OK. If I'