egads and small fishes

I am not dreading this milestone in my life. (I said milestone not headstone!) Not one to put things off that I can needlessly worry about, I dreaded this day months ago. Wrinkling around my eyes, neck going crepey, down-turning at the corners of my mouth, flab around my middle, etc. The evidence was clear that there was no mistake on my birth certificate. And no amount of bemoaning the fact was going to make any difference, except to make me miserable.Why do I dread getting old? I’ve enjoyed a long series of blessings, challenges, trials, and triumphs. The Lord’s hand is more and more visible in my life and the lives of those around me. I have learned so much and come so far. For me, each decade speaks of my progression along life’s rocky road (sounds like ice cream).

At age 10, I’d gone from infant to young girl just recently back from 1-1/2 years in Germany. Shy and unsure of how to fit in.

My teen years of dating behind me, I was married just prior to my 20th birthday. I was in a new environment with new family. Again, shy and unsure of how to fit in. Yet full with anticipation on the precipice of what was sure to be a happy life.

Thirty found me the mother of four beautiful gifts from heaven—James, Joshua, Joseph, and Brent—between the ages of 9 and 1. Life was busy and responsibilities intense. Any self-doubt and insecurity in the background.

At forty I was remarried to the love of my life, after enduring a painful divorce. My oldest had graduated from high school. Coping with a new life of college, the angst of my teenaged children, and easing into a new family of in-laws. My husband’s wise counsel to always take the long view as I faced my many challenges was a new and untried concept to me.

As I approached fifty, I took stock of myself. I realized how my reliance upon my Heavenly Father have increased. That the long view my husband encouraged me to take has been coupled with great spiritual outpourings of understanding as challenges have continued to be part of my daily walk. My four sons are all good young men who are trying to do good and be good. My relationship with each of them has gotten closer and my love and respect for them have increased. I am enjoying a close bond with two wonderful grandchildren. My relationship with my former in-laws has been restored in large part, and I cherish my new in-laws who have shown me how to embrace and accept others by their example of accepting me and mine into their family circle. I continue to learn at the feet of my parents through their many acts of kindness and their good examples. Life is so full and rich, even when fraught with turmoil and trauma. A sense of peace and joy undergirds my day to day life. I have so much to be grateful for.

So I made a decision to turn that frown upside down, so to speak. I’ve had fifty blessed years on this earth that have taught me so many things. I have such sense of gratitude for my loving family – a loving, wonderful husband, four beautiful, strong sons, exemplary parents, mother-in-law, ex-in-laws. I’ve been blessed with good health and I’m in better shape than I’ve been in years.  I’ve earned every wrinkle, flab, and sag. But all in all I think I look and feel pretty good for an old broad.

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

j

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was a precedent-breaking First Lady during her husband’s (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) terms as U.S. President. She was a strong political helpmate who dedicated her life to Franklin’s purposes. And, unlike her predecessors, she held press conferences, traveled across the country, spoke and expressed her opinions candidly thereby transforming the role of First Lady.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don’t fall off unless you plan to stop pedaling.
- Claude Duncan Pepper

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Claude Duncan Pepper (1900-1989) was an American politician belonging to the Democratic party.

Life is a great bundle of little things.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

By managing the little things we make more room for the bigger things – the things that give our life meaning. Tasks that follow us day in and day out can over-run us if we do not give them their own place so we can move away from that place quickly and efficiently.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) was one of the best regarded 19th century American poets even though he was a physician by profession. His poem Ironsides gave him national prominence and generated enough public sentiment that resulted in the historic frigate USS Constitution being preserved as a monument rather than be broken up for scrap.

Good change is the (occasionally) skilful redirecting, renewing, and reconnecting of stuff (like time, money, things, jokes, knowledge, hopes, passion, and dreams) into something better for us, for someone, even for everyone.
- Max McKeown

I’m ready for something better by making good changes in my life.

j

Max McKeown has been described as “somewhere between Bill Gates and Buddha on the wisdom scale”. McKeown works as a strategic adviser and is a well-known speaker on subjects including innovation, engagement, human potential, customer experience, marketing, team building, and competitive advantage. He has written six books, including Unshrink featuring the myths that stop our people doing their best work and a set of new principles to engage their interest and ability.

