Choose to Do You

I’ve been experimenting. For the past week, before I make any decision—even the smallest—I ask myself: What do I want to do?

Sounds like a ridiculously obvious way to make a decision. But try it. In this culture of shoulds and musts, it can be shockingly difficult. Shocking because this is also a culture that encourages you to “do you”—so you think you’re doing what you want to do. At least I did.

I'm not one of those women who selflessly devotes all her time to her children or who is married to her job. I love my crew and I like my work, but I make sure I zip out for yoga class at least twice a week. I make time for coffee with my girls. I’ll buy myself something pretty when I get a notion. I make time for my own pursuits.

But for many of us, doing what you want to do means fitting your stuff around someone’s staff meeting, someone’s piano lessons, someone’s doctor’s appointment, someone’s nap schedule. And that someone isn’t you.

This week I realized it was impossible for me to make a decision without first thinking about what was on Said Husband’s schedule or Little Bitty’s wish list or someone else's agenda. I’d said yes to baby-sitting, an out-of-town shopping trip, a graduation ceremony, and a pot-luck before I could stop and think of myself.

The more you start working your stuff around someone else’s stuff, the further back you fall in line and the more likely your own stuff is to be bumped or back burnered. If you’re not careful, you start to forget what it is that you really want or like to do. You start to think that your happiness lies in how well Junior performed at the piano recital or how much lower hubby’s cholesterol is since you’ve been cooking more.

And you are happy about all that. You love these people. You are glad to support them.
The problem is not saying yes to other people. The problem is when it means you’re saying no to you.

What about me? That is the question that’s going to stop you from drifting into a totally co-dependent state where you cease to exist outside of the people around you—an invisible state that evolves from ignoring your own gifts, talents, passions and desires until they finally atrophy, shrink and wither.

My friend Renai, who does a fabulous job of executing her own creative energy—despite running around after an ailing mother, an ailing man and two busy kids—admits that “doing you” is a hard job to manage.

“I was thinking the other day that I know why women/moms just opt to put our needs on the back burner or nix them altogether,” she says. “It's damn hard. I always feel like I'm trying to squeeze in a little bit for me and not a day goes by when I just don't want to throw my hands up and say, “Forget it.” But I eek out 5 minutes here and an hour there; maybe that's the way it has to be for now.

The point is that she’s...eeking. Which means she’s asking herself the magic question. And she’s answering it. And she’s doing the hardest part of the experiment: choosing to do what she knows her own heart desires.

There will be folks who find this amazingly selfish and practically impossible. In the real world, no one can just do whatever she wants to do, we think. But that’s guilt-rooted thinking. Instead, think of it this way: what you want to do is what your spirit calls for. And if you’re moving in Spirit, everything else will move in Divine Order. That makes way for the possibility that you can do what you want to do WITHOUT HURTING ANYONE ELSE. You can do what you want to do AND everyone around you will be fine.

It’s true. At least it has been for me, for this week.

Order in the court

The 60s and 70s were times of upheaval and turmoil by most readings of American history. But my life back then was comfortingly orderly. We grew up with simple routines that were, looking back on them, almost comforting. Every school-day morning the clock radio flipped to 7 a.m. and woke us to the sounds of WBTM’s playlist that seemed to consist solely of Paul Simon tunes. My sister and I knew to slip on the clothes that had been laid out the night before. We could hear Daddy in the kitchen boiling water for our cereal. Mama combed our hair while we spooned our oatmeal. Even the last minute rush out the door was part of the normalcy of our mornings.

Then it was laundry on Friday, housework on Saturday morning and church on Sunday. And still there was time on Sunday afternoons to take a drive to visit family friends. By sundown on Sunday we’d still be playing tag and catching lightning bugs while our parents lingered over their goodbyes. No one was frantically trying to get ready for the next frantic week. It was peaceful because times were different. But also because my parents lived and raised us according to their sense of order.

What happened? Those routines worked for all of us—or seemed to. (My mother was often late for things but never frazzled and frantic as I so often am.) So why am I not following that lead?

In so many ways, I’m freer than my parents were. There are fewer rules, more choices and more "conveniences," so my life is much more “anything goes” than theirs. And while that would seem to make things so much easier, it also seems to open the door to chaos. Having a whole cornucopia of choices means… well, that we have to wade through all of them and decide what to do. Frankly, it’s all too much.

I’m not nostalgic for the 70s. (The eyeglass frames alone are enough to make me never wish to turn back time.) But I need more order in my life.

People who know me will think I’m heading into OCD territory; I have a rep for being pretty organized. But “order” the way I’m thinking about it feels a little different from “organization.” The latter has a whiff of everything-in-its-place rigidity. Order feels more fluid, more instinctive. Order isn’t uptight, but it is focused. It’s about being on purpose.

My first step toward a more orderly life: A more orderly mind. My brain is so frantic with thoughts that it’s hard to get a thought-out thought…out. You’ve got to make sense to yourself, self-help guru Iyanla Vanzant likes to say. I’m so busy doing and going and rushing and responding to the needs of other people that my hours are often consumed by tasks that seem necessary at the time, but that don’t always yield much at the end of the day. Even getting my life in order has become a task that I’m rushing through and tripping over.

I’ve got to stop. Stop trying to keep up with the self- and society-imposed demands to respond— instantly and cleverly—to every request that hits my desk or my ear. I need to be still long enough to see what’s really needed. (First, I need to check for what I need. But that’s a post for another day.) I need to stop to get a sense of what really makes sense and a sense of how best to move toward that. If I give myself space to breathe and think—and ease myself away from the tendency toward swift, blind reaction—I have the feeling that a sense of order will follow. May it be Divine Order.

