Meme of the Week
Happy Friday.
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Posts tagged ‘life’
Feb 15
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Jun 30
Miranda: I Surrender
Many of us grapple with a mounting sense that things aren’t quite right. Life is beautiful, in lots of ways, but if we could just shift this or that or accomplish X, the pieces would fit together better and we could make it all work. At that magical moment, we’d finally arrive at that elusive place of “balance” that everyone always talks about.
With trumpet fanfare in the background, we’d finally figure out how to raise happy children while holding down a job, reading two books a week, keeping the house spotless, fitting into our skinny jeans, growing heirloom tomatoes, and making mind-boggling progress in our creative work that results in a finished project that ultimately brings fame and fortune.
Right?
I’ve spent many (most) years of my life pursuing support systems and strategies that I believe will enable the flow and sense of ease that we all yearn for. I often seem tantalizingly close ~ if I could just tweak my organizational systems a bit or come up with a few more ounces of self-discipline then I would really be at the top of my game. I’d be able to do all of the most important things and stay constructively focused on my priorities.
Right?
Well, not so much. Despite my deep, abiding affection for all things organizational and relating to time management and life design, I must acknowledge that my addiction to these tools is often just another distraction. The truth is, I can’t get this messy, often chaotic life to “balance.” The pieces are big and unwieldy and no matter what I do, they’re going to fall on my head. And you know what? That’s OK. Balance isn’t really the point.
Increasingly, when I feel uncomfortable or anxious, I am able to take a breath and say, “This, too.” My preschooler has another toilet-training accident on the living room carpet? This, too. A client miscommunicates a marketing project outline and I end up having to start all over again? This, too. I can’t find time to finish that art project with the kids? This, too. The collard greens I’d planned to steam for dinner have gone wilted and weepy in the crisper? This, too. It’s the resistance that causes suffering.
I’m learning how to let go into things that are seemingly unpleasant or upsetting. I ask myself, in the refrain of Buddhist teachers, “Is this worth sacrificing my ease?” Because in truth, 99% of the time, whatever irritation or anxiety I’m experiencing is really not worth losing my sense of peace. Ease is always there, always within grasp, if I chose it.
When you start choosing ease as a matter of habit, you begin to realize how much you used to get carried away by the utterly minor dramas of daily life. You begin to notice how other people around you seem to complain a lot and are constantly fixated on what isn’t working. You can’t help but observe how so many others unwittingly opt for disharmony.
You can’t change other people, and that’s OK. You can’t be all things to everyone at the same time. You can’t do everything you want to accomplish today, right now. You can’t fit your many passions into a simultaneous funnel. But you can learn to wake up in wonder at the start of each new day.
This, too.
This piece was reprinted from a past issue of the Creative Times, our monthly newsletter. Click here to subscribe!
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Jan 27
Jenny: Having Kids Early vs Having ‘Em Later
I had a very enlightening conversation last night — one of many, in fact — with my host here in Sydney, Ms. Jodie Ekert.
I first met Jodie many years back when we were both fresh faces on the stand-up comedy scene (not saying anything about the current state of our faces, mind you, I am speaking purely metaphorically…ehem) — we hit it off and when some many months later she came to town to perform and was looking for an MC, she called on yours truly.
Fast forward x years later and we’re now playing mummy club together in her suitably faboosh child-friendly pad — her bub 15 months, my little dude just a little older — and we found ourselves with a whole new level of common ground over which to chin-wag.
And so it was that the topic turned to the effect that having kids has on your life when you have them early in life versus later. And Jodie’s take on it was an interesting one to me, given that my experience of parenting has been quite different, at least in terms of the timing in my life.
You see, I remember very boldly proclaiming to somebody that “I’m not having kids til I’m at LEAST 33!”, not realising of course, that at that very moment, I was indeed, pregnant.
Ha. Ha.
I was 22.
And once I’d overcome the initial shock of this unexpected twist of events, my first thought turned to all the things I’d wanted so badly to do with my life but hadn’t.
Backpack through Europe.
Carve out a career in showbiz.
Go to Nepal and hire a sherpa.
I was kicking myself for not having taken action before now: why hadn’t I just pulled my finger out and made these things happen when I had the chance? Now that I was going to be a mother, I’d have to just resign myself to those dreams going on the backburner for the forseeable future, if not off the stove altogether.
Then something in me snapped. I resolved — in my traditional melodramatic form — to absolutely NOT let this new stage of my life mean the end of the things I really wanted to do. I was so completely resolute in this, so determined to still make serious headway on even the maddest dreams and adventures in my heart that I think, to be honest, I actually became quite selfish.
I still believe I was a good mother in those early years, in that I cared for my kids, loved them to bits and made sure they were well looked after – but I also recognise now that I became so damn hell bent on achieving what I wanted to with my life that at times my mind wasn’t really present just to enjoy my beautiful babies right then and there, which makes me sad now especially as I realise how quickly those first years really do pass.
Would I change anything?
I don’t know.
