CCChanges...

“He who fails to plan is planning to fail.” –Winston Churchill

About ten days ago my middle son embarked on an improved diet.  He has modified his starch choices, upped his leafy greens, and diminished his sugar intake.  It’s a good, healthy modification.  He is the lone vegetarian in our house, and although I have never left him without supper or meatless alternatives, he has undertaken to make his own meals. 

One of the things he immediately realized is that he needed some help from me.  He told me what he was doing, and solicited my support – in the form of buying some groceries we don’t usually have on hand.  Almond milk.  Red quinoa.  He told me what he wanted, and I gave him my card to make the purchases.  He couldn’t find one thing, so he asked if I would try to find it next time I went to the store.  Done.  He thanked me and asked where I had found it.  I told him.  He was grateful.  No problem.  Happy to help.

About the second day of healthy eating plan, he was busy in the kitchen, and I was probably watching him drinking a diet coke.  He turned to me and said, “This isn’t that hard, but it does require planning.” 

Isn’t that how it is with change?  Most changes aren’t hard, but they do require planning.  And, they require support.  And communication.  A couple other situations have arisen in my life this spring that have brought this into focus in other ways.

Over the years in the workplace, I have noticed that those who effect the best changes are those who seek advice.  They consult experts; they examine various possibilities before launching a change – just like my son did his research prior to his modifications.

I have also noticed that positive change – anywhere – almost always involves garnering support from those around you.  If the change will affect the lives of others, it is wisest to ask them for their ideas and support – just as my son did before he began.  Had his proposals been outrageous or unhealthy, I would have objected and offered other ideas to help him achieve his goals.

Help is also a key component to making changes.  One can declare a change, but it is so much easier to make changes with the help of those who care about you at home, at the office, or at school.  If I were to just decree a change in my office, my colleague might go along with me.  But, if I consult her, get her input (especially since she has been there longer than I), consider her suggestions, my change might keep its form and my colleague would be on board with me; or, maybe, just maybe, my change would end up being modified and better for everyone.

One thing I noticed about son’s new meal choices is that while I did help him, he undertook the bulk of the work.  In the last seven days, he has made 20 of 21 meals.  Furthermore, he has cleaned up the preparation and consumption of these meals.  He has even gone above and beyond cleaning up extra from his brother’s and my meals. 

That’s what has really impressed me: he rolled up his sleeves and got to work.  He didn’t sit in the living room and proclaim what he wanted and expect me to hightail it to the store or prepare special foods.  He did not recline, saying, “Well, this will all work out because this is what I want, so get on board, Mom.”  He communicated, planned, and did the work.  If we want changes, we must be willing not only to work for them but also to plan. Just thinking about changing his eating habits won’t get him the results he wants.  Simply declaring a change, asking others for support without any discussion, and blindly hoping that change will work out does not succeed.

We check the forecast and buy seeds before we plant our gardens.  Schools spend five months or more planning graduation ceremonies.  Summer vacations are usually the subject of familial conversations and extensive research.  Offices don’t just hope for the best when the fiscal year turns over. 

Let’s all take a page from my son’s book – at home and at work.  Spring is the season for new beginnings.  Positive change doesn’t happen on its own; those new beginnings can only sprout from good ideas watered with the wisdom and support of those around us.

Resolutions and New Calendars: Happy New Year!

What I’d really like to do today is to hole up and work on some projects that I have been putting off by denying I have time for them. I’d like to turn off everything and just do these projects.  Well, maybe a little music playing in the background.

What I will really do today is a combination of a number of things, none of which will probably be done as well as I want them to be done.  Isn’t that the way for many of us on many of our days?  We can get up as early as we can – stay up later than we’d prefer, and still our most mundane (cleaning the bathroom) or most treasured (organizing heirloom family photos) projects or plans don’t exactly get done.  And, then, the next day we must face the ongoingness of tasks and projects.  Sometimes they pile up and sometimes they collect dust and occasionally they get done.

The same is true of New Year’s resolutions.  You know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.  A number of my Face Book friends have begun their new year’s workouts today.  Some writer friends have begun some kind of writing project goal – 1000 words a day – that sort of thing.  These are all people of integrity, and people who are goal-oriented, and who may very well achieve their goals.  I am not among them today.

I’m sitting at a dining room table that is covered with paints, college application essays, a hope to get some things done today, a Harry Potter book, calendars, a poetry journal and other miscellany, not having gone to the gym; and, my plan for the day is outlined on a reused yellow post-it note with scribbles – the last item on it says “get organized.”