Drowning in the sea of things I need to do, should do, and want to do, I feel like I am lucky just to tread water—just get through the things of today as best I can. But like treading water, I get frustrated because I’m not making any progress a more simplified existence. I’m just desperately dog-paddling to keep my head above the water of my complicated life.

I began last week with the spirit of an Olympic swimmer only to become sick on Monday afternoon and was out of the race for the rest of the week. As I laid there in bed, I thought about the time when, as a young girl, my family and I went to live in Germany for 1-1/2 years. We didn’t know the language—just ask my mom who flapped her wings like a chicken when she tried to buy some poultry to cook for dinner. Needless to say, we six children were left to our own devices when it came to entertaining ourselves. This was pre -video, – personal computer, – ipod, and – cell phone. Local television didn’t hold our interest in a language we didn’t understand enough to make sense of. But, thanks to reel-to-reel tapes, we could listen to the same few tapes over and over. Those tapes contained three types of audio: my parents really square music, some German beer drinking songs, and Bill Cosby to listen to over and over. Needless to say, in our desperation to replace the Saturday morning cartoons we left behind in the U.S., we listened to Cosby hundreds of times and can quote him verbatim. The sad thing about it is after all these years I laugh at the same stories and same punch lines I did as a kid.

You may be wondering, what this has to do with my quest for living a simplified life. Well, I’m getting to that. And, no, I am not going to talk at length about those good-old-days in Germany (although I could and I reserve my right to do so in the future.) Rather, I want to refer to one of Cosby’s lines in his unique retelling of biblical story, Noah’s Ark [The Best of Bill Cosby]. The Lord is hinting to a reluctant, dubious Noah why he must build an Ark. And the Lord asks “How long can you tread water?” While I’m not planning on gathering up two animals of every kind to strike out on my ocean of despair, I think there is value in learning to tread water.

Like treading water where we must to keep our hands moving and our head above water, we need to figure out what every-day tasks we face every day. Once these tasks are identified, we can begin to devise a plan to accomplish them in an efficient way. The goal is to stream-line these every-day tasks so we can have more room in our lives to focus on more fulfilling goals—such as tackling the children’s scrapbooks, finishing the home improvement projects, or perhaps, more quality time with family and friends. I find it hard to enjoy each moment when I know I have stacks of paperwork, piles of old newspapers, dinner-hour approaching and no groceries in the cupboards.

Although we will find daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly tasks that fill up our lives, it’s important to begin by making a running list of everything we need to do to keep our head above water. Here’s the beginning of my list:
- Mail : bills, wedding announcements, letters, etc.
- Finances : paying bills, bookkeeping, balancing bank statements, receipts
- Newspaper : daily access, accumulating old papers before recycling
- Newsclips : (I like to collect news stories that interest me)
- Photos : downloading, printing, accessibility
- Camcorder : same as photos
- Flyers
- Calendar
- Scrapbook memorabilia : how to store it and get it accessible
- Menu / Groceries
- Housekeeping : dishes, vacuuming, tidying, etc.

I was surprised by what I felt confronted me on a regular basis. Some tasks are handled with ease. Others are handled easily once you determine a consistent plan of how you are going to deal with them. Others tend to get shoved aside, accumulates and finally consumes a large block of time in order to be dealt with. We’ll discuss many of these in detail and develop strategies for that can be applied for unique situations as time goes on. But for now, start building your list.

j

Our life is frittered away by detail…. Simplify, simplify.
Henry David Thoreau

the frittering is truly in the details

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Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862), was an American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, best-known for his autobiographical story of life in the woods, Walden(1854). Thoreau was one of the leading personalities in New England Transcendentalism. His Civil Disobedience (1849) influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
[Onlineliterature.com]

It is the perfection of God’s works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion.
- Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in Religion of Isaac Newton (Fremantle lectures)(1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120.

