Everything in its place

My kid desk (but "corner office" with a window!) that has worked for 5 years.

You know how when organizing your home, people always say to make sure you have "a place for everything, and everything in its place"?

During Morning Pages on Wednesday I had this random thought. We know this principle as it pertains to stuff, but what about in the way we spend our time?

As you know from all my posts, I have been working hard to carve out space and time for "creative" pursuits. But honestly, it sometimes feels rigid to say I must do morning pages in the mornings, and I must work on my blog in the afternoons.

But I can also see that if I don't make "a home" to work on writing, then other, less-fulfilling things will inevitably fill in those pockets of time.

Before this recent energy around producing/creating/doing, I think I inadvertently spent a lot of my time trying to stay on top of the dishes as a way to feel successful about my day. Hint: I can never keep up, I will never win the battle.

So, technically, as I am now using less of my time cleaning up (perhaps the cleaning is now more consolidated to the evenings, once David is home, ha), my house is actually not that much worse for the neglect - it was already bad - and now I'm using what limited free time I have to create, and create stuff that no one is going to undo (but maybe myself).

I still only have 168 hours a week. But using a few of these hours each week specifically for creativity has filled a place in my spirit which more than makes up for the sinking feeling I would experience when I looked at how un-picked up our house was.

It's weird; the mess is still there, but it doesn't matter as much anymore.

Creating art and living out art has become more important than the blank canvas I use to covet.

David brought up this desk that we built (!) together when we first got married because there was no room for an office in our one-bedroom apartment. Now we are using it again to create a living room office.

This season of diving into blogging/writing without a defined plan - but with clear discipline - feels very different for me. I'm trying to focus more on input than output, but I am, of course, anxious to see how things will turn out. In the meantime, I shall keep plugging along, trying my best to remain open and curious.

Something tells me that if I follow inspiration, it will follow me.

***

And now for the randoms:

1. A new (to me) writer/blogger whose writing is inspiring.
2. An interesting article David sent me on happiness.
3. Tsh Oxenreider's "On Making Friends and Partial Solutions"
4. This looks good, and, as I've already asked Stephanie, can someone please make this for me already? (And Happy Chinese New Year!)
5. Did you know about the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? Found this through encountering the word "sonder" somewhere.

First-world hungry

first-world hungry = being hungry, but not for anything I have in my fridge

"Give me neither poverty nor riches. . .
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you,
and say, 'Who is the Lord?'
Or I may become poor and steal,
and so dishonor the name of my God."
--Proverbs 30:8-9

David once mentioned to me that one of the signs of poverty in first-world countries is, perhaps unexpectedly, obesity.

While I don't want to get too much into social commentary here as I am not well studied on the topic, I do think it's a good launching point for the metaphor of the kind of stuff-obesity we fall prey to in our modern day first-world lives.

When we don't have enough quality in our lives, we may substitute quantity to make up for the feelings of poverty. It's easy to grab at every opportunity that comes our way when we're afraid of not getting opportunities in the future.

In an essay I wrote for my workshop group, I talked about how there was once a time not too long ago when, ironically, we couldn't afford to "declutter." 

I spent a lot of the first years of our marriage in a poverty mentality, even if it was just first-world poverty. (I'm careful here to say "I" because David is so much more above me.) I would ask David to cut the baby wipe packages in half and save pour-overs for the weekends because coffee filters cost $0.02 each.

Now that David's career is more stabilized I've felt free to let go of some things and in doing so I've had to confront a lot of my fears and the shame of having a scarcity mentality (c.f., once again, The Secret Sauce). 

***

I'm wrestling with the paradox that sometimes you need enough to get more. (This could probably be its own post one day.)

You need emotional resilience in order to grow. So when you're in a place of stuckness, how do you get momentum?

***

We once laughed at a pamphlet that came with some outdoor gear Kenny had purchased. In addition to instructions regarding the gear, the author of this little manual tried to provide the user with further instructions on survival, something I guess they thought might be relevant for the person who made the purchase. "Do not wait until you are without water to begin looking for water," it read. 

We guffawed*, but how often do we actually do this in life? And, to take this further, we could also say that the "opposite" of this is good advice, too: "Do not wait until you are drowning to begin asking for help." 

(*That was for you, Molly.)

I'm not drowning any more, though I have been there. Still, I'm realizing I need yet more margin. In particular, I'm seeing the value of having enough margin that I can make mistakes. If I want to live a brave and creative life, it will involve making mistakes.

(Molly {again}, fear not, I said "margin", not "margarine".)

***

On an unrelated train of thought...

Addenda, or Other Ramblings:

1. Wealth is the feeling of using or needing less than you are bringing in. I think we all know that living hand to mouth is no good, and that the "secret" to financial wealth is to spend less than you make (or, alternately, to make way more than you spend). But how often to we apply that to life? We want to fill our every moment with getting stuff done. What we if intentionally chose to spend less time than we have been granted? (Sabbath? We've been given seven days, and by choosing to not exhaust all seven days with work, we perhaps store up life-wealth.)

2. Another nugget I'm loving from Essentialism is the idea of shaping your life by design rather than be default. Marie Kondo also talks about this when she mentions how it's easy to hold on to things we've been given (either as gifts or hand-me-downs) but that there are ways to let go of even those things, too, if you so desire. Similarly, with life opportunities, just like we should prioritize our own lives instead of letting others prioritize them for us, we should - for our own sake, and for the sake of making our greatest contribution to the world - think hard about designing our lives with intention - proactively, rather than reactively.