Today it's Tuesday and I'm just flailing around for direction. Got up good and early to get a jump on the day and be productive but I'm frittering it away with inertia, uncertainty and this icky, itchy feeling of discontent and unease. Did you notice that every adjective I just listed started with a vowel - whatever that means? So writing today is a challenge because I want to be relevant and I'm not sure I am. That's actually something Mike said the other day when he came for breakfast. We talked about life goals - he's a man of simple words. He said, "I want to be relevant" and that was all he had to say as I babbled on and on about my multitude of agendas, trying to be dazzling but probably just boring the pants off of him. Wait, his pants stayed on! - wrong expression. How about, boring him to tears or boring him to want to leave and purchase a gas grill for his deck! That's when you know you're not fascinating - when someone chooses to leave your company to buy a gas grill. Can you tell I'm still smarting from that rejection? Men are so weird. I just don't understand them most of the time.
Last night a stupid evening at Petterino's - sparsely attended, sang badly, not many singers and there was awkwardness because Denise singled out several singers to perform a second number, dissing the rest of us. And really, that whole scene is getting old to me. Last night I heard her tell the same joke about the late Mayor Daley saying he was going to sing a song "Acapulco" instead of "a cappella", listened for the 50th time to her tell the story about how her piano teacher encouraged her to sing instead of play (apparently she was a terrible piano student), witness her theatrics as she sang the world's shortest birthday song that I've heard her sing almost every week (there is usually someone in the audience celebrating a birthday). Goes like this: "This is your birthday song. It isn't very long." That's it - the whole song. Funny, right? Maybe the first or second time.
And I know I've harped on our need for novelty in our lives but I sure haven't walked the walk. I'm getting further in a rut with the things I do over and over again, week after week, with less and less pleasure. I'm not alone, right? My ex babysat for an old man who woke every morning at 6AM and had coffee with the same friends for forty years. Thinking there came a point where they didn't even like each other that much anymore, found the whole thing annoying and yet it was their sacred routine.
Should there be sacred routines? You think I'm going to say no, right? Surprised you. I vote, "yes". There ARE things we do, day in and day out, that ground us to life. Imagine you had absolutely no routines. You woke at a different time every day, ate if you happened to have food in the frig, had no rules for self care, didn't observe your friend's milestones, etc. Your life would be anarchy! We NEED routine to make sense of every day. Each day I ground myself to the day with little rituals that remind me what's important - kind of like the blue thread in a Jewish prayer shawl that's there to remind the congregant to remember and obey the commandments (I'm not Jewish but I admire the the religion). My observances are secular - pouring an exact 1/3 c. of milk into a measuring cup and then adding it to my coffee. Totally unnecessary - by now, I know exactly, from the color of the coffee, what 1/3 c. of milk looks like - I don't really need to measure it but there is something about the action that starts the day with Weight Watcher awareness and respect and sets the tone for the rest of the day to eat in a careful and compliant way. Making my bed every day, feeding my animals before I feed myself, writing this blog - it all creates a rhythmic framework to the day that is comforting and supportive. Love this from a website called Blessing Maven (picture today is also from her site).
Allowing simple, small shifts in perception, practicing self love and knowing we’re all divine and energetically connected is key in creating a sacred day. I find this to be a powerful antidote against not just going through the motions, not just checking off the “to do” list and not having unimaginative habits to infect our day.I suspect it's the other routines we do out of habit, fear of the unknown, complacence, just being nice, etc. that we should question. Another thing Mike said that resonated - that spending time with people who don't enrich you in some deep way - it's a lost opportunity - the opportunity cost of time spent doing or being with someone anemic that precludes finding someone else or other things to do that enrich the blood (to further the anemic analogy). I love what the Buddhist daily dharma had to say yesterday:
Hang out with people who are capable of making a commitment to you and your life, and who require that you make a commitment to theirs. Hang out with people who care about you, with people who need you to develop and who say so. Make such a commitment and don't break that bond until you and all beings are perfect.Well, not so sure about the perfect part, but the idea that we need to be selective and, as my mother said repeatedly when I was growing up, "not throw our pearls to swine." Thinking the difficult part is the whole lowest common denominator thing. Boredom and loneliness drive us to do things and be with people who lack luster but who fill the time. One thing I give my mother credit for is that we didn't have a television growing up. What I observe in retrospect is that things can get ugly when you have a bunch of petulant bored kids. "We're so bored. There's nothing to DOOOOOO." I remember throwing myself on couches with drama and swearing I would die of boredom. My siblings agreed - we flopped around like beached fish. And we would stay that way for a while - listlessly complaining. Then something would happen. We could only stay that way for so long. Eventually we breached the divide and came out the other end productive and happily occupied. We dragged our asses outside, or got out art supplies and made something - or played a game, or went to the library and got a stack of books, or biked to the beach. It was only the void of no TV that made the good stuff possible. If the TV had been available, we would have sunk to the lowest common denominator of that activity, watched other people living instead of living ourselves.
I need to crack this nut - I know I lead an interesting life, full of good friends, creativity, culture, and yet I'm falling into the rut of repetition. Not going to throw my babies out with bathwater (love my friends, talents, much of my life) but it's time to mix things up. Need the right balance between healthful sacred routines and taking risks - trying new things.
Challenge today is assessing your life in this vein - do you strike the right balance between routine and risk? If you're Martin, you just yesterday bought your very first home. It's a seismic decision for him - his personal tectonic plates are colliding with excitement and fear (his bank accounts emptied to take this risk). If you're Josh, you are embarking on a brand new life, sans partner, dating again for the first time in 15 years and looking for a job. If you're Tom, your divorce just came through yesterday and that chapter of your life is behind you - time to write the next one. If you're Mike, you just moved to a new house in a friendly new town and maybe this positive change will beget other positive changes - domino effect. If you're Sarah, you closed your office, downsized, have taken on a Herculean task of ridding your life of clutter and you are deliberately creating an uncomfortable void with the hope that it will make a space for things new and wonderful. All these scary things take us out of our comfort zones, but I believe comfort and the non-sacred routines can be their own scary slippery slope - life numbing, life robbing.
Peace,
Sarah
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