The Power of Deciding Not To, For a While

In the final analysis, what we tell ourselves about life is at least as important – and often a lot more important – than what’s really going on. If we’re telling ourselves we’re doing something different than what we’re actually doing, what we’re secretly doing has a way of getting out of control.  I used to eat low-calorie frozen meals made by Healthy Choice for dinner and tell myself I was on a diet, then eat a bunch of food afterwards because I was still hungry.  Somehow I didn’t pay attention when I was eating that after-dinner food, and when I gained weight I didn’t notice that either. I was completely in denial about it all until I saw a picture of myself standing next to a woman I considered a rival.  She was thin, willowy, and beautiful, and I was fat. 

Now I write down what I eat and keep track of how many calories are in it.  Keeping track that way might seem like it would be restrictive or oppressive, but I find it’s actually relieving.   And in the same way, I keep track of what I do on any given day.  I tell myself what I’m going to do (when I plan my day), and then I do it and then afterwards I tell myself (I actually tell another person too, but we’ll talk about that in a future blog) that I’ve done it.  If I didn’t or couldn’t do something I planned – which happens all the time -- I pay attention to that too.  Doing all that keeps me present in my own life, gives me a positive, realistic sense of what I’ve accomplished, and is also enormously relieving.  Because, let’s face it, if we’re not telling ourselves anything, our fears tend to step in and do all the talking.

This morning, on the phone, my friend Paul helped me understand something else about what we tell ourselves. Paul is a writer, and this morning he said that he was thinking about taking a week off writing. He really wanted to take the week off, but he had doubts about whether he should.  He said he was worried he was just sabotaging his writing by taking time off and what did I think?

I said I thought he should decide one way or the other whether he was going to write and then stick to the decision.  That the worst thing he could do would be to sit around all week thinking he should be writing but not writing, feeling guilty about not writing.  Because then he’d associate writing with guilt and that would make him not want to write the next time.

I didn’t really think about it all that much before I said it, but afterwards I knew it was true.  And I knew that sometimes, the best thing we can do for ourselves is decide not to do something even if we feel like we should do it.  Decide not to do it for a particular period of time, like next week, or today, or this summer, because then we’re also deciding when we will do it again. Making the decision – declaring our intention to ourselves – is the important part.  Because if we leave it open, even though way down deep we know we’re probably not going to do it, we’ll be feeling the whole time on some level like we should be doing it (should be writing or painting or taking up yoga or whatever), and then we’ll have that negative guilty I-have-failed feeling.  We’ll associate that feeling with the thing itself (the writing, painting, yoga-ing, et cetera) and then we’ll want to do it even less.

            

Boundaries

For a long time I had a hard time understanding the concept of boundaries.

A therapist introduced me to the idea of boundaries a long time ago.  She said that boundaries are the psychological lines that separate you from other people, and if the boundaries between you and other people are blurry, which she said mine were, then you have trouble knowing where other people stop and you begin, knowing what their needs and problems and jobs to do in life are and what your own needs and imperatives are, separate from theirs.  So you take on other people’s stuff and then struggle and suffer under the burden of it.  I knew she was right about me and my blurry boundaries – what she said felt so true it was almost embarrassing – but the problem in itself somehow felt too close to me, too much a part of me with no boundaries between me and it, for me to know what to do about it.

Later, in the twelve-step program I started attending, I heard people talking about boundaries in a slightly different but related way.  Those people talked about “setting boundaries” and letting other people know what their boundaries were, and sometimes setting boundaries for themselves.  By then I had a better idea of what boundaries were than when my therapist introduced me to the notion, but I was still a little foggy about what they meant in my own life.  My Czech boyfriend, Viktor, said to me once that he had no idea what people were talking about when they talked about boundaries and when I tried to explain boundaries to him I couldn’t.  

Maybe the problem is that if you don’t have good boundaries it’s hard to get a fix on them -- that in order to understand boundaries we have to have them.  But I also think that “boundaries” might be one of those pop psychology words and concepts that are a little bit squishy and blurry themselves.  We may need to think about what boundaries really are in order to get somewhere with using and improving boundaries in our own lives.  I know I had to.

