Tag: order

Borrowed Wisdom

Another gem from Marc and Angel Chernoff of Hack Life.

It is another example of insight from the Universe that came along for me when I needed it.

I am intimately familiar with overwhelm. I lived that way for most of my adult life.

Was it a character fault? A habit I’d developed to cope? I’m still not sure.

Those fastidious people who can tackle projects on an orderly and well-organized timeline?

I don’t understand those people.

But I’m learning. Slowly.

And late.

But I’m learning.

I envy those people. They often produce results of lasting duration. They benefit those around them in small and large ways. They firmly root themselves in their legacy.

Marc Chernoff’s post below offers a partial explanation for why I may have acted the way I did.

Too much is sometimes simply too much. We must learn to stop, sit down, and let the flood waters flow over and past us. How and however we can.

“Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.”
— Catherynne M. Valente

Ever feel a little overwhelmed? Or really overwhelmed? Here’s a story that may resonate.

Once upon a time there was a man who had been lost in the desert for three whole days without water. Just as he was about to collapse, he saw what appeared to be a lake a few hundred yards in front of him. “Could it be? Or is it just a mirage?” he thought to himself.

With the last bit of strength he could muster, he staggered toward the lake and quickly learned that his prayers had been answered: it was no mirage — it was indeed a large spring-fed lake full of more fresh water than he could ever drink in his lifetime. Yet while he was practically dying of thirst, he couldn’t bring himself to drink the water. He simply stood by the water’s edge and stared down at it.

There was a passerby riding on a camel from a nearby desert town who was watching the man’s bizarre behavior. She got off her camel, walked up to the thirsty man and asked, “Why don’t you have a drink, sir?”

He looked up at the woman with an exhausted, distraught expression on his face and tears welling up in his eyes. “I think I’m dying of thirst,” he said, “But there is way too much water here in this lake to drink. No matter what I do, I can’t possibly finish it all.”

The passerby smiled softly, bent down, scooped some water up with her hands, lifted it to the man’s mouth and said, “Sir, your opportunity right now, and as you move forward throughout the rest of your life, is to understand that you don’t have to drink the whole lake to quench your thirst. You can simply take one sip — just one small sip… and then another if you choose. Focus only on the mouthful in front of you, and most of your anxiety, fear, and overwhelm about the rest will gradually fade.”

Collections

When I was a young girl, I collected post cards. Old ones mostly. It started when I came across a few old ones at my Nanny’s house. She let me have them and, from there, my collection grew.

There were lots of soppy old post cards. They must have been used for courting or keeping love alive. Full of romantic sentiments and wreathed in ribbons and flowers and birds. There were lots of birds.

There were several old-fashioned tourism post cards, too. One of Niagara Falls, I remember. Others of “Southern belles” who worked as window dressing and guides at Southern plantations. Beautiful young ladies clad in elaborate hoop skirt dresses in multiple colors, with perfectly coiffed hair. Usually blond.

Before I was a teenager, my post card collection disappeared in one move or the other. I miss it. It had grown to be about 6 inches thick with an elastic band wrapped around it. That’s a lot of post cards. I think it would be fun to look at them again and ponder the different eras that generated them.

Humans are great collectors. There is something pleasing and sometimes instructive about the order of collections. I think about butterfly and other bug collections we see in museums or old books. Or china collections, like a certain pattern we favor or maybe a variety of tea cups we have accumulated.

Collecting has something to do with our values and what matters to us. My Dad was famously unsentimental about holding on to anything. From about the age of 11, I had started collecting flotsam and jetsam from my life in a wallpaper book.

Wallpaper used to be sold from huge bound pattern books that most paint stores carried. There were large desks set up at the end of paint aisles where you could thumb through them and choose what you wanted.

Paint stores would often lend out the pattern books so you could take them home to check how the pattern would look in your home. When the patterns were discontinued and no longer available, the books became redundant. Paint stores were happy to give them away.

So one of these discards became my precious possession. The thing was about four feet by four feet and awkward to carry. It had a thick plastic carrying handle at the spine. For several years, I put all the precious accumulated things of childhood in that book.

Report cards. Birthday cards from relatives. Ticket stubs. Artwork I wanted to hold on to. Pictures of friends, family and events of interest in my life. Newspaper articles about an event I’d attended or that interested me.

It is still painful to remember the circumstances of its demise. Dad had moved from an apartment to his “forever” home while I was away at college. In the course of the move, my wallpaper book full of childish memorabilia was garbaged. It had been in the closet of the bedroom where I stayed when I came to visit.

I heard Dad report on its fate with a mixture of numbness, horror and despair. “What was done was done.” No histrionics or tantrum would have effected its return. I remember interpreting Dad’s act as a discard of me, or at least what mattered to me. It was a lifelong pattern. As many men of his era did, my interests were of little import compared to his pursuits. I loved my Dad, but remember telling a high school teacher: “I don’t think he is very good for me.”