Isn’t that how much of life is? Unorganized but somehow we make it.  Even when we buy new calendars, sort out what we want to happen, make plans, and get it all together, those plans get shot to hell.  Life happens outside the door while we hide and make our plans.  So many moving parts.  So many unpredictabilities.

And, that’s what makes things interesting and either challenges us or defeats us.  I’m pleased for everyone who has gotten a jump on resolutions today; I’m in the same boat with those of you who are saying, “When is New Year’s again?” and debating whether the tree stays up or gets taken out today.

And, for all of us, may I suggest penciling those plans into that new calendar?  You just never know when you might need to sit and hold hands with a friend; when you may have to deal with an ant infestation; when you may opt to talk to your teenager instead of taking Zumba class.  Frightening things may get scrawled across your calendar in black Sharpie.  Colorful doodles may take precedence over the carefully penciled in details.  And, no matter our motivation and energy levels, we will need some days to be totally blank. 

So many moving parts. 

So many unpredictabilities. 

So much joy.

Happy New Year!

Always Never Enough Time

This month there has been a lot going on.  For everyone.  Students have been taking exams.  Teachers were writing said exams.  Now, teachers are grading or avoiding grading those same exams. Throughout the past twenty-one days there have also been gifts to buy; services to attend; errands to run; meals to plan; family members to greet; cards to send (if you haven’t gotten one from me, it is because I’m doing New Year’s cards this year); parties to enjoy; trees to trim.  If you do not celebrate Christmas, you may be preparing to enjoy New Year’s or other celebrations or attending to other parts of life that are equally busy.  In the midst of all of the yearly Decembraic hustle and bustle, a number of my students got college admissions decisions. 

That’s right – just as they were studying for and taking their first semester finals, students were getting the fat envelope or the skinny envelope.  (Of course, for most colleges, those envelopes are virtual now.)  And, these students had to calm down enough to study or overcome disappointment well enough to study. One of the disappointed students noted: “It seems like colleges could find a better time to do this.  I mean, they know we have finals, right?”

He’s right.  There has to be a better time to do a lot of things.  There’s a reason for the old saying, “It doesn’t rain, it pours.”  

When I was younger I tried to do holidays perfectly and beautifully and traditionally, despite the fact that I have been a teacher who always found herself as stressed as students during exam week.  The holidays were put on the back burner until that was over, and then I really stressed out.   Now, I ask the people with whom I will be celebrating what they want.  Most of the time, they do not ask for perfection or beauty or tradition.  They ask for breakfast muffins, mimosa, a relaxed day, a little food, and music.  They ask not to have to do “screaming fiasco cookies” – that’s what my children came to call sugar cookie decorating.  Yeah, I used to be wound pretty tightly, and the cause was the crammed calendar that I let rule all too often. 

Perhaps over the course of the year, or maybe just for a certain given year, I suspect many of us would rearrange some holidays or birthdays or events to better suit what we have coming up.   If I could, I would space out the birthdays in my family a bit differently.   In my immediate family we have twelve members.  I’d like everyone to have their birthday on, say, the 15^th of the month – one per month.  Nope, our family has clusters in August-October and then January-March.  And, yes, as I have noted before, my mother has always said that they are on the same day every year, and it’s just a matter of planning.  Sure.  But life doesn’t always seem that simple, does it? 

Because among those birthdays and holidays are: the laundry, cleaning out the garage, making lunches, going to the gym, and feeding the pets.  Not to mention getting into college, taking tests, buying houses, getting new jobs – all of that sort of thing. 

Here’s the thing, though: that’s all life.  That’s what life is made of.  So many of us seem to think that life is the presents or what will happen “when I just…”  No, life is what is happening right now.  A friend of mine used to have this near her Face Book profile picture:  “Quit looking at my picture and go live your life.” 

As we buy our new planners and calendars for 2014, and as we celebrate the holiday season, it is my hope that even though life is crowded and birthdays are clustered and colleges send admissions decisions at the worst times, we are all able to enjoy all of the hectic and the relaxed parts of these wonderful journeys around the sun.

Control

The other night I was invited to a friend’s house.  Out of the blue.  The kind of invitation that makes you think, “Who canceled and how far down on the I-guess-we-could-invite-her list was I?”  Still, I was free and so were the drinks, so I went.  It was a small gathering – the kind of gathering that evokes Jordan Baker’s Gatsby musing:  “At small parties there’s never any privacy.”  Indeed there wasn't, but we were an amiable group and all of the people (dog and baby included) chatted and enjoyed shared company for the evening.