My dictionary defines boundaries as “something that indicates bounds or limits.”  After I had been working with harnessing time for a while, I realized that I was, without really thinking about it, putting boundaries around small chunks of time. It was the planning -- the knowing what I was going to do when -- that seemed to be giving me the most relief and relaxation, and the same is still true.  If I don’t plan and everything is just vague and open-ended, I may get things done, I may even get everything I need to do done, but somehow I’m not totally, consciously aware of what I’m accomplishing.  I feel anxious the whole time about whether I’m doing what I need to, whether there are things that I’m forgetting, and about all the things I should be doing that I’m not.  And often I don’t accomplish very much.  I try to do everything at once and end up doing nothing, or I can’t decide what to do and end up doing nothing.  Or I may go from one task to another, touching on each one but not completing it, like a butterfly lighting on one flower and then flitting to the next flower it notices.

When I do that I feel scattered and discombobulated; I keep rehearsing all the tasks “on my plate” (I hate that expression, as if work was food that you have to eat whether you want to or not) and worrying about whether I can get them all finished when I have to.  Whereas, when I know what I’m going to do and when, when there are boundaries around the tasks in my day and the time they’re going to take, I feel much better.  I feel in control of my day, I feel like I’m making choices about what I do and when I do it instead of having those choices made for me by default or not made at all.  

The boundaries I put around the different parts of my day are flexible – I don’t have to stick to them if I can’t or don’t want to because they’re mine.  I made them and I can choose to break them if I want to.  I can’t always stick to them perfectly, either; some days things just don’t work out the way I planned.  But the most important thing, I’ve learned, is that I have them, these little boundaries -- that I know what they are.  Instead of making me feel over-scheduled or confined, they make me feel amazingly happy, light, free.   Happy because they free me of worry, guilt, and free-floating anxiety about everything outside the boundaries of where I am and what I’m doing right now.

One day, when I was feeling relaxed and noticing that the little boundaries around what I was going to do when were making me feel that way, it occurred to me that this might be how and why boundaries in general – all kinds of boundaries, personal boundaries -- work.  And it occurred to me that if you have boundaries in one area of your life – boundaries around your time, say – then you may naturally start putting boundaries around other things too.  And I also realized that not having very good boundaries can make you feel crazy, irritable, out of control, anxious, and depressed, and that if you are any or all of those things, you might want to look at your boundaries and see if they could use some work.  In particular, I realized that often when we feel crazy busy, it has at least as much to do with boundaries as it does with what we’ve actually got on our plates (ugh).

We might need to work on our boundaries with other people (I know I did and will probably continue to keep working on them for the rest of my life).  But an easier place to begin could be putting boundaries between the tasks we’ve got on our plates today (so they’re not all mushed together in one big, unmanageable, inedible mess.)   I do this myself by sitting down at the beginning of every day and planning in writing what I’m going to do and when, during the day, I’m probably going to do it.

The Power of Flexibility

About fifteen years ago, I was launching on a big writing project and suddenly found myself with a lot more time to write than I'd ever had before. I also found myself struggling with writing.  Even though I knew that writing in general, and writing that book in particular, was what I wanted to do more than anything in the world, when it came time to write on any given day I didn’t want to.  I really, really didn’t want to.  I kept finding other things I had to do instead, things I thought I needed to do more than I needed to write, like clean the house or go grocery shopping – this is something all writers and lots of other people too will be familiar with.  When I did sit down to write I felt anxious, irritable, and uncomfortable. (Mostly, I think, I was afraid – afraid of not being able to write, afraid that what I wrote wouldn’t be good, afraid of the feelings that might rise up in me when I opened myself to let the writing come).  And so instead of sticking with the writing, I’d get back up and go to the refrigerator and eat something or I’d suddenly feel so tired I had to take a nap and so forth.  My writing time would pass for the day and I wouldn’t get anything done.