The flipside of this, of course, is that my kids have always known (and will always know) a mother who is at least trying — with various levels of success and failure — to look after her own needs and pursue her own goals, as crazy as they may be. Whether this turns out to be a positive thing for them, I can only hope. Time will tell.
Anyway, I am in typical Jenny-fashion, getting rather side-tracked here.
My point is that for me personally, motherhood at such an early age hugely impacted on the way I live my life (duh!) in the sense that it made me resolutely determined to carve out the life I’d barely even begun to live.
Jodie, on the other hand told me that she felt — as a first time mother at 32 — that her struggle was more about dealing with the sense of loss of the life she’d already had. i.e. the career she’d had, even friends she’d had – the difference between her and I being that I’d barely even begun to carve out my life when motherhood hit, whereas she had an established life that then had to change.
Let me hereby state for the record that both of us adore our little ones to bits and are so happy that they are in our lives — but it is fascinating to me the effect that becoming a parent has on your whole world.
It was only last night that I really thought about my own experience from a different angle.
That is, up until now I’d kinda thought at some level that maybe if I HAD done all the stuff I’d wanted to do pre-kids, even if I HAD waited til I was “at least 33” to have babies, maybe even if I HAD backpacked, treaded the boards and found my sherpa before embarking on the adventure that was family life, that the transition to “mother” would have been simple.
It’s now that I realise that’s just not so.
There’s never a “right time” to have a baby. They change your life no matter what.
And carving out a life for yourself is not just something you do in your early twenties — it’s a lifelong undertaking.
What do you reckon?
[Cross posted from Comic Mummy]
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Nov 29
Kelly: What Shall You Do?
This little scrap of spelling list has been floating around the house for months. I find it here and there, and for some reason, I’ve just never thrown it away. Today I was thinking about everything that I have on my plate on right now, and when I came home, I saw this on the floor in the bedroom. Shall.
Sometimes things get so crazy that we lose track of all the things we said we shall do. The kids get sick (Olivia). You get sick (me). The cat goes on the lam again (Tink). You become over-committed, oftentimes because of things you cannot control (me, work). You stay sick because you’re over-committed (me, still). You follow through on obligations you make because you committed that you shall do them (me, participating in the Halifax Arts Festival even though I was still sick). You work one very demanding full-time job, one part-time job and try to manage a creative business, for a reason (you, um, I, want the part-time job to become the full-time job so you can have more time with your family and more time for creativity). So you keep going. What shall you do to pull all this together?
Today, I shall try to remember that all things will fall into place where they shall, in their due time, as the Man above plans. And I shall be thankful that I got to get away for a brief 24 hours to reunite with my sorority sisters Saturday (45 of us), antibiotics and cough drops in hand (and a few beers to help battle the germs). And I shall decide that those custom orders can wait just a little while longer, and that will be okay. And I shall decide that I’ll get to my blog when I get to my blog, which obviously hasn’t been very often lately. And I shall sit on the couch and cuddle with my girls while watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and then lie in the bed and snuggle with DH while watching Antiques Roadshow. And I shall try not to worry about all those things I’ve been losing track of. And I shall decide that everything will be just fine. What shall you do today?
[cross-posted from Artful Happiness…pictures from the reunion there :-)]
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Jul 2
Kelly: Learning to Spread My Wings
Over the past month, I’ve been taking an e-course with Kelly Rae Roberts called Flying Lessons. Let me just say wow. The amount of content Kelly Rae has written for this course has been absolutely phenomenal. I imagine the full thing would print out to be a 300-page book. It’s been crazy chock full of great information. Of course, as par for the course for me, I’ve been having a heck of a time keeping up so I’ve been hopping around a bit, but today’s post really struck a chord with me. It talks about embracing the journey of a creative business… “the ebb and flow, overwhelm and burnout, celebration and joy.” I’ve most definitely been experiencing that. (Bracelet above listed in my Etsy shop.)
Kelly Rae said, “After all, in the big scheme of things, it’s often not the destination that we can control. The only thing we really can control is staying centered and inside the perspective that the creative biz path really is a journey. If we can give ourselves permission to not always know, to give up the “shoulds,” then we allow ourselves and our creative spirits a bit more freedom to roam the mysteries of its possibilities.”
Well said, sister! Last year, I postponed the majority of my regular juried show schedule in lieu of participating in the Riverside Arts Market (RAM). I was so excited about RAM. The venue was gorgeous, the idea was fabulous, and I felt like it was something Jacksonville really needed. And if I could stay right here at home and sell my jewelry and photography, awesome! Now, I still think the venue is gorgeous, and the idea is fabulous, and the people running it are truly wonderful; it’s very well organized. It just didn’t work for me. My sales for 13 weeks at RAM barely surpassed what I normally do at a large juried festival in one weekend. Granted my jewelry is on the higher end of what you’d typically find at a market like this, so maybe that was part of it. And maybe I expected too much. Who knows? I’d love to see RAM move to a once-a-month format instead of a weekly format. While RAM is still the top dog and the best run market in the best venue, nearly a dozen little Saturday arts and farmers markets have sprouted up in the area, and I wonder if the market is getting a bit too diluted.
