Waiting

I put things off. I procrastinate. I avoid. These are issues I've long dealt with, and to be honest, have no idea why they developed into the problem that they have. I don't remember any adult in my life modeling these behaviors, but I certainly picked it up somewhere.

To be honest, the procrastination thing I've worked out into a sort of system. In fact, given the opportunity, I generally do better on some things with the adrenaline of having put something off until the last minute. Example- I write better under pressure. Far better. Think about something to long and it turns into the usual mush you find on this blog. Sorry about that.

But seriously, no matter how I frame it, it doesn't feel good. It feels really terrible, to be honest. Haunted by too many duties left unattended to will keep a person awake at night, and it has, far too often. The bags under my eyes will sometimes attest to that fact, and the thing is, I know a better way. It's just that I also know how to avoid the knowing-of-the-better-way a bit more intimately, so even the knowing is avoided.

I was thinking about all of this while cleaning out my bathroom this morning, thinking back to the times when I felt like I had finally gained some control and clarity over my life. I believe the first time I felt like I wasn't just riding some proverbial wave, against my will, but doing it anyway was when I was somewhere around 24. I lived in a little apartment across the street from the college I'd dropped out of. The thing with this apartment was that it already smelled like cat pee, so the landlord didn't much mind my two little kitties coming along on the lease. Plus, I promised I would help eradicate that problem- and I did. Moving into that apartment was odd, because suddenly- I had furniture. I also had a multitude of boxes containing odds and ends, old assignments, workbooks from first grade, and I thought: I am turning into my parents. This must stop. Now.

Instead, the boxes were shoved into the attic storage space and forgotten about until a bat dropped down during a momentary winter awakening- no doubt worried about some untended duty- and nearly was eaten alive by Hobbes, no longer a dainty little kitty. Sometime during the next 24 hours, between rescuing the bat with an old sweater, admiring it's devilishly sharp teeth on the way down the stairs and out of the apartment, placing it gingerly in a pile of leaves in the corner of the outer stairway to our laundry room, calling wildlife rescue, begging them to come out, waiting for them to do so, watching the bat climb up on a stick they placed in front of it- sometime in all of that, I looked at my attic and started wondering how many dead bats were mingled in with the old workbooks, discarded clothing, plastic caboodle, and used pencils that were the normal inhabitants of that space.

I started throwing stuff away. Even though I felt guilty, and wondered how I would feel if I were the three inch pencil, the half-used math book.

Maybe it had something to do with being an only child and attributing intelligence and feelings to objects that I spent a lot of time with, because I was alone too much. I didn't have siblings to fight with, so I played with crayons and married colors to each other. The yellow and red absolutely must be in the same corner of the crayon box with one another.

And the green and blue.

And the white and pink.

Lately, I have been trying to balance work and the life thing and I'm failing miserably. This has something to do with failed organization on my part- again- but on that of nearly everyone else, too. I find myself manically checking my phone for emails and texts, for the newest Instagram post, just to drug myself from the guilt of the dinners unplanned and all the laundry.

I used to like laundry. I don't like it anymore. It's needy and insistent and I'm tired.

There are about a million things I want to do. They always get put off for chores and sometimes just because I'm in the habit of drowning sorrows in procrastination and it's many devices. And also because I'm waiting for things to happen for me, rather than making them happen for me- and for everybody else. I'm in the waiting place.

The Waiting Place

by Dr. Seuss

Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, 

or a plane to go or the mail to come, 

or the rain to go or the phone to ring, 

or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No

or waiting for their hair to grow. 

Everyone is just waiting. 

Waiting for the fish to bite

or waiting for wind to fly a kite

or waiting around for Friday night

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants

or a wig with curls, or Another Chance. 

Everyone is just waiting. 

Excerpt from Oh, The Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss

                                           

Minimalist Panic episode 2: That really small space I'm always yacking about

Click the play arrow. Go ahead- you know you want to.


Gypsy caravan.

I could live in one of those. Easy. If I didn't have all these other people to think about, that is. I don't want to go for the whole gypsy/traveler stereotype thing.  And the minivan already looks like a clown car when we all pile out, so my dream of caravan and piebald pony are probably not the most realistic.

So, I settle. Before, it was the entry-way/walled porch of our old house. Now it's a too-large walk-in closet. No joke. In my efforts to clarify our spaces and minimize the damage to organization that only children can demonstrate, I found myself staring into an artery so clogged it was impassable. Too late for daily aspirin, too late for Lipitor- what this space needed was an angiogram in the form of a total repurposing. And a couple very large trash bags. Five trashbags. It was five.

Look at it. Just look at it.

Notice that most of that looks like it might belong to me. What was I saying about children before? Well, the old trampoline is theirs. They rolled that in there. There was the pile of one child's missing clothing. Right in the foot of the doorway- I literally was standing on it when I took this photo. I didn't do that. Broken bench. Check. Box of homeless game pieces. Yep. That broken window thing, that was there too- and I DIDN'T DO THAT EITHER! I threw my yarn in there. In old ugly boxes. How inspiring. I hung up all the clothes I could wear except that I am usually in a uniform. So I don't wear them. So why do I have them??

This brings me to an awful realization. I am a terrible minimalist. Unless being a minimalist has something to do with keeping a lot of junk that you might use some day. When you catch up on all the requirements of daily living. Then you'll get to it.

I suspect that is not the definition.