Choosing Your Lane

I just finished listening to Brick Lane. I bought Monica Ali's book on tape for a road trip that never materialized, and have since been listening piecemeal each time I go on an errand that takes more than 5 minutes. Little Bitty has been enthralled—“Mommy, can we hear the story?”—probably more fascinated by the lyrical cadence of the narrator’s Euro/Bangladeshi accent(s) than the story itself. (It's not a children's book by any means.)

It’s a story of a woman, Nazneen, whose arranged marriage took her from Bangladesh to London with a highly mis-educated, vapid, but kind husband—and the cultural evolution that happens for her and her family in the years just before and after 9/11. There’s a bit of romance and a bit of politics. But the theme is mainly this: Does one wait and allow one’s life to be arranged by fate—by God? Or must you take your life into your own hands?

For Westerners it seems like a no-brainer. We’re all about self-determination, venturing forth, blazing trails. But the book illustrates how difficult a choice it would be if you’d been raised from the womb in a culture where, as a woman, as a Muslim, you understood that virtue lay in allowing your fate to be decided for you. Trying to be a good wife, Nazneen relies on prayer, housework, family caretaking, and mental submission to her husband’s winding academic monologues to suppress any thoughts that might veer into the realm of decision-making.

Most of us would recoil at the thought. (How Third World!) So we do the same thing without thinking.

Don’t we? I do. There are times when, rather than put my mind to the task of accomplishing a major goal, I delay. Let me just wash these dishes; it’s only a few. It won’t take but a minute to make the bed. I can tackle my stuff after I return this phone call. After I create another blog post.

I put my mind to the things I know I can accomplish easily—things I can see. (Look at the china sparkle!) It’s easier and yields a quicker payoff than getting to the difficult business of taking action and making decisions that will have a bigger influence on my fate.

I think for those of us with any kind of religious background, there is, ingrained, the idea that the Higher Power knows what is best for us and will nudge us in that direction, keeping our destination a secret from us until the very last minute—then leaving us to deal with it as best our faith will allow.

But, whether we’re religious or not, the idea of making a decision—and possibly making a mistake—is harder than relying on something or someone else to decide for us: a husband’s subtle preference, a child’s pressing need, a friend’s admonition, the cards in the Tarot deck, a sign in the stars.

To take our lives into our own hands makes us…well, responsible for our lives. And perhaps, deep down, we know what a grave and precious responsibility that is. Perhaps, paradoxically, it is because we know how important our lives are—how vital our purpose on the planet—that we suppress, procrastinate, equivocate and delay. We think that our own lives are too important for us to touch. But that can’t be true, can it?

And at some point, for many of us—if we’re listening; if we are present in our bodies at all—the call to lay our hands on our our own lives gets to be too great. You feel yourself pushed away from a situation that doesn’t suit. Or pulled to pursue a calling that gets louder and louder. At some point you realize that you are not fighting against a Higher Power, but responding to Its demands. And when that becomes clear, what is there to do but reach out to your own life and take it in your hands? What can you do but become your own Fate?

That is Nazneen's story. Check it out for inspiration.

Talking In My Sleep

I had a chance to go and meet one of my favorite authors. Not at a reading or lecture. She was going to be at a friend’s house, having tea. I was invited. To sit and drink tea with Said Author and my friend. Just the three of us. I was dressed to go. I was in the car. I was on my way.

And I never got there. Because I ended up having a huge, all-consuming “discussion” with Said Husband—on the cell phone, as I was driving, trying to navigate my way to meet Said Author. In the end, I was too distracted to find the place and too much a mess to have enjoyed it anyway. (And lucky I hadn’t wrecked the car in all that drama.) That’s what I told myself anyway, to mask my disappointment at my own self-undermining.

I’ve always believed that, when two reasonable people have an issue, talking it out ought to work. Never mind that, in seven years of marriage, it has rarely yielded much. In fact, I’m beginning to find that talk—at least the way Said Husband and I are doing it—has become a form of self-sabotage. There have been nights when discussions about the State of Our Union have kept us up until 3 in the morning. And, while these hashings seem important at the time, often, in the next-day light I realize that we haven’t covered much new ground or come to any major revelations or resolutions. And, adding insult to injury, I end up exhausted. Not only have I wasted a good night’s sleep, I’ve tanked my ability to function the next day as well.

But I keep doing it. Keep think talking is going to help. According to Susan Page, that’s my first problem. She’s the author of, Why Talking Doesn’t Work: Eight Loving Actions That Will Transform Your Marriage.

The title doesn’t do the book justice. You’ll find it on the “self-help” shelf, but its focus is spiritual. It encourages you to think of marriage (and all relationships) as spiritual practice—a way for you to grow as a person. More connected, more authentic, more aware, more at peace, more in Love. (Big L Love.)

The book asks you to eschew discussion, debate and verbal self-defense in favor of acting with a sense of good will, allowing the other person to just be himself, accepting what is and accepting yourself with the same compassion. Give up problem solving, Page writes. Talking and negotiating isn’t going to solve them—and you’re not going to change your partner any more than he’s going to change you.

So far, the only “loving action” that has come fairly easily for me is Act On Your Own. Stop asking or expecting the partner to do the thing, say the thing, have a revelation you want him to have. Just do what you need to do. I’ve been calling this the “Work Around”—and find that it’s empowering to see that I can find a way to do or have what I need, without being hindered by another person’s actions or inactions.

I’ve had a very hard time with the other “loving actions,” because they require you to consider some practices and concepts that, if you have any ego at all, really stretch you beyond your comfort zone. But I’m inching my way into the book, going back and literally re-viewing the concepts again and again. Remembering that this is supposed to be a spiritual practice—trying again and again until I get it. And reminding myself that this is about me getting it. Because until I get it, I’m going to keep spinning in the same circle of self-sabotage. And I’m never going to get any sleep.