My experience with RAM was a big lesson for me. And it was a big lesson that caused some major burnout. All those Saturdays in a row at the market away from my family, not making many sales, really took a physical and creative toll on me. Because of that, this year I took a big step back. I only did one show this spring, the always fun and profitable Springtime Tallahassee Arts Jubilee. (I wrote about my very first Springtime Tallahassee here; it was quite an experience!) I’ve started worrying less about selling my art and started enjoying more the process itself, creating whatever I’ve wanted to create when I’ve wanted to create it (obviously, since in the last week on my blog I’ve shared the jewelry above, a mixed media postcard, and some Best Shot Monday photography!). That’s been very freeing. I guess that’s part of the ebb and flow Kelly Rae referred to. And because I’ve let go of the need to sell, every little sale I do make on Etsy or on my website is cause for celebration! And it’s made room for other things, allowing me the time to explore other creative areas, the freedom to experience amazing adventures like Artful Journey, and even the room and opportunity for my first solo gallery showing of my photography (more on that later!).
It’s fitting that I wrote this post on June 30. Thanks to that letting go this first half of 2010, I’m now starting to feel better about loading Sally up and hitting the road again, so this fall, I’m planning to get back to a scaled-down version of my regular show schedule. Because I’ve been so scatter-brained lately (okay, I’m always scatter-brained, but I’ve been more scatter-brained than usual lately), I missed the application deadline for Market Days in Tallahassee, which has been one of my regulars, but that’s okay; that’ll save me that $375 booth and application fee, and I’ll fill that spot with a less expensive show. I’m looking into the Glynn Arts Association shows for this fall. I could essentially still sleep at home with those since they are just an hour up the road in St. Simon’s! So thank you, Kelly Rae. That post was just what I needed to read today. It was a good reminder that the journey really is so much more enjoyable when we worry less about the destination. That’s a good lesson learned.
[Crossposted from Artful Happiness]
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May 5
Alison: Carved-out satisfaction versus cut-throat success
There’s a ‘wealth’ of information out there and particularly online about how to become a successful writer, how to write, pitch, blog, market yourself, build up a following, get a publisher, be known. Much of it is excellent advice. However, what grates on me is the kind of ‘stop at nothing’ advice where you are meant to steamroller your way to the top by being relentlessly competitive with your contemporaries. Some will think I am naive. You simply have to stand out to be noticed, you need to blog more, network more, tour more, promote more.
Absolutely. You need dedication. You need to lose the excuses not to write. You need to be aware of what’s going on in the market. You need to know who’s in the know and what they know! But what I object to is ambition in a vacuum, the one-track mind to success that doesn’t consider other priorities like the people around you, your home and family life, or your relationship with others and with the world.
Last week Christina Katz, writer, woman, mother, powerhouse asked people to blog about happiness. To me happiness can be joy, exquisite moments of enjoyment of the process of writing, of the gorgeous reality of my children and their funny moments, a perfect moment of spring blossom and sun. But that kind of happiness is not always available moment to moment. What is available is an overall satisfaction with your life and its choices, an understanding that you may not always get exactly what you want, when you want (like all the time you want to write) but that you are doing your absolute best to fulfill your ambition while maintaining equilibrium with other parts of your life. As a woman and mother, this reciprocity and balancing of your own needs with the needs of your children, family, extended family and the community as a whole is integral. I am not going to blog everyday if it means that I don’t do a jigsaw with my two-year-old or colour with my daughter, if I can’t listen to my friend who is going through a hard time, if I never have time for giving rather than just getting. On Benjamin Kanarek blog Isa Maisa said recently: As our society today considers fame and fortune to be the Holy Grail of our sense of purpose, living a life in an attitude of a happy medium is hushed as insufficient and discusses Doris Lessing, Michael Jackson and Alexander McQueen’s relationship with success.
There are many people in the writing world I admire who are successful by building up a reciprocal and mutually satisfying relationship with their readers and with other writers. They bring others up with them, provide others with opportunities for exposure and development. In particular I would like to mention Vanessa O’ Loughlin of Inkwell Writers. She writes, provides great-quality writing classes, and has created a network of writers who regularly receive her extremely useful newsletter. She uses the newsletter to promote other writers and has provided opportunities for other writers to be noticed. Christina Katz is an expert at platform building and becoming known in the publishing world, making the most of opportunities — but she also promotes the careers of fellow writers and provides opportunities for them. The Year Zero collective is a group of writers who want to engage with and give back to readers. They develop a reciprocal relationship with readers by posting work regularly and getting feedback, by doing readings in intimate venues and by often giving away their work for free.
These are only a few examples. In terms of social media, there is, for the most part, a wonderful atmosphere on Twitter of reciprocal help, promotion and respect. There are also plenty of blogs (here, for instance!) where the object is mutual support and encouragement. Only occasionally do you find those whose own agenda of self-promotion comes ahead of their respect for others.
