Archive for January, 2010
Are you managing?
Why is it that taking control of your life seems so difficult at first? I remember when I was going through my own transitory stage (mental puberty) and I fought like hell to not be the one in the pilot seat. Yes, I wanted to do certain things (holidays, girls, kids, etc) but I really, really didn’t want to be responsible if things went wrong.
I didn’t want complete control of my life, just a managerial position. That way there was always someone else to blame when things went wrong and I could still take the credit when it went right. I wanted control without responsibility, a childish fantasy about how life should be.
Over time I have realised that this was the source of most of the misery and struggles in my life. The initial anger and frustration I felt during my mental puberty was because I didn’t want to accept this ultimate truth. In a similar fashion to biological puberty (where parts of my body suddenly developed new, seemingly bizarre functions) the fundamental landscape of my mind had changed. I could no longer ignore the truth: that I had always been in control of my life; that I was responsible for what was happening to me; that I am the only one who can change my life experience.
I had additional growth and I had to come to terms with it, one way or another.
Now that I am taking more and more conscious control of my life I can see the results every day. And I do mean, “Every day”. With a finer control of my actions comes a more sensitive reception of their consequences and a better understanding of what each of the variables does.
Leaping ahead of all this is the question, “How can I help others through their own mental puberty?”. The best answer I have so far is the same one we use for biological puberty – “Show compassion for the afflicted; demonstrate that it is survivable and, ultimately, enjoyable”.
Just telling people to behave, grow up, act their age or any number of the other over used, badly thought out clichés only shows how far you have not progressed.
Image by noii (Flickr).
During each hospital visit and at subsequent times when I could wrangle the iPhone from Ben, I played a game called Bejewelled Blitz as a way to forget about my surroundings and concentrate on something else, even if it was just for one minute of rapid game play. It was an escape, a way to concentrate on something other than how much my life was falling apart and how much I wanted to run out of the emergency room and curl up in bed. It helped more than I had ever thought it would, and surely more than Ben ever thought it would when he bought the game.
Lately though I have been thinking about that game as a sort of metaphor for what we have been through (if you aren’t aware of how the game works than this isn’t going to make much sense to you, go on Facebook and play it there, you will soon understand).
Every time you start a new game the pieces fall into place. You have no control over the opening configuration of the game, it is a random selection of colours placed into the frame. What you do have control over though is your first and subsequent moves. Each move will create one of three outcomes; either you will have made an impossible move and the board will stay the same and a little time will pass, you will make a move which creates a change in the board, more crystals fall and the board changes, or you may be lucky enough to make one move which sets a chain of events into place which sees your score go skyrocketing.
Ben and I have been through something a little like the bejewelled blitz game. We started with a random selection of circumstances, we made a move which worked and it started a chain of events which saw us elevated in happiness and drew us closer together. We thought we were on a roll but eventually the chain reaction stopped and the board was back the way it was, slightly changed but still a random scattering of colours which we had no control over. What we did have control over was our next move. We could have sat there and watched in disbelief that our run had halted but we didn’t. We had difficulty seeing the next move but we saw it soon enough. Some of the moves were small and didn’t create much of a stir, others started to make a bigger impact. Now we are just waiting for the next chain reaction. Where we can experience that rollercoaster ride of excitement and joy we had before, but it will never come if we are too scared to make another move and risk it being the wrong one.
That little game helped me in a time where I didn’t want to think about anything other than making my next move. Each game has a start and a finish, just like life but it is up to us what we do during the time we have. The choice is ours to keep playing or to quit if we aren’t doing as well as we had planned.
I don’t want to quit. I want to keep playing.
Image by evelynishere (flikr)
My posts lately have been a little all over the shop and a little more spaced out than I would have liked. I made a New Year’s intention (rather than resolution cause they never seem to work and I get too hard on myself if I don’t follow through) to post three new posts a week and this past week i have fallen a little short. I have a reason rather than an excuse and I am attempting to make up for it by posting more now, I’ve been working nights which are exhausting in themselves and I have been sick.
The last month i have been unhappy in my job. I feel like I am exhausted all the time, i seem to get in trouble every second shift and I don’t really know who I can trust at work as I know people have already ‘dobbed’ on me for things I didn’t even do (and yes I mean every sense of the word dobbed, it is like working with children sometimes). The result of all this has been a lot of stress and the resultant illness manifesting itself in a barrage of mouth ulcers (in two weeks I have had ten in total covering all parts of my mouth, cheeks, lips, gums, tongue and throat).
Work isn’t meant to be like this. I have always had the philosophy that work should not be why you live but rather should help you to live the way you want. As the old saying goes “Work to live, don’t live to work”. So I have decided to do something about it. I need to get out of this hurtful environment and into something that is going to make me happy again. I am sick of being miserable and being miserable is making me sick.
I need to start looking at my life and stop doing things that make me unhappy. If I don’t make that commitment now then how can I ever expect to feel good about myself again and ultimately how can I be healthy enough to be pregnant again (after all this is what this blog is about).
Australia day is my favorite day of the year. It involves the culmination of all my favorite things; having a barbie, listening to good music (although this years result on the hottest one hundred left a lot to be desired), spending time with good friends, fireworks, having a few drinks and generally just having a good day outside in the sunshine. So you can imagine my disappointment to discover that I had forgotten to ask for the day off and ended up landing an eight-hour shift at work which took a great chunk out of my Australia day festivities. Sure the pay was double time and a half but missing the day, in the end, wasn’t worth the money.
It was nearing the end of my shift and I had planned to have my last break to coincide with the beginning of the Australia day fireworks on the Swan River. I rushed down to the car park and along with a large group of hotel guests and other staff I watched the fireworks from the distance of the Burswood car park. It sucked.
The whole time all I could think about was how much I wanted to be down on the foreshore, having the fireworks explode right above me so that they filled up my entire range of view, having a few drinks and celebrating with friends. Instead I was here watching through trees, with no music, sober, relatively alone and missing half the show.
How many times do I do this? How many times do I do something I don’t want to be doing because I didn’t have the forethought to plan ahead or because I had somehow managed to convince myself that it was worth it for the money, or I thought it was better to inconvenience myself rather than inconvenience someone else despite what actually was at stake.
I would rather have missed that day at work and actually celebrated my favorite day the way I wanted to, to have the memory instead of the money.
Image by muffytyrone (flikr)
What does it mean to Live Consciously?
For me; to Live Consciously is to act in a way that is in line with who I am and what I wish to accomplish. It’s a self-realisation that what I do now is non-repeatable and is, therefore, to be treated as a single chance to perform an action that will ultimately lead to the results I want. Everything I do cannot be un-done. There is no “do-over”.
How does that effect my daily life?
For the rest of my life, each day will be the same length of time (24hrs). My experience of time is finite. I am going to die sometime. That means every time I do something I didn’t mean to do, that needs fixing up or smoothing over, I am losing time. If I had thought about it first, I could have adjusted my action(s) in such a way as to reduce or avoid having to clean up afterward. Then I would give me more time to do what I want.
So how do you do it?
I been going down this path for a little while and it recently dawned on me that the way to Live Consciously is to practise Living Consciously. I’m gradually replacing the habit of un-conscious living with a more constructive and useful one. There are moments when I sit firmly astride the two though:
Do I really need to have this argument? Am I willing to spend that extra time making up afterwards? Does it really matter if the paper is that shade of blue? Is that really what the argument is about? Or have I just been ignoring her this whole time? Are those shoes new? Was I supposed to say something? Is that what this is all about?
Ultimately there is only forward.
So mean what you do, and do what you mean.
Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ (Flickr).