At one point a woman began extolling the virtues and coolness of a new gadget she had been using, the UP by Jawbone.  This bracelet-like device that tracks exercise and sleep habits, calories burned, and probably a few more things that I’m forgetting right now.  It is sleek looking and plugs directly into your iPhone or iPad to convert its data into charts and graphs.  She demonstrated her new device for about thirty minutes, then she wandered off to make loud and uncomfortably intimate inquiries of her teenage son who was busying himself with reruns of The Big Bang Theory on television.

The next day, I recalled that my friend Kathy has a Jawbone device; I proceeded to text her, inquiring about it usefulness.  Kathy thought the device was interesting and useful, but she doesn't always wear it as a matter of fashion.  Next was my sister, a trainer and a person who, unless under extreme duress, has not missed a day of exercise since 1982.  Her response to the capabilities of this device:  just eat a little, exercise a little, sleep a little.  In short, why buy a device to track or remind you to do this?  She posed this question:  if someone told you they wanted to read 20 minutes a day and had purchased a device to help them do this, what would you say?  She went on to assert that all one really needs to do is put it in one’s calendar, and do it.

My sister isn’t wrong, but people feel the need to control things.  The modern person seems to think that controlling everything is best. If people didn’t feel this way, the Jawbone, helicopter parenting, and these house alarms with cameras that you can access from your phone would not have been invented.  Despite such advances (not including the helicopter parenting), people are at a loss as to how to control their worlds.  The idea of self-control does not seem to apply here, so the idea that one can simply put it on the calendar and do it goes out the window.  This has to do with the inundation of information that people receive.  Surface information.  We hear about things, or we see them in our Facebook feeds, or we skim a headline, and voila! we are “informed.”  The more we are informed, the more we feel that we must do.  We must eat organic and local; we must exercise 30 minutes a day; we must spend 20 minutes a day reading with our child; we must call our parents daily; we must track our sleep patterns; we must know our cholesterol.   It’s all a bit much.  Add to this that we need to be informed about current events and bake cupcakes for the fund-raiser tomorrow, top it all off with remembering usernames and passwords, and it gets hard to breathe. It is a bastardized keeping up with the Joneses. 

Once we have information and perceived requirements for living, we must get everything scheduled and organized and planned.  And, then once that’s done, we are in control.  Whew.  We can relax and follow the schedule.  Except.  Except the information is ever-changing.  So are circumstances.  Who hasn’t gotten the week planned when a beloved spouse throws a wrench into the plans with a business trip or a wild hair to finally fix the bathroom tile?  Maybe an illness or a broken toe curtails our planned dog-walking.  Perhaps a long-lost friend calls.  A child comes home with a half-frozen, starving kitten that needs to be nursed through the night.  Such occurrences madden so many people and stress so many relationships because such occurrences are not the calendar.  The thing is: human beings want to be in control.    The ever-changing refuses to be controlled.  People don’t like that.  If I don’t know what’s going to happen next, I can’t be in control, and if I am not in control, then things might get hairy, and if things get hairy, I may react in an unpredicted way, and if I react in an unpredicted way people may see the real, deep-heart me, and if people see the real me…  Aha!  Perhaps the heart of this control issue is here: have human beings become afraid of being human?  Would we like to be slightly agitated or a sniveling mess?  Can we go to work overly tired because we spent the night on the phone with an old friend in distress?  Is it okay to skip a workout to meet a new friend?  If it’s not in the plan, then perhaps we shouldn't.   If you stick to your carefully planned day, then you will know what is going to happen and avoid unforeseen emotions or stresses.

Real, human responses to crises and opportunities are not planned ahead of time.  But we don’t want to be vulnerable to forces outside of ourselves.  Our school motto is “To be rather than to seem.”  But, that isn’t the real world‘s motto.  The real world would like things to seem okay, because if everything seems okay, then the seeming has to eventually become reality, right?  In order for things to seem okay, we need to control many of those things – preferably all of them.  But, being in control is exhausting even with a smart phone and a sleep-tracking bracelet.

I am particularly good at getting organized, especially at the start of a new school year, but I sometimes stink at the follow-through.  I have a smart phone to help me get and stay organized, but let me be honest, sometimes I just play Ruzzle and text friends…okay, most often I just do that. If whatever devices, from jotting things down on the calendar to tracking your sleep and steps with a mini-computer, help you to make plans and live the life you want to live, then “it’s all good.”  Still, rather than using such things for control, perhaps we should use them for organization, and maybe we can all remember to embrace this messy, unplannable life that is at its happiest when unannounced guests come by and the best laid plans and sleep patterns get thrown out the window.