I want to be a writer first; I want to be a successful but also satisfied writer. But what that means to me is to develop a relationship with my readers and other writers first and foremost, to maintain a courteous, considerate and caring relationship with people in my personal and professional life. And after that, only after, will I count book sales and stats as a measure of happiness. What do you think?
[Cross-posted from my personal blog.]
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Apr 28
Robin: Ordinary Choices Prompted by Extraordinary Love
Sometimes, while I am working on a mosaic piece, I begin to feel myself becoming anxious over the idea that I have wasted precious hours prepping and organizing for a result that is less than inspiring. The process calls for the artist to apply the grout to the point where all the beautifully hand-picked pieces are hidden. The result she is striving for is hidden underneath the muck and she wonders whether the piece will recover its brilliance once the grout dries. This is the point where, similarly to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, I want to hide the object behind the spaghetti leftovers in the trash bin in my kitchen.
The correlation between mosaics and motherhood are striking. The idea of a little person coming into the world with the image of the mother and father and the community shaping and coaxing those things that are planted inside there by her creator looms large in my head these days. The parents represent the sponge I use when removing the grout. They help to remove the childish ways of thinking that could destroy a future while cultivating the personality and the fascinations the child holds and exposing her to opportunities that enhance the interests the one working with the pieces can see upon close inspection.
When that mosaic piece begins to show me things that I may not necessarily like about myself or remind me of the roadblocks that I experienced that may have detoured my life whether temporarily or permanently, rather than throwing up my hands in dismay I can promote opportunities for the child to sidetrack the pitfalls (or minimize the opportunity for long-term damage!).
Observing a mosaic piece to see how it responds to the grout as it is laid and observing a child as she responds to life as new challenges enter in — obviously one has less room for error. I am amazed that as I create new things, fashioning them with my hands, I can enter into my responsibility as a parent in a deeper way and in turn experience a more intimate connection with my Creator.
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Feb 10
Miranda: My new laptop doesn’t have a power cord — or then again, maybe it does
This weekend, instead of using my “off” morning time to work on my novel, I decided to immerse myself in a half-day motherhood retreat. Not a retreat from motherhood, but a retreat to motherhood. Better motherhood.
For some time — years — I’ve been moving closer to fitting all the pieces together. This process has been a conscious journey. If you’ve been reading these pages for a while, you may remember my struggles with living in the moment as a working mother with 5 kids and too many hats. There’s the vortex of caring for young children, our trouble with transitions, accepting that someday is today, problems with multi-tasking, and my recent love affair with fixed-schedule time management. I do have the occasional flash of successful mothering. But the sum total is a lot of focus on what I’m not doing, and angst about what it all means.
My frustration stemmed from feeling like when I’m doing my own creative thing I’m not being a mother, and when I’m being a mother I’m not really doing my own creative thing. Putting stakes down around my creative time often comes with a price. Yet I know that being actively creative raises my resistance to domestic disasters. I know that “blending” the two parts as much as possible is often the key to success, but there are limits to how much you can pursue your art without some amount of time and space “apart.” Aren’t there?
No more ‘shoulds’
A dear friend of mine is emerging from a potentially life-threatening illness — during which she resigned to stop living under the shroud of obligations. “No more ‘shoulds,'” she told me. She decided that living her life in terms of what she should or shouldn’t do hadn’t served her very well, and big changes were in store.
I thought about this a lot. I realized that it makes sense on so many levels. Even practical terms. I decided that I too wanted to live in the realm of “want to” and “have to” only. Those are the things that matter. I might tell myself at 5:00 that I “should” start dinner, but put it off until 5:45 when I really have to start dinner. Why muck everything up with the “shoulds”? Either you want to start dinner and you do, or you have to start dinner and you do. Either way, dinner gets cooked, and you don’t need to fret about it one way or the other. No more relationships that I “should” foster. If I don’t want to invest myself in someone, then I won’t. Why throw myself away like that, in the name of “should”?
What’s most interesting about this particular exercise is that when you remove the “should” factor, you realize that there is a lot more “want” than you thought there was. When I thought about pulling away from certain friendships, I realized that I really didn’t want to do that. Some of those relationships were actually not based on obligation as much as I thought they were. When I remove the cloud of “should,” suddenly everything is clear. There is commitment because it’s actually important to me. So all of a sudden nurturing those relationships feels like a gift, not a chore, because I’ve recognized their true value.
Putting the pieces back together
Strangely, I’ve finally figured out how broken my framework was, and the many ways in which I perpetuated that broken viewpoint. I used to think it was cliché to say “my kids come first.” Like, duh. None of us are going to let the kids burn up in a fire while we run to the studio to save the canvases. But with my new paradigm, I see beyond the cliché. It’s the kids. Creativity is important, but I can’t live my life thinking that my children are the barrier to my creativity, and I can’t live my life trying to come up with clever ways to convince myself that that isn’t the case.