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Sir Isaac Newton [1643-1727] a theologian, physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher and alchemist. Newton is best known for his treatise Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. This work helped remove the last doubts about heliocentrism and advanced the scientific revolution. Among his other accomplishments, he invented the reflecting telescope, developed a theory of color based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum, and shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development in calculus. Newton was deemed more influential that Albert Einstein in a 2005 poll of the Royal Society of who had the greatest effect on the history of science.

We’re all broken. We’re all messed up pigs. When we can accept that, we’re ready to become the new creations God intended us to be. And that’s when the fun starts!
- Phil Visher, Sidney & Norman, a tale of two pigs (2006)

Okay. It looks like I’m ready for ALOT of fun. I long to know and to become what the Lord intends for me to be.

j

Phil Vischer was born 16 Jun 1966 and is a writer, actor, animator, puppeteer, and the founder of Big Idea Productions, the company best known for bringing computer animated vegetables to life in the popular VeggieTales series.

The other day I was in the store and saw yet another plaque to hang up at home with the word SIMPLIFY. I was strongly drawn to the sentiment but I didn’t want to buy it and then have to find a place to hang it thereby complicating my day instead of achieving the simplification I longed for.

Since then I have contemplated what it would mean to simplify my life into something truly fulfilling and rewarding. It would mean a simple life where I can deal with the everyday tasks and responsibilities I have while also enjoying the simple everyday pleasures and the freedom to pursue goals that are both fulfilling and rewarding. I am not primarily motivated by the acquisition of money or possessions-not that I would complain about the acquisition of either. Rather, meaningful relationships with God, my husband and my family are. Seeing, both visually and intellectually, the world around me in new ways is a rewarding experience for me. I love pulling together what I observe, read, learn, and live and then converting it into new ways of seeing life more fully and deeply. And I long to express this to others. But what I imagine is a far cry from what I see in my real life.

What I see in my real life is a lot of areas that are out-of-control and I wonder how my life ever got into such a mess. I look around me and feel overwhelmed by all that I need and want to do. I don’t even know where to start. My futile attempts at getting a handle on my life have failed-miserably. Instead, I watch my life get further from my simple ideals and more complicated as each day passes.

I occasionally watch those home organizing shows on television and wish someone would come in and rescue me from my messy life. But I don’t think it is a matter of throwing away stuff and having a garage sale-although that might help.

How did my life get into such a chaotic state? I have a lot to be grateful for-I’m happily remarried, I have overcome and accomplished many things so far in life. However, these things are overwhelmed by so many other things that are robbing me of truly enjoying my simple, contented life. I have decades of scrapbook materials I want to get in books for my four sons, who are now between the ages of 24 and 17. I live in a cozy [a.k.a. small, modest] home that we have neglected for half of the eight years we’ve been married while my husband supported me through school-obtaining my bachelors degree in graphic design. I am still trying to assimilate two households-my husband’s and mine-as well as defining our joint household. I have relationships with my four sons and three step-children, ranging in age from 30 to 17, to build and maintain-each of whom have their own special needs as they face their own personal and career drama. I have a multitude of interests, both intellectually and creatively, for which I have collected information on-thanks to the information superhighway and the newspaper. I have a recipe collection that is out of control and a house that never gets quite clean. I have home improvement projects waiting to be completed and others to begin. Blah. Blah. Blah. The list goes on.

I know I’m not the only one who feels overwhelmed by a chaotic life. I have discussed this with my writer/teacher husband and he feels similarly. I watch my children, both biological and step, go through their own states of chaos in their lives. And when I want to laugh at myself and my predicament [instead of cry] I listen to folk singer/songwriter Cheryl Wheeler’s song on her Sylvia Hotel cd I’m Not Worthy which humorously pegs this overwhelming sense of all the things that I feel I should be doing. However, laughing at myself is not enough-I need to act.

Heaven knows, I’ve tried to act and fallen down in the attempt. But you know what they say about falling off a horse. Well, here I go. I’m getting back on the horse. Or maybe, I should just break down and go back to the store to buy the SIMPLIFY plaque and see if it can magically rescue me from my messiness.

j

[I adore Cheryl Wheeler's Sylvia Hotel and Circle and Arrows. She is an amazing talent.]