I had an interesting experience a
few days ago with how you can be stressed about time without even knowing
that’s what’s making you miserable, and with the ways that problems with time
can be more complicated than just not having enough of it.
Last
Thursday morning, a rather distinguished retired professor, an acquaintance of
an acquaintance, showed up at my backdoor.
He apologized for dropping by my house and said that that was the only
way he knew how to get hold of me, and he asked me if I, in my capacity as a
writing coaching, would have time to read his friend’s manuscript and talk to
her about it sometime during the following week. It had to be during the following week
because that was the only time she was going to be here in town to meet with me.
I
didn’t have time. I was going to be
teaching on the weekend, then leaving on Wednesday to spend three days away
from home resting and retreating at a local monastery. But instead of saying I
didn’t have time, I said, “Let me get my calendar.” I looked at my calendar and saw that if I
really pushed it I could spend one hour looking at the woman’s manuscript on
Monday, and one hour meeting with her at the library first thing on Tuesday
morning. I told the distinguished
retired professor I could do that if it would work for him and his friend and
he agreed to it as a plan. He said he
would drop off the manuscript in my mailbox over the weekend, while I was
teaching.
All
weekend, during the brief moments when I was home during my incredibly busy and
exhausting teaching schedule, I kept looking for the manuscript, hoping, when
it didn’t arrive, that the professor had somehow forgotten or changed his
mind. Then late on Sunday evening, when
I got home from the grocery store where I’d gone as part of catching up on the
errands I had postponed all weekend, it was there. I felt disappointed and irritated and tired
at the sight of it, but I was already tired anyway.
I’d had insomnia
the night before – I was awake, tossing and turning from one-thirty until about
six in the morning. For some reason, I just
could not let go and sink down into the deep healing inner space of sleep. Instead I felt tense, burdened, anxious. I kept worrying about how I was going to be
able to teach for four hours the following day on so little sleep – less and
less sleep as the minutes and hours went by as I checked my digital clock: It was 1:22, then 2:47, 3:23, 4:36, oh my God
5:32. And during all that time I kept returning to the
thought of that manuscript that I had to read.
I didn’t think there was anything I could do to get out of reading it
because I had already said that I would, and the woman was only going to be in
town for that one week and the distinguished retired professor seemed to think
that I should meet with her in person.
And after all it was only one hour of reading and one hour of meeting
with her. Still, it was going to be hard
because I was going to be tired from teaching, even more tired now because I
wasn’t sleeping and … on and on. I must’ve cycled through that thought loop at
least five times as I was lying there hour after hour, wondering how I was
going to manage to teach the following day on so little sleep.
I
did teach the next day. I don’t think I
taught any differently than I would have if I had had a normal night’s sleep,
but I felt absolutely awful. It was a
huge relief when the class was over at three and I could go home. I lay down and fell into an exhausted sleep
for half an hour. But that night, when the time came to go to bed, once again I
couldn’t go to sleep. And once again I
kept returning to the thought of that manuscript, going over and over in my
mind the fact that I had said I would take it and read it on Monday and meet on
Tuesday and that I shouldn’t have agreed to that, worrying about how tired I
was going to be and how much I wasn’t going to be up for reading the manuscript,
and so forth.
I
finally did manage to go to sleep, and when I got up on Monday morning, after I
did my little meditation, connecting to the deep place inside myself from which
all good decisions seem to come, I knew exactly what I should do: I picked up the telephone and called the
distinguished professor, whose cell phone number I had at least been smart
enough to get when I agreed to read the manuscript. I told him that I was too tired to do justice
to the manuscript; that I usually meet with my coaching clients, many of whom
live very far away from where I live, on the telephone; and that I was going to
have to make a phone date with the manuscript author for sometime in the next
few weeks since I was booked up until then.
The distinguished professor had no problem with that at all. He put me on the phone with his author
friend, who was staying at his house, and she and I made a date to meet on the
phone in three weeks.
I
hung up the phone feeling jubilant with relief.
Then I called the two coaching clients I was supposed to meet with that
day and rescheduled their appointments to future dates. Everyone was very understanding and sympathetic. All the stress that I had felt earlier was
suddenly gone. I was still tired, but
instead of feeling overwhelmed, resentful, anxious, and crabby, I now felt
light, free, relaxed, calm, powerful or at least empowered, and happy.
And
I felt as if I had learned a lesson, the same lesson I apparently need to keep
learning over and over. What I learned
is that when I say I’ll do something without thinking about whether I really
can or want to do it, when I just jump right in and agree to something because
I think some other person wants or needs it, without considering whether it
truly works for me – it often blows up in my face.
(In the twelve-step meetings I go
to, we call this tendency to make other people’s needs more important than
yours, people-pleasing. Sometimes it
might seem like it’s the other person’s fault, for asking us for to do something
we don’t want to do, but we’re the ones who are doing the agreeing and we can’t
after all expect other people to know what we can and can’t do unless we tell
them.)
I’ve
learned that people-pleasing gets me into all sorts of trouble. It makes me grumpy, because I end up feeling
like I’ve got to do something I don’t want to do. And it makes me feel powerless, because I’ve put
someone else’s needs ahead of my own and therefore given them more power than
I’ve held onto for myself. I also feel
powerless because I feel trapped by my own agreement. All of these feelings are an illusion, of
course: I didn’t have to agree to
anything I didn’t want to and I’m not trapped because I can always change my
mind; all I have to do is allow myself to call the person back and tell them
nicely (it doesn’t work as well if you don’t tell them nicely) that I need to
cancel or change the plan. As long as
I’m nice, they’re always nice too, and often we find some alternative that
works better for both of us. I learn that I had the power all along, I just
didn’t remember that in the beginning when I considered what they wanted and needed and forgot to
consider what I did. (There are various reasons for doing that,
depending on the situation. One of them
is what I call the flattery factor, where I feel so flattered by someone asking
me to do something, say, in the professional arena, that I don’t want to say no. Another factor can be that the person who’s
asking is someone I’m a little bit intimidated by, someone I have a
pre-established sense of as more powerful than me, so I want to please him. And sometimes I feel a little rushed to give
an answer, like I don’t have time to really think about what I want before I
say yes, so I jump the gun and agree to something that I shouldn’t agree to,
and then I have to back out later. All
of those factors were present the other day in my initial interaction with the
retired professor.)
Most
important of all, I’ve learned that a lot of my stress and struggles with time,
my feelings of anxiety because there’s too much to do and not enough time to do
it, have at least as much to do with people-pleasing as they do with how much
time I have to get everything done. And I think it’s probably safe to assume that
that’s true for most people.
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