Because really, it isn’t the case.
It turns out that I’ve totally missed the forest for the trees. You’ll have to bear with my slowness on some of this stuff. I’ve spent my entire adult life being a mother and some of my perspective was apparently truncated along with my youth. I was 21 when my first child is born — he’s a freshman in college now. Since there is a very wide age span between my children — the youngest is not yet 2 — I’m still in the trenches of parenting young children.
And what I have I realized? Being in the trenches, parenting young children, is exactly where I want to be. Because it’s where I am. No, I do not need to “try” to be a good mother while internally I’m just treading water until I can do what I really want to do. The relationship between creativity and motherhood is summed up beautifully in this post, which was just sent our way by Gale Pryor: “Your writing can always be revised; your children can’t.”
Creativity is a beautiful overlay to my existence, but not the reason for my existence. Motherhood isn’t the reason for my existence either. The point is just to be here and take it all in. Just be here. Breathing and enjoying and letting the magic happen instead of using a shoehorn to make it all “work.” But meanwhile, while I’m living in the moment, serving the people I love is surely the most important way to focus my time. By “serve” I don’t just mean feed, bathe, clothe, and chauffeur — although of course, those are parts of it — by serve I mean serve bring joy, bring peace, bring laughter. My job is to help everyone I live with wake up and feel excited to be alive. I am not responsible for their happiness in the largest sense, but my job is to help them along the path to self-actualization as much as possible. And that’s a job I really want.
Putting work in a box
The “job” of nurturing my family is certainly more meaningful than the one I get paid for, even though you wouldn’t know that based on how I’ve let my business consume my life like over-fertilized kudzu. Over and over again I let my professional work take precedence over everything else, and then come out on the other side thinking that I won’t let it happen again — only to crawl back under the same rock a few weeks or months later.
It’s taken nearly 15 years, but I’ve finally figured out why I keep getting overbooked. Last month I sat down and did a bunch of math to calculate my monthly quota, how much time I need to spend on my retainer clients, and how much time I need to spend on additional billables. This all sounds so obvious, but I had never figured it all out before, and as a result was double and triple booking my time — and short-changing my most loyal clients. No more. I now know exactly how many hours I have on hand to spend on “extra” work and I am not going to say yes to anything new that won’t fit inside this box. I’m just done with working day and night and ignoring my family and my creativity in the name of meeting some “important” deadline. What’s so important, exactly?
OK, so the work dragon has been slayed. I get it. It’s been two weeks since I won that battle and I feel like a new person. The drop in stress level is amazing. Suddenly I have the bandwidth to focus on all of the important things — the people — I’ve been putting in the backseat for so long. I realize that I am in the midst of a tangible gear shift as I begin to live more in accordance with my priorities. It’s an incredible sensation.
Me, in bed, with lots of books
So. Back to my motherhood retreat. (If I haven’t lost all of my readers yet!) I had just finished Jamie C. Martin’s Steady Days the night before, and was inspired build on her good advice and creative thinking about “professional mothering.” I wanted to assemble my new progress and thought patterns and capture them so that the “old” ways wouldn’t take over again. I could have slept in that morning, but I was too excited about the work ahead. So I made a cup of coffee and got into bed with a stack of relevant books, a notebook, and my laptop. My stack included a selection of trusted favorites with a few recent additions:
- Steady Days by Jamie C. Martin
- Busy But Balanced by Mimi Doe
- The Creative Family by Amanda Soule
- The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
- What Happy Working Mothers Know by Cathy Greenberg & Barrett Avigdor
- Confessions of an Organized Homemaker by Deniece Schofield
- Take Time for Your Life by Cheryl Richardson
- The Family Manager’s Everyday Survival Guide by Kathy Peel
- The Toddler’s Busy Book by Trish Kuffner
- Things I Can Make by Sabine Lohf
This may not be sufficient indication, but I horde organization-related books. There are at least a dozen excellent other titles on my shelves, but these are the ones that jumped out at me that morning.
I wanted to figure out how to use my organizational resources to create a system that supported my priorities, rather than left me feeling like I had a million things to do and no time to do them. I also wanted to create a few good lists of projects and games that I can do with my 4-year-old AND my 21-month old — and figure out how to incorporate that creative time into our lives in a meaningful way. I pulled apart all of my various planning methods and organizational tools and recreated the elements into something new that actually speaks to what I believe in. Something that actually helps me live in alignment with what really matters, rather than helps me chase the dust bunnies of life.
The result is a binder. A binder that includes all of the essential building blocks, all in one place. Motherhood, domestic life, the big picture, work — it’s all here, in the planner to end all planners. I think of this as my new laptop. And now, instead of staring at a piece of equipment, I can reach for PAPER — that beautiful, evocative tool that leads me to creative paths in ways that my iPhone — much as I love it — and MacBook — much as I love that too — cannot. While my new planner is fed by various applications and digital tools, it ends up being a tangible thing that I can carry and flip through throughout the day — without the distractions of e-mail and internet, which so often pull me away from what’s important.
