When we confuse process with result

Here's the scenario: you decide to spring clean your closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. You pull everything out to see what's in there, and have it all spread over every available surface at the point where your blood sugar falls through the floor or you're called away to another task. It all starts to feel pointless and counterproductive. You shove it all back in, any old how, and mentally curse yourself for being such a slob that even when you're trying to clean up you're still only making a bigger mess.

Congratulations, you've confused the process with the result. The result is a tidy and organised closet / hall cupboard / stationery store. The process is chaotic and appears disorganised. (People never believe that random looking piles of stuff are a form of order.)

Our new fitness regime is likely to suffer a similar fate. We don't feel (or look) trim, taut, energetic and terrific when we exercise, so when we hit our lowest ebb, we wonder 'what's the point?' We're confusing the result with the process.

Take this human tendency into the field of human relationships and you just know its going to go kablooey.

Can you see this pattern at work anywhere in your life?

Making space

I spend too much of my time 'stuff wrangling'. Books, tools and craft items top my stuff list. I'm always looking for a space where some new thing can live happily in a 'place for everything and everything in its place' way. I'm also always looking for stuff I can sell, gift, donate, recycle or throw away.

When a thing doesn't have its own space, it just hangs around clogging up your home (or your workplace) and by extension, your life. Having stuff can make you happier, but not if its controlling you rather than the other way around.

I've realised that where I need more space is in time.

There are lots of projects I want to do, and genuinely intend to do. Problem is, they don't have a spot on my calendar yet. Or, if they do, they get bumped by something more urgent, or something more important (usually something for someone else).

Like physical stuff without its own space, things you want to do can hang around clogging up your mental space. So I started committing to particular times to work on different projects. I call it making 'temporal space'.

Even allocating 15 minutes to some planning on a new project gives it a space in which to become real. Add another 30 minutes to do just one bit of it, and you're on your way. Sometimes just deciding to rest the project this week gives you some valuable mental space, because you're not running that internal litany of "I really should be getting on with…"

Ok, its just scheduling. When I think of it as that, it focusses me on how time-poor I am. I don't want to be in a closed mindset about time. I want to be in an open mindset. When I create temporal space, I feel expansive and welcoming. I'm focussing on the possibilities.

Retrospective enjoyment

The Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show is on next week. I go most years, and enjoy it - even in the days when I didn't have a garden myself. Some years are better than others, but I always look forward to the next one, and recall the last one fondly.

I suspect this is a case of retrospective enjoyment: I enjoy having gone to MIFGS even more than I enjoy going. On the day itself I'm dealing with crowds, after a few hours my feet hurt, I'm wondering how I'll get my purchases home... In memory, all of that fades and I can be more present in retrospect than in the moment.

Envy and covetousness

I'm inspired when I see something good, something done well, something beautiful, something well crafted. I want to do something as good, as well done, as beautiful, as crafted of my own. I may envy your expertise and skill, but its' a generous sort of envy. It's an appreciation for things that are a force of good: insight, craft, expertise, application, etc. It prompts us to ask ourselves, what more could I be doing or being?

This is the opposite of the envy we feel for others' possessions.  Covetousness, as the King James Bible describes it. The problem with covetousness is, basically, not only do we want what the other person has, we also want them not to have it. When we talk about 'keeping up with the Joneses' but really we want to be the Joneses (or the new Joneses). Displacement is part of the aspiration.

In which I manage to pick up

You get to experience a strong sense of the culture of place when you travel by public transport.

Today at the local station, a young chap was struggling with a large bag and a guitar. The train was the occasional branch service, not the frequent main line service. He was hobbling - it looked like he either had blisters or a sprained ankle - and he was clearly worried that the train would go before he was aboard. Here in Melbourne, the doors close 30 seconds before the train leaves, so it was a very real risk.  His guitar strap came lose and fell to the ground in the rush. He saw it fall, saw the train about to leave, made a regretful face and kept hobbling.

I wasn't in a hurry, and without thinking I called, "Keep going, I'll get it." I bent down, picked up the strap, took two long steps toward the train and shoved it through the doors just before they closed.  I was rewarded with a big smile and a look of huge relief, as the train chugged off.

The key to this scenario was not any particular virtue on my part. It's just that, unlike the other commuters, I wasn't so caught up in an internal monologue of What I Need To Do Next, and How Late I Am For Work or even Which Tropical Island I Wish I Was On Right Now (insert your preferred rumination). At the risk of sounding all Zen, I was actually Present - in that particular moment, at least - and the action arose naturally out of my awareness of what was going on here and now.

In retrospect, I find it rather sad that the young man was so surprised someone would help him.

Doing and being.

When we're asked who we are, we often define ourselves in terms of what we do: I am a music teacher (my job), or I am a wife (my relationship with others), or I am a writer (my hobby or my other job, depending on the context).

One school of thought in overcoming self-esteem issues or depression is to go and do something. If you've ever been a manager - or a Mum - you know empty it can feel to work hard all day and not have 'anything' tangible to show for it, instead you helped everything else happen for everyone else. We need to see 'stuff', we want to see evidence of our own capability. The production company 10/13 - they made X-Files and Millenium - had a popular tag line at the end of their episodes: "I made this".

Self-worth through industry is all very well, but what if we can't do? There's nothing like a brush with incapacitating injury or illness to challenge our assumption that we are what we do. I spent several months, a while back, being able to do very little. My sense of my own self-worth vanished, not overnight, but within a very few days. I found it very hard to accept the help I needed, and when I did I couldn't relax into being helped a bit, and I found it very hard to be satisfied with just 'being'. (I considered the lillies: I considered them a bit of a waste of space, under the circumstances, but they, at least, were decorative!)

I was fortunate that those around me did not share my pessimistic view of my self-worth. In the end, I achieved a certain amount of 'attitude adjustment'. Which will no doubt come in useful should such a thing ever happen again. And, you know, sooner or later, it happens to all of us unless we drop dead of an unexpected cataclysmic event such as a heart attack or stroke.

So if you're the sort of person who gets bored on holiday and doesn't enjoy idleness, I encourage you to practice, just a little, just in case. You never know when it might come in useful. As the bumper sticker says: we're called human beings, not human doings.

This is post 33 of 100 posts in 100 days.