You are busy, and you are tired, but you’ll always be busy and tired – even more so if you aren’t doing anything to change your situation that’s making you quite this busy and tired.

I wanted to share some of the very short applications of The Work that I did on these thoughts.  I didn’t do all of The Work on all of these thoughts because (surprise) none of these thoughts are strictly true, and I didn’t have all day… And for your sake, dear reader, I skipped most of this because it was a bit repetitive (even for me).

“The gap is too big for me” ← the original thought (slightly expanded).  Now, turnarounds.
“The gap is not too big for me”
“I am too big for the gap”
“The gap is too small for me”
“The gap is the right size for me”

Who am I with that thought? Discouraged.  Daunted.  Inactive.  Inert.

Who am I without that thought?  Curious, playful, possible.

“I can’t see the path”
“I can see the path”
“The path can’t see me”
“I know the path”

Who am I with that thought?  Uncertain, unmoving.

Without it?  Exploring

“Maybe I am making a mistake”
“Maybe I am not making a mistake”
“Maybe a mistake is making me”
“Maybe I am exactly right.”

“Maybe a mistake is making me” This is a good one!  Are my mistakes building me?  Are they making me into something new?  How exciting!

What to think instead?  What are some better beliefs?  A better narrative?  

Here’s what I came up with.

“I would like this outcome.  I am willing to work creatively to get it.  If I move, the Lord will direct me.  The outcome is important to me.  It matters to me that I really try and really commit to getting there.  I can find or make a path, and big gaps are just a lot of little gaps.  It would matter if it happened, and it would be good if I succeeded.”

These sentences don’t exactly contain earth-shaking profundity.  But what is profound is recognizing you can just think something else.  And I have decided that when confronted with choosing between stultifying, discouraging thoughts and inspiring, encouraging thoughts, that I will choose the latter. 

Our goal is not to have an easy life.  It is to see how much life we can have. I want to choose a perspective that drives action.

What does a good coach do?

A lot of it is about noticing the subtext or the expression of the person they’re coaching.  Calling it out, shining a light.

In an episode of “Beyond High Performance”, one of the coaches talks about their job of noticing, and shining a light on something their client is expressing or experiencing.  Calling out something that may be hidden.

Why are we hidden from ourselves?  Because we are looking out, and we are looking _through_ ourselves.  We are not looking at ourselves looking.

Journaling out thoughts or doing exercises to find out what our thoughts are can serve as a way to self-coach.

One thing my coach pointed out is that we are creating our experiences.  We filter what happens through our thoughts and our attitudes.  Our beliefs, our foundational _narratives_ about the world around us are something we choose, and they are not something that can be uprooted by counter-evidence.  Everything is interpreted through the lens, and if you refuse to choose a different lens, everything will support your interpretation.

I am reminded of this scene in The Last Battle, which I read to my eldest daughter a few years ago:

“Aslan,” said Lucy through her tears, “could you – will you – do something for these poor Dwarfs?”

“Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.” He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, “Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!”

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.” But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:

“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

The dwarves have a foundational narrative that can’t be shaken by the evidence.  They see what they’re given through that narrative.  It’s unshakable.  And so their experience of what was good was a very bad one.

Obstacles and challenges are frequently (always?) wonderful opportunities.  But do we experience them that way?  Or do we grumble?  

Exercises such as The Work or The Metanoia Catholic Journal (they have a free sample exercise if you sign up for their mailing list and don’t want to pay for a physical thing), are good to help you notice your thoughts and question your thoughts, and decide what thoughts you want to think.

What beliefs are you looking through instead of looking at?   Could you start by pulling apart just one of those, and seeing if you want to hold onto it?

The last 24 hours have been illuminating.  I’ve been pausing throughout my day to reset and ask myself what is most important to me right now?  I’ve realized a few things.

My days lack intention

I run myself ragged bouncing from one thing to the next, racing to do the thing that appears most urgent, because it’s in my field of vision.  When I forced myself to pause and consider, I had to think for a moment about what would actually add the most value to my life.  A lot of the time that meant sacrificing a perceived present good for the future.  Delaying homeschool for 15 minutes so I could take a shower.  Waiting on that next load of laundry and instead spraying the pile of stained clothes on the counter with stain remover.  Leaving the pile of dishes for a moment while I dug out my book club book and made a plan to get through it gradually over the next month.  I allowed myself to give precedence to the things that are important to me, and required my life to make a space for those things.  Which brings me to my next point-

When I actually prioritize my priorities, sometimes I end up doing the same things, but with ownership.