Peace
Some of our community members are already living in alignment with their priorities, and don’t seem to experience the struggles that I’ve touched on above. I applaud the strength of that inner compass, that “knowing” without having first spent years doing it all the wrong way. But if you don’t quite feel at peace with your life’s “balance,” take a few hours one evening or Sunday afternoon to think about your big-picture goals, your real mission, and hold that up against how you really live, you may find that there is a gap between the two. The next task is to figure out how to close that gap. The results are so exciting that I find myself leaping out of bed every morning because I cannot wait for the new day to begin. I feel like a new person, and I already see a remarkable difference in how my family and my relationships with my children are changing as a result.
The creativity part? I’m not worried about it. I have no shortage of inspiration, and I’m confident that I will finish at least one of my various writing projects. I will write when I write. Whether I write or not, I’m going to enjoy the process. Living life in this openness actually feels more creative than when I’m forcing myself to write because I “should.” I’m no longer going to let “shoulds” take the joy out of what I love, whether that’s a creative project, my husband, my children — or myself.
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Jan 7
Cathy: Moms Who Blog
crosspost from musings in mayhem
Moms Who Blog: It sounds like a support group for mother’s who can’t help themselves from blogging, a twelve-step program.
But it’s a growing population of those of us who need to tell our stories, lament the woes and record the triumphs of our day in and day out, a way to be creative when we feel we have no mental space for thinking more deeply in order to write our great american novels or capture the image of our masterpieces, like in the days before we had children and we still had brains capable of more than routine tasks and singing Old MacDonald for the 300,000th time, or reading Tikki-Tikki-Tembo until we are blue in the face.
It seems from where I sit anyway, that there are more of us in the blogosphere than most, and fathers too, recording the amazing and most common thing humanity shares, the raising of our children.
Some of us are special needs moms, some are moms of teens, tweens or small children, some moms of blended families, some young moms, some who waited until later in life, and some of us are all of the above. And yes, I am talking about me in that last group. 🙂
We share a lot, with each other and of ourselves with the world at large. I think, besides the outlet for creativity, we do so to say, like the Whos on Horton’s dustpeck, We are here! We are here! We are here! To say, we matter, I am doing something with my life, and it’s important. We do it to say, I am not alone, are you out there, can you hear me? I want to hear your story, too!
The old trotted out line that it takes a village to raise a child is very true, and one of those reasons is to keep the mother who is caring for her kids from feelings of desperate isolation. It may be the mother who is running from work to home and racing to the store for dinner in between, who is lacking a serious connection with her friends she used to see all the time or stay up all night talking on the phone. It may be the mother who is going mental thinking the last time she had a conversation that didn’t involve diapers and their contents in graphic detail was she can’t remember when. It may be the mother who seems to have moments of sheer joy at the developmental milestone her child just sailed past, who wants to call out, Hey! Did you see that?! It may be the mother who found a moment of quiet and beauty with her child that cracked her open like an egg to the wonders of the universe.
Some people, even in this day and age, still have their coffee klatches and playdates, some of us don’t. In the twenty-first century, we have our blogs. Our neighborhood is the whole world and whoever happens to click in and say hello, I see you, and that sounds just like me! Sometimes readers click in, and if you use a tracker on your blog, you can see them and know you’ve been visited from Brazil, Ireland, Russian, Japan, or across the the US or even from the next town. I feel validated when I see my tracker or when people, I still haven’t met but who feel like friends comment. I feel like what I’m doing matters. That sometimes talking about the tougher stuff helps someone else, or sharing a joy lifts someone’s spirit. But mostly I feel like the fact that I am parenting matters. That I’m not doing it in a void. That doing what I can for my kids is the best thing I can do.
I’ll just write the great american novel later. When I’ve had some more sleep.
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Dec 4
The Fixed-Schedule Effect: Secret Keys to Life?
My husband often forwards me tidbits from the interwebs that he knows I’ll find interesting. Last week he sent me an article about time management that really blew my mind. In some ways I think it’s the paradigm shift I’ve been looking for, as I often feel lost in the vortex of caring for young children and stepping between motherhood and work.
The answer to feeling overwhelmed and overbooked is NOT throwing more time at your workload — it’s about prioritizing and working in a more condensed framework. It’s about working smarter, not working MORE. Just what busy mothers need, right? We can’t add more hours to our day, but we can use what we have more efficiently WITHOUT running around like maniacs.
This article was truly an eye-opener for me. There’s even discussion of synthesizing parenthood, domestic life, and work. Here’s an excerpt (although I do hope you read the whole thing):
I must emphasize that I’m not some laid-back lifestyle entrepreneur who monitors an automated business from a hammock in Aruba. I have a normal job (I’m a postdoc) and a lot on my plate. This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.
Put another way: I’m no slacker. But with only a few exceptions, all of this work took place between 8:30 and 5:30, only on weekdays. (My exercise, which I do every day, is also included in this block, as is an hour of dog walking. I really like my post-5:30 free time to be completely free.)