Then I read something that helped me make a change that has allowed me to stick with writing on any given day ever since:  If you tie a monkey to a tree it will try to get away, but if you let it stand free next to the tree it’ll get interested and go toward the tree.

As soon as I read that I knew I could use it to help me with my writing -- that I was the monkey and my writing was the tree.  It also came to me that the way to untie the monkey from the tree but set the monkey next to the tree, was to tell myself that I didn’t have to write anything on any given day, but I did have to spend a certain amount of time, five days a week, sitting in front of my computer.  My writing had to be on the screen and I couldn’t do anything else on the computer, but I didn’t have to write:  I could stare around the room, look out the window, think, sing, pet the cat, and generally avoid my writing for as long as I wanted to.   But I had to sit there in front of the writing, like the monkey standing near the tree.

That formula has worked for me for years.  It helps me when I’m resisting my writing because I tell myself I don’t have to write a thing, I just have to sit there for X amount of time.  That gets me to the computer.  And then, once I’m at the computer, boredom, if nothing else, eventually -- usually after about ten minutes -- gets me interested in and involved in the writing.  I’m not forcing myself to do anything – I read somewhere that whenever you try to force yourself or someone else toward something, it automatically results in resistance.  And because I’m not forcing anything I’m able to do the writing.  Occasionally I just sit there for the whole two hours and not write a word, but to me that’s still a successful writing session.  Maybe an even an especially successful writing session because it teaches me that I really mean it, just sitting there is all I need to do.

So what does this have to do harnessing time?  I’ve come to believe that flexibility is one of the most important tools in the harnessing time toolbox. Planning is another important tool, of course.   I’ve learned that the key to getting anything done is planning when I’m going to do it during the day.  I sort of look at my day as a puzzle, one of those wooden ones with different-size pieces you fit together to make a square, and I look at my day’s activities as the pieces.  When I’m making my plan I puzzle over how to fit all the pieces of the day together.

Once I’ve got my plan I relax and head into the day feeling happy and confident.  But sometimes the day doesn’t go according to plan.  I may end up doing things completely differently than the way I planned them; the day may even completely unravel with various problems or contingencies cropping up all over the place. Sometimes that just happens – we can’t know when we’re planning how long things will end up taking, and we can’t predict whether or what new developments are going to present themselves.  When things do turn out differently than we’d planned there’s no need to get frustrated or to feel like we’ve somehow screwed up – we can just employ our flexibility, look at the plan and change it.   (The goal of harnessing time is to get rid of guilt, definitely not to create or add more guilt, which is one reason being flexible is almost as important as planning.) 

And so what do the monkey and tree have to do with flexibility?  Maybe our plan – what we want to do on any given day – is the tree and we’re the monkey.  We set ourselves beside the tree by making the plan for the day.  But we know that we’re not going to make ourselves follow the plan no matter what -- if we don’t feel like doing something or if something better or more efficient presents itself we can happily do that instead.  We do whatever’s on the plan that we feel called to do, want to do – after all, if we didn’t want or need or feel called to do it we wouldn’t have written it down to begin with – but if in the course of the day we decide we don’t want to do something, can’t do something, on our list, not today anyway, we can shrug, laugh, and let go of that thing.  Maybe tomorrow we will want to do that thing, since we didn’t chain ourselves to the tree of it today.  Or maybe we’ll decide we never needed to do it at all, or we can postpone doing it for a few weeks, or ask ourselves if there’s some better way to get it done that we haven’t thought of before.    Maybe we need to start thinking about what we really do want to do instead of chaining ourselves to trees, maybe we need to stop thinking about ourselves as bad little monkeys. 

Maybe all we have to do to get unchained is observe ourselves, shrug, laugh, and share with a friend.

Enjoying the Present Moment

            Years ago I was addicted to watching the TV show Jeopardy everyday.  My TV was in my den and every afternoon at four o’clock I would go in there and half-sit, half-lie on the daybed and spend half an hour with Alex Trebek and his contestants, guessing at the answers to the questions (or actually guessing at the questions, the answers to which appeared on a board under the categories of the day and were selected by the contestants, as in, “I’ll take famous restaurants for $200”).   I always picked one contestant to root for.  For some reason my contestant hardly ever won, and I hardly ever got any of the questions right, but I felt delight every time I did get something right and I felt competitive satisfaction when my contestant won and minor grief every time they didn’t, especially if it was during a play-off when there was a lot at stake. 