Sometimes when I paused and asked myself what was most important to me right now, the answer was folding the laundry or doing the dishes.  But instead feeling begrudgingly dragged, I had to be honest about what I wanted.  I want to fold the laundry, because it will feel good to get that job done.  I want to do the dishes, because an empty sink will energize me.  I want to teach the 9 year old her math lesson, because nurturing her and helping her thrive academically are important to me.  Once I accepted that I do in fact have a choice, I had to own the choices I was making.  And that led to a lot less angsting and resisting, and a lot more peace.

When I move the big rocks, the little rocks follow

Order is contagious.  And I am more productive when I’m not dragging myself around doing things I don’t want to do.  I found that the day went more smoothly and more little things got done when I felt like I was on my own side.  I was treating myself like a valued asset, instead of an indentured servant.

I make even more excuses than I realized.

Today husband asked me to send a text.  I told him I might not have time to get to it today, but then almost immediately, I caught myself, and admitted honestly that it wasn’t that I didn’t have time, it was that I didn’t want to do it.  If I can make time for the things I want, I can make time for the things I dread.  Texting people gives me intense anxiety.  Such intense anxiety that I want to do it perfectly, craft the perfect text that won’t offend, will be impossible to misinterpret, and will secure a prompt and clear response.  So I agonize over it, and put it off, and finally don’t actually send anything, because it all makes me feel yucky, and I don’t want to feel yucky.  I’m frantically flailing around trying to avoid a feeling that I don’t like.  

Busyness is the ultimate excuse.  My 4 crazy kids are the ultimate excuse.  Of course I can’t get to it, I don’t even have time to take a shower. As soon as I stopped and questioned that statement, a whole bunch of other stuff came out.  

I’m afraid.  I’m so afraid that I’ve been hiding even from myself.  I have been hiding in my busy life, in my 4 children, and in my endless housework and errands and appointments and chores.   But what if I’m not too busy to accomplish things?  What if it’s just a matter of really prioritizing? What if it’s more about wanting the thing than not having the circumstances to get it?  What if it’s my choice?  What if I choose the things that I do in a day?  

With agency comes responsibility.  If I have time to take a shower, I have time to send a text, time to have an awkward but necessary conversation, time to make a phone call that fills me with dread, time to write a blog post, time to work on a business, time to learn something new, time to confront the things that are difficult or unpleasant for me.

I’m not saying that I have time for everything.  At this point in my life, I’m going to get to the end of the day and still have chores undone.   But I can choose the things that I do accomplish.  I don’t have to be dragged around by an endless to do list, throwing up my hands in helpless consternation.

I had a conversation the other day with a friend about why we don’t do what we could do.  

We are afraid to find out how much we can do.

Why?

A few things appear to me when I ask this question.  

The first is similar to my lovely wife’s thoughts.  If you know what you can do, you may discover a responsibility to do it.  Excuses are nice sometimes.

The second though is more interesting to me.  Let’s say you happen to be extremely strong as a young person.  And you use that strength to get what you want.  

You might be physically strong, or just very smart, or very charming.  And you use that power to take advantage of people.  You are giving into a temptation to use your power for evil.

Now you repent.  And you don’t want to be that kind of person.  

Instead of renouncing the misuse, you renounce the power.  The power led you astray, and so you try to suppress it and avoid it and pretend you don’t have it.

But this isn’t the right response.  This also cuts off your power to do good.  Being too incapable or weak or timid to do evil is not the same thing as the capacity to do good.

It may be preferable for a truly bad man to stop being evil by becoming weak than to continue being evil.  

But what if instead you became good?  You kept your power.  You didn’t divorce yourself from it, but instead turned it to good?

Fears

We sometimes avoid our areas of greatest strength because we are afraid of what we might do.  We may have given ourselves wounds by misuse of those things in the past.

We may be avoiding confronting the scary truths about ourselves.  Or confronting areas where there is some danger of regressing.

These fears hold us back from developing our strengths.  Our greatest problems and our greatest strengths go together.

Find the Lie, Get back your Freedom

The lie is that you can’t be good if you have that power.  You can’t be trusted with it.

Can you find the particular thing in your life? 

Then what do you do with that?  You figure out how to start living well with your talents, with your abilities.  And you vote every day on what kind of person you want to be.  You commit to it, and when you screw up, you repent.

You have to judge what risks you’re willing to take, but you can ease into things, and eventually learn how to use all your talents and abilities for good.  

Then you will start to feel free again, to do what is good.

We must of course, in all things, try to avoid self-deception, and that’s why it helps to have some good friends with solid values to check you, and to challenge you. 

But going through life timidly, afraid that we may make any mistake, or give any offense, or in any way do something a bit wrong is simply not a way to live.  It’s avoiding the problem.

We need to become good, not just be too weak to be bad.

So what could I accomplish if I felt like 200%?  What could and therefore maybe should I expect from myself if I gave myself what I say I need?