I call this approach fixed-scheduled productivity, and it’s something I’ve been following and preaching since early 2008. The idea is simple:
Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way.
The beneficial effects of this strategy on your sense of control, stress levels, and amount of important work accomplished, is profound.
<snip>
Michael Simmons’ [business] expanded quickly in the years following college graduation. Around the time I was reading The 4-Hour Work Week, I started to discuss the possibility that Simmons tone down the hours. It was his company, I argued, so why not take advantage of this fact to craft an awesome life.
Among the specific topics we discussed, I remember suggesting that Simmons cut down the time spent on e-mail and social networks.
“This isn’t optional for me,” he explained. “Any of these contacts could turn into a important partner or sale.”
But then Simmons’ daughter, Halle, was born.
Simmons’ work schedule reduced from 10 to 12 hours days to 3 to 5 hour days. He took care of the baby in the morning, then worked in the afternoon while his wife, and company co-founder, took over the childcare responsibilities. Evenings were family together time.
Halle forced Simmons into the type of constrained schedule that he had previously declared impossible. And yet the business didn’t flounder.
“The baby turns ’shoulds’ into ‘musts’,” Simmons explained to me. “In the past I used to put off key decisions, or saying ‘no’, because I didn’t want to deal with the discomfort. Now I have no choice. I have to make the decisions because my time has been slashed in half.”
“Since out daughter was born about a year ago, our business has more than doubled.”
The Fixed-Schedule Effect
Collins, Saunders, and Simmons all share a similar discovery. When they constrained their schedule to the point where non-essential work was eliminated and colleagues and clients had to retrain their expectations, they discovered two surprising results.
First, the essentials — be it making sales calls, or focusing on the core research behind a book — are what really matter, and the non-essentials — be it random e-mail conversations, or managing an overhaul to your blog template — are more disposable than many believe.
Second, by focusing only the essentials, they’ll receive more attention than when your schedule was unbounded. The paradoxic effect, as with Collins’ bestsellers, or Saunders and Simmons’ fast-growing businesses, you achieve more results.
Living the Fixed-Scheduled Lifestyle
The steps to adopting fixed-schedule productivity are straightforward:
- Choose a work schedule that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation.
- Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.
This sounds simple. But of course it’s not. Satisfying rule 2 is non-trivial. If you took your current projects, obligations, and work habits, you’d probably fall well short of satisfying your ideal schedule.
Here’s a simple truth that you must confront when considering fixed-schedule productivity: sticking to your ideal schedule will require drastic actions. For example, you may have to:
- Dramatically cut back on the number of projects you are working on.
- Ruthlessly cull inefficient habits from your daily schedule.
- Risk mildly annoying or upsetting some people in exchange for large gains in time freedom.
- Stop procrastinating.
In the abstract, these are all hard goals to accomplish. But when you’re focused on a specific goal — “I refuse to work past 5:30 on weekdays!” — you’d be surprised by how much easier it becomes to deploy these strategies in your daily life.
Read the full article here. Really, it’s worth the read!
I’ve already begun applying these principles to my work life, and I see how powerful this approach can be. Knowing that I need to tie up all loose ends by a certain time (various intervals throughout the day) really helps me stay focused. It’s kind of like applying the urgency of NaNoWriMo to your regular schedule. Do it now; there’s a deadline; stay focused. When you know there really are only 6 hours to get a project completed (rather than telling yourself you’ll work a second shift to get it done) you don’t waste time on Facebook or comparison shopping prices for Seventh Generation Diapers online. And in the end, what do you get? A finished project AND an evening to spend doing whatever you want to do. Suddenly there is time for creativity, reading, whatever. Sounds so simple, I know, but I can’t tell you how much I DON’T do that when left to my own instincts.
Can you see ways of applying these principles to the domestic side of life? Obviously, children aren’t going to observe a “fixed” schedule, no matter how much we might want them to, but there must be ways to apply the “container” approach in a way that makes the domestic scene feel less overwhelming. Your thoughts?
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Nov 9
Cathy: An update on the progress or not of my nano novel
crossposted from my personal blog
Life happens,
doctors happen,
and this past week, a lot of doctor appointments happened and other sundry bits of attending to sick self, sick kids, etc. So in the interest of pediatrics, Nanowrimo fell somewhat behind and has been having trouble catching back up. also, I really got walloped by news of Brother Blue passing away.
Nanowrimo is an excellent tool to get yourself writing if you call yourself a writer but don’t find yourself doing much of it. It’s an excellent jumpstart, you feel inspired, and even if you don’t, you push to meet that 1667 words per diem minimum. But once you fall behind, it becomes really hard to scramble. but I figured out a a few little secrets today:
1. I don’t have to write 1667 words per day.
2. But it works a heck of a lot better if I do. Otherwise I’m playing a deceitful game of catch-up – which is really very much like swimming against the riptide during hurricane season.