            I did that almost every weekday afternoon for maybe a year.  Then I got together with Viktor, rented my house, and moved to Fairfield to live with him.  I lost my study, my daybed, my TV, and even the ability to watch TV since we didn’t have one in Fairfield that you could do more than watch a DVD on.  By the time I made it back to my house and to Iowa City, my life had changed and I no longer had time, or even a space in my house, for watching Jeopardy. (The former den was now Viktor’s and my bedroom, my former bedroom was now my study, and Viktor’s kids had the upstairs to hang out in on the weekends.  All of that has changed once again, but I still don’t have my old den back or a Jeopardy-getting TV. )  

Every now and then I still feel a strong pang of sadness when I think of how I used to watch Jeopardy every day and the spaciousness of my life back then. (At that time I had come into some money and didn’t have to do anything to make a living and could devote myself pretty much to writing.)  But the truth is, when I look back at those times when I had the house, the study, the schedule all set up so I could watch Jeopardy, I see that there were many times when I didn’t really enjoy that half hour of television.  Even then I kind of knew that there was a certain state of mind that would make it possible for me to enjoy that little window of time and another one that would keep me from enjoying it, and that I was in the latter a lot more than the former. 

Often, back then, as I was sitting there watching Jeopardy, part of me was focusing on whatever problem or fear or worry was on my mind at that particular moment.  And I was usually feeling vaguely guilty, thinking that I probably shouldn’t be doing what I was doing.  I was feeling tense, distracted, rushed, and worried about what I was going to do next.  I wasn’t close to enjoying myself to the maximum, for all those reasons.

            I like to think that now all that would be different.

            Since then, I’ve become a lot more able to stay in the present moment than I used to be, although I haven’t gotten there via the route I used to think would take me there. I used to think that if I just made up my mind to stop worrying and obsessing and thinking all the time, to look around and see, really see, what was there, I would become permanently more mindful.  But I kept forgetting to make up my mind to be more mindful, and in the end the wanting-to/trying-to approach to becoming present in the moment didn’t work for me at all.  What did work, practically without my even noticing it, was doing certain things day after day, things that automatically made me more mindful.  

One of those actions has been planning my days in a certain way – deciding at the beginning of the day what I’m going to do and when I’m going to do it -- and another has been checking in about my day’s plan with someone else.  Planning my day is sort of like visualizing my day -- because I’ve touched down in every part of it during the planning I’m more likely to be present in it as I actually go through it.  I consciously make space for anything I need or want to do and then I’m more conscious as I do what I’ve made space for.   And knowing I’m going to be telling my friend (my regular time partner) specifically what I did when I check back in tomorrow, makes me more mindful today too:  Everything becomes a story I tell myself in preparation for telling my friend.  I imagine how I’ll describe for my friend that half-hour of sitting there in my study watching Jeopardy (if only I were doing that these days!), which activates the observer part of me, which activates mindfulness.  Mindfulness, after all, is about observing ourselves as well as everything around us, observing ourselves as we notice and interact with everything else.

            And because I’ve harnessed my time and planned my day, I know that at this moment I’m doing exactly what I should be doing.  I don’t have to worry that I should be doing something else, don’t have to fret and rehearse and mentally engage with what I did before and what I’m doing next, don’t have to feel distracted and guilty, the way I used to when I was watching Jeopardy.  Now I can use the mental energy I used to spend on that sort of stuff, actually paying attention to and enjoying what I’m doing in the moment.  I can even plan to tell myself that I’ll be present while I’m doing whatever the these-days equivalent of watching Jeopardy is.  I can write that little goal of being present down on my plan, which will remind me of it, will make me mindful that I wanted to be mindful, and I can tell my time partner that that’s my goal and then tell her later how it went, which will also make me mindful of being mindful. 