His carelessness about taking care of things that mattered to me was a more general disregard for me personally and my pursuits. I expect it was projection. Dad had little self-regard so how was he going to extend that to his issue. It took years to develop my own internal cheerleader to sustain a belief and commitment to things in life that were of value and interest to me.

I have only a few, small collections now. A china pattern called Blue Eva Opulent by 555 Fifth Avenue. The pattern is discontinued so the pieces I have and ones that come up at auction are rare. I collect white china pitchers, too. This was a nod to my Aunt Anne who started me with my first one when I was a teenager. I have several ornate porcelain teacups that I keep simply because they are so fancy-schmancy.

And rocks. I love rocks. Pretty, little ones mostly that you might find on a beach walk or in a riverbed. I have bought special rocks in tourist and science shops just because they were beautiful and interesting. Hematite is a good example. If you’ve ever come across this shiny onyx black magnetic rock in your travels, you may understand the appeal.

I don’t know what that little blip of excitement is when you find something new to add to your collection. Perhaps it is because you know the pieces are rare and beautiful and pleasant to look at and handle. It is a peculiar vanity. These collections will be dispersed when I am no longer here to manage them.

But like other favorite pursuits on this planet, they are an enjoyable distraction and occasional preoccupation. They are not vital or necessary in the grand scheme of things by any means.

Similar to many human pursuits, building collections can bring life joy and just be a personal bright spot. For that reason alone,

Chaos and Order

We long for order. We fight for order. We spend money on boxes, bins, baskets, labels, label makers, file labels, file folders, file cabinets, cupboards, closets, containers, crypts, efficiency experts, and efficiency systems. All to create to order.

We despair when order eludes us. I sure do. I think this longing for order and certainty is a metaphor for fighting against life’s inevitable outcome. We all disappear and dissolve into chaos eventually. We depart this world. This is non-negotiable. Not knowing what awaits us after death (if anything) has been the subject of speculation for centuries.

Still, we often negotiate like crazy against impending darkness and often do so right up until the very end. For all the good it does us. I think I have devised a way to make friends with death. Well, my own death anyway. I have lived so many realities in my time on this planet and have never settled all that comfortably into any of them.

When your early life begins in chaos, you learn to distrust order. You long for it but when it is upended and taken away so often, order becomes suspect and sterile. People living in peace and order – went my dysfunctional thinking – live in denial and delusion. Not only that, their lives are undoubtedly dry and boring. This was my comfortable justification for something I did not have and was uncertain I could ever achieve.

It is true that on this planet, order is essential to success. That is why we have a gazillion systems and products and recommendations for how to achieve it. To play the game of life successfully (in our culture, at least), you must have your ducks in a row. At law school, I met earnest young lawyers-to-be who were not particularly intellectually gifted, but I was consumed by suffering and envy for the order in their course notes.

My cousin Pat Good is a quilter and more generally, a fabric artist. Quilting requires order and an ungodly level of patience and stick-to-it-ism. As do any of the creative arts. Would you read this if my thoughts and words were helter-skelter all over the page and disconnected? I didn’t think so.

Writing has been a discipline of self-imposed order on a chaotic environment. Mom betrayed me? I wrote down exactly what she did (supported my ex-husband over me) and how I felt about it (confused and devastated, naturally). I don’t trust my memory more than anyone else should. But when it is right there, written down in blue and white (my preferred inkpen color), years later, I can still read and recall the truth of that moment.

That has helped me in many ways. When I was being gaslighted by my mother or ridiculed and dismissed by my mother, the journals I kept took me back to my truth as it had been in that moment.

There was one particularly telling exchange with my mother. I told her I kept a journal and had written down the details of our many confrontations after they happened and her decidedly unmotherly actions: “You could have made all that up!” she chortled. But I didn’t.

There is order I see and believe in daily and that is in nature. Unlike humans, nature doesn’t busy itself with running around changing its’ environment willy-nilly exclusively for power and monetary gain. The path of nature unfolds in some kind of divine order that I am never going to fully get in this lifetime.

We are born but let’s face it, we don’t know where the hell we came from. We know the biology and have fiddled with that dramatically in recent years. But where does the spark of creation come from? Damned if I know.

What I do know or believe is in “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” we came from the great formlessness and to it we will one day return. I am slowly getting this. In our writer’s group the other day, the ethereal and spiritually evolved Anrael Lovejoy said words to the effect – lest I misquote her – “We are formless before we are conceived and after death, return to formlessness.” Ever insightful and a thinker of deep thoughts is my friend, Anrael.

Everything we do – from birth to grave in the middle – are finger-tapping exercises. Best then that we have fun with the time we’ve been allotted.