But all of that aside, I have always had a tiny space. As a child, it was a basket underneath the table beside my mother's display at an art show. It was the lilac jungle behind our garage. It was the teddy bear room at Play&Learn. It was underneath the branches of the blue spruce that bordered our yard. In the interiors of my mind, it was the wheel of the year. The colors of the seasons, the months, the days of the week. It was knowing that if I was standing on February 16, if I stepped slightly down and to the right, I would be standing on tomorrow, and getting a bit closer to the sun. It was in favorite books and television shows- oh, those were a biggie for me. The Mayberry Jail, the yorkshire fells, the stairway on Leave It To Beaver, The Ricardo's apartment, Mr. Roger's house, the front stoop of Reuven Malter's brownstone, Calpurnia's swept yard, the garden behind Ella Bembridge's cottage. All of these places constituted home, place, nest- comfort- to me. And that's what this is really about.

Comfort, contentment- being the person I wish to be, and not the insane, hyperactive squirrel I tend towards.

Minimalism is a tool, an ideal- a good one. It is a bit austere at times, which is what I tend to run away from. I think I'm looking at a balance between minimalism and boring old organization. When I get rid of things I don't need- I feel good. When I organize the things I really love- I feel even better. I feel so great I actually get things done that I need to get done. Not a usual occurrence.

So the closet was repurposed.

Everything is organized, I know where it all is. Weird. It's my own strange little caravan. Maureen the Closet Monster stands guard, and in place of the piebald pony. 

I just need a new tea kettle.

Minimalist Panic, episode one

Today's mood music-

For the last several years- well, for the last 17 years, roughly- I've been throwing things away as a winter practice. I think this might have something mildly to do with my synesthesia, but also because I don't think that hanging out in the basement going through things is a warm-weather activity. Short of basement flood of severe magnitude, I haven't had a good sort-out any time other than the colder months.

Except for last year. There was no sort-out last year. Last year I think I might have been suffering from SAD or possibly just short on Vitamin D and money. Or just short on money. When I am depressed, I stop functioning, except at the most basic levels. Work, I'll show up for that. Choir? You betcha. Lunch with a friend? I'll be right there. That part of the month when the bills get paid? Yeah, I'll avoid that, because it's depressing paying for two houses, particularly when one is empty awaiting sale. It's also depressing paying for an extra, empty house when you're trying to be a minimalist.

I started looking with a particular longing at all the tiny house blogs out there. I read stories about mortgage-less couples who had killed their student loans in three years living in their (very cool) tiny houses with their three cats. I read of people being able to work in areas they really enjoyed- for less money- because they had no mortgage, no debt, just their little house and freedom. I read of families traveling in an old school bus- totally refitted as a living area- and unschooling themselves across the country. I became a radicalized minimalist in my mind- while I tripped over eight million legos and swished my finger across my phone and kindle in a hypnotic trance, hoping for something to change.

The house sold. I got a full-time job. Things are changing- but I still, mostly, feel powerless. Because I'm meant to. This powerlessness- this waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop- is what we're raised to feel as normal. This is it, our lot in life, and learning to deal with that is, apparently "the dream" or something. Like in school- those who follow the rules and accept the expectations usually do better on this particular path.  The contrarians, those afflicted with any sort of defiance embedded in their character usually suck at it. That last category is where I have always found myself.

At work the other day- New Year's Day, actually- a thought crossed my mind watching people bound in for the third, fourth time for meaningless, silly things they just couldn't live without for one day. Potato chips, usually. With more and more businesses staying open on holidays, people are being trained into entitlement, and trained out of the ability to plan, to share, to sacrifice, to weigh the importance of their purchases. Why? Because our economy is driven with just these values.

Industrialization has had it's positives- but our complacency is not one of them. So many factors are built into these discussions- the religious influence and ultimate acceptance and defense of the business ethic, the reality of "better" technologies requiring a step-away from self-sufficiency in the home to obtain cash to pay for these technologies, the loss of skill through the generations, as children were raised with outside work as the norm. In her book Radical Homemakers; Reclaiming Domesticity From A Consumer Culture, Shannon Hayes writes,

The industrial economy altered nearly every aspect of home life. The rearing  and education of children was reoriented with the assumption that they would become employees, rather than owners of their own homesteads or enterprises. To hold a good job was the aspirational force behind their childhood training. The family's eating patters changed as well; traditionally, dinner was served midday, enabling the cook the benefit of working during daylight hours, and supper was a light repast, taken just prior to sundown, before the family would head off to bed. But once men were gone to factories all day and children were off to school, this pattern changed, and dinner became the principal meal, pushing the daily work of house-wives later into the evening. Most importantly, families came to think of "work" and "home" as separate places, with "work" most typically being the realm of the man, and "home" the domain of the woman. Before long, "work" also came to mean the "real world," where one's labors had value, leaving the home a site for thankless toil. 

And a place for powerlessness and pathetic meandering through an unplanned and yet, entitled, existence.

I don't get it.

I don't like it much, either. And I'm really good at feeling powerless, pathetic meandering and failing to plan, and yeah, entitlement, too. I just recognize that this status-quo doesn't make me happy.

Living in the world requires a lot of compromise for some people. I'm a changer in my core, but I get tired and I lack motivation. And of course, I know that change isn't easy, and sometimes what you begin, you don't see the results of. So- I get rid of things. I give them away, I throw away, I recycle- and I try hard to be thankful for what I have- because that's the real key.

We live in a place where having too much stuff is our burden. Imagine what that looks like to the outsider without enough food to eat, or clothes for her children? (Reconciling the protestant defense of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution and knowing a particular passage in Matthew 25 nearly by heart is an impossibility for me- and a frustration, because it does drag on.)

So, I plan to keep thinking about having too many things and working through that. I plan to keep my focus on ever-smaller- and yeah, I've seen the looks I get from some of you. Mom- talking to you here. The world is in need of balance. I have too much stuff, I know that it isn't sustainable, so I get rid of it and shift the balance toward an equilibrium I can feel decent about.