            All of which can, will, and does make me able to be more present in the present moment.  Makes me enjoy what I’m doing more as I’m doing it.  Which makes life worth living.   More and more worth living with every passing day.  It’s as simple as that.

Putting on the Oxygen Mask

In the twelve step meetings I go to, we talk a lot about self-care.  There’s a reading in one of our daily meditation books about how in an airplane emergency you’re supposed to put your own oxygen mask on before you put one on your child or on someone else who can’t do it for themselves, because if you pass out you won’t be able to help someone else with their oxygen mask.  The reading goes on to talk about how that can be seen as a metaphor for what we should do in our lives.  Often the impulse is to put our own needs aside when someone else needs help, but we should make our own needs a priority, not only for our own sakes – because after all we count, we’re people too – but also because if we’re not taking care of ourselves we won’t be able to be any good for anyone else.

            All of that my friends and I are totally clear about, although we can’t always put it into action in our lives.  The thing we’re not always so clear about it is how to put into action in our lives.  How do we take care of ourselves?  Do we luxuriate in bubble baths (for some reason there are many references to bubble baths in the twelve-step literature that talks about self-care), eat well, exercise, go to the doctor and dentist when we need to?  Yes, all of that.  And self-care has a lot to do with how we use our time, with whether we take time to rest and have fun or make ourselves work all the time without ever taking breaks, with whether we take time to nurture ourselves or just do things for other people all day long, joylessly, relentlessly, sometimes resentfully.

            I’ve been using my own harnessing time tools consistently for several years now, and lately I’ve been noticing that I seem to have taken self-care to a new level, noticing that I have many opportunities for self-care that I never thought of before I started working on harnessing my time. What I’ve noticed, specifically, is that I don’t make myself do things any more that don’t feel right in the moment.  Of course, I have obligations like everyone else and I honor those obligations; I don’t skip out on work, whether it’s coaching dates with clients or something else, and I don’t skip out on writing either.  Unless there’s an emergency or some other really compelling reason, I write and do whatever timely thing I need to do for my work life whether I feel like it or not.  (Otherwise I might never write or work at all, because I often don’t feel like getting to work at the outset, then I start enjoying the work once I’ve gotten involved.)  But there are many things I can choose to do or not do that don’t fall into those categories, and those things, it turns out, are more negotiable than I used to believe. 

Almost anything that’s not nailed down -- because of some previous arrangement with myself or someone else -- can be postponed.  And because I’m planning my days in a certain way, I know that there’s no chance that “postponing” equals not doing at all.  I have confidence these days that I will do what I need to do and do it in a timely way, but that time just isn’t now.

              For example, a couple of days ago I had it on my plan that from five to six o’clock I was going to prepare a presentation.  The preparation had to be done by a certain date and my days had been very full and I was a little nervous about getting the preparation done on time, so I was pleased to have found a spot in my day when I could do it.  But when the time came, there was a part of me that really, really didn’t want to do that work then.  In the old days I might have forced myself to do it anyway, or at the very least I would have felt bad – felt like I was bad – for not doing it.  But now I simply noticed the feeling – oh, I don’t want to do that right now – acknowledged it, paid attention to it, and acted on it.  I looked at my calendar and identified a couple of other time slots in the next few days when I could do the preparing.    And then I promptly lay down on the daybed in my study and took a nap. 

I felt great:  I was resting when I needed to rest.  And I wasn’t forcing myself to override the inner voice that told me (in the form of a deep felt sense that I didn’t want to work right then) that what I really needed to do in that moment was rest. I wasn’t feeling guilty and therefore ruining my rest; I wasn’t telling myself any negative messages about myself at all.  Instead I was showing myself that I cared about what I wanted. I was showing myself that I -- like a good, loving, attentive parent -- can, do, and will notice what I need and take care of myself.  And I was proving to myself that later, having put on my own oxygen mask and worn it for a while, I’ll feel renewed, restored, and able to go out into the world and do what I need to do.