I think it’s time for an experiment.  For the next week, I’m going to be ruthlessly selfish (that’s what it feels like, anyway).  I’m going to pause during my day and ask myself What is most important to me right now?  And then I’m going to do that, instead of the thing that feels most urgent.  Maybe dinner will be 15 minutes late because I chose to take a shower in the morning instead of doing the dishes.  Maybe I won’t get to the 9 year old’s math lesson today because I was working on a design for the e commerce business.  Is that the end of the world?  Let’s see what happens.

If you asked me what is the most important thing to accomplish in a day, what makes me feel like a human, nay, like a superhuman, what one thing that, if checked off my list, makes me feel like countless other things are possible–I’d say, getting a shower in the morning.  And yet.  Most days I don’t manage to fit a shower into my morning, and I go through the day busy and grumpy and probably a little stinky, moving from one thing to the next to the next, because somehow, I made all the other priorities for the day come first.  Let’s unpack that.  

My priority= morning shower

Things that I give precedence over my priority=pretty much everything else that I need to do in a day.  I tried making a list, but it was a long and interminable list, and consisted of pretty much every other action that I engage in.  Including things like folding laundry and doing dishes.

So is it really my priority?  Why don’t we do the things that we say are important to us?  Why am I dragging myself through the day, feeling like 50%, and telling myself (and my husband) that it’s inescapable, and that I just had too many important things to do (for other people) to fit in the one thing that would make me feel like 200%?  

What could I accomplish if I felt like 200% all the time?  That’s kind of intimidating.  Maybe I can get into this more tomorrow-it’s bedtime.

This evening, I had some friends over, to sit around the fire and talk.  While in some sense, I don’t have this time if I’m going to be hustling and accomplishing all these huge goals, it was one of the major constraints of my vision.  To not neglect my friendships, or my wife, or my kids.

I am keeping these priorities, and see them as essential.  What good is it if we build a business but have no one to share life with?

One of the themes of our discussion was giving all your desires to God.  Pointing everything back to what’s primary.  Pointing everything to the one who calls us out of our complacency, out into the wild, out into adventure.  Allowing our striving to be directed, ultimately, to what is good, and to ordering our lives and our striving ultimately to Him.

If I were to make my goals all about me, and to simply go after material success, it would be a fruitless and vain endeavor, ultimately about self-gratification, which would accomplish nothing.

What I want is for this striving to be a source of transformation and grace, to show myself, and others, what we are capable of when we do not sit complacently but reach for something.  

So far, the fruits of this striving has been to find the cracks in myself, and where the struggles are, and what kinds of beliefs I have that are keeping me from using my talents fully.

I hope that these friendships are strengthened and deepened by what I gain, and that these fruits also help those I love to grow in their own lives and in their own goals, which ultimately will help us all to become who God wants us to be.

Since we committed to working on this goal, we’ve had to stop making excuses, and just face up to doing some very hard things.  And as we’ve done that, a lot of sludge has been coming out.  Insecurities, weaknesses, old wounds, lies we’ve told ourselves for so long that they have taken on the appearance of truths, just tons of really yucky sludgey stuff.  I keep wondering, where is all this stuff coming from?  I thought I was over this, I didn’t even realize that was a problem, and so on.

I’ve been taking traffic school online for the last couple of weeks.  I’m about….2/7 of the way through the course.  Another one of those things that I’m trying to fit into a schedule that feels like it’s bursting at the seams.  A couple of lessons ago I came across a description of what’s called “self regulating.”  It’s essentially avoiding driving situations that you find difficult or potentially dangerous.  It could mean keeping to the slow lane, or choosing not to make right turns at red lights.  Parking in the back of a parking lot to avoid having to deal with other drivers, or never driving during inclement weather.  Traffic school posits that more self regulation leads to safer roads.  I’m not so sure.

When I first read about self regulation, my initial thought was that it would lead to timid drivers who don’t really know how to drive, and who can’t handle themselves on the road when things get real.  Who can’t handle LA traffic, or parallel parking on a busy street, or making that really scary left turn with a whole line of cars lined up behind you.  When you have to safely change 4 lanes of traffic in the space of half of a mile to reach the freeway offramp…do you really want to be the guy who never practiced changing lanes because it seemed a little dangerous?

It suddenly occurred to me why it is that all that sludge is coming up and out now.  We’ve been self regulating our lives.  We’ve been avoiding anything that forces us to even approach the difficult, the uncomfortable, the awkward, the icky.  We’ve made anything and everything our excuses, and now that we’ve started calling BS on all the excuses and just facing up to things…it’s getting a little yucky.  It doesn’t feel good.

I was discussing this with husband earlier.  He made the point that maybe instead of avoiding those bad feelings as we have for years, we should sit with them.  Listen to them, and learn something.  Learn about the parts of ourselves that are broken, rotted, and in disrepair.  And then fix them.