3. Nanowrimo becomes an obsession. Possibly a very unhealthy obsession. I sat in the pediatrics office for six hours on Wednesday thinking not so much of my kids and their various stages of this long, non-h1n1 flu we’ve had, but of how I could be writing instead of sitting in this waiting room, exam room, phlebotomy department, radiology department because when I took my daughter to the hospital the previous week, they didn’t run all the tests they now had to run during Nanowrimo. The boys were with me, too for their wellness appointments, etc, vaccines, etc. I was barely concerned, except when C was crying from getting stuck with a needle for bloodwork or having a big loud machine shoot light boxes all over her leg and hips, while mommy wore a big lead apron. Nano becomes unhealthy when your spouse and you are sitting right next to each other all night long on separate computers not saying a word to each other until he does, and you get annoyed that he’s interrupting your train of thought, but more importantly, your word count. It becomes an obsession when every time your toddler wanders over and whines and pulls to be on your lap, you act like it’s the end of the world because you can’t finish your train of thought or your word count. Same with the preteen mom-mom-momming in your ear and poking you in the arm or the teen mom-mom-momming you on the cellphone until you realize in a half-attention moment you allowed him to sleep over someone’s dad’s house and you don’t even know where he lives, because you were still typing when he was asking and you just wanted him off the phone.
4. But Nanowrimo is important, because you will write a novel in thirty days, whether you make the word count or not, and you will have another manuscript to edit and eventually shop with the other one, because you now can market it to agents as a series of sorts….and you will have two books at the end of this! And at the end of this, you’ll pay better attention to your spouse and your kids and yourself for that matter, and to the fact that maybe the sun is in fact shining outside and oh, yea, there’s an outside…..
5. I don’t have to write the parts in the order in which they come chronologically, but in the order in which they travel through my bleeding brain.
6. Ok that’s more than a few things, but I also figured out it is much better to write about what you know than have to research about something for a novel you’re trying to write in thirty days. Set it in a country you’ve been to, and forget about wildlife, unless of course, it has become a central theme in the book….
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Sep 16
Kelly: A Girl’s Gotta Dream…
Cross-posted from my personal blog…
Catching my breath quite a bit here lately so I haven’t had much happening on the art front. Here’s another spread from my art journal I’ve been working on. I’ve actually even started writing in it now!!! I was in Tampa Friday and Saturday facilitating some leadership programs and came home with a nasty cold virus. Slept pretty much all day Sunday and most of the day Monday. I guess I needed some rest! Made it back into work today but still feeling way under par. When I got back in town Saturday afternoon, I picked the girls up over at the football party DH and they were attending and told DH I needed to work on simplifying my life. He quickly agreed! Trick is, how do you do that?
Over dinner one night last week, we were talking about work stuff and he asked me where I saw myself in 10 years. I had to respond, “Like, for real or for dreaming?” Pretty telling question, huh? Where the realist in me sees me is vastly different from where the dreamer in me sees me. I’m working on coming to terms with the fact that turning your dreams into reality is one of the biggest challenges you’ll ever face….when you add in paying the mortgage; raising wonderful, caring, thoughtful children; saving for their college education; planning for retirement….all that real life stuff, the choices are hard! That’s where the simplification of life to make it all work towards that dream meets the challenges of real life! Does that make sense? For example, I have nearly 17 years in with the state of Florida retirement system. Just for giggles, I checked out the retirement calculator recently. I looked at what the state would send me per month starting at age 62 if I were to retire tomorrow. Then I looked at what the state would send me per month starting at age 62 if I worked 13 more years to earn my full 30. Boy was that a shock of realism! The stick it out for 13 more years figure was more than 30 times that of the retire tomorrow figure.
So, how do I answer that “Where do you see yourself in 10 years” question then? Realistically, still working for the college, preferably by that point in a somewhat lower-paying, but much more free-time friendly faculty position. In the short run, I’m still working towards a new step up position (first interview next week!). Now the dreamer, the dreamer in me sees myself and the family in a much different position…closer to that Purple Cottage I told you about. My Purple Cottage post generated quite a bit of discussion and some great ideas surfaced, an expansion of the purple cottage so to speak. That’s the dream I’m keeping stoked (so maybe it’ll be for 13 years instead of 10..what’s three years in the big scheme of things?). There’s a piece of property I’ve been familiar with since I was in college….and it hasn’t changed since I was in college. The location shall remain right here in my little brain. 🙂 It’s on the coast and has ten little concrete bungalows on it. Those cottages could easily been renovated…a few of them for lodging, a few of them for art studios, one of them for a kids’ playroom, one of them for a kitchen and dining area. You catchin’ what I’m layin’ down here? Sounding anything like that Mothers’ Studio Miranda tossed out there? Of course, this would involve selling our house and moving to a small town, but we plan to do that in the next ten years anyways. I’ve been keeping my eye on that property. Next time I’m over in that area, I’m gonna do me a little research… A girl’s gotta dream, right?
Studio Mothers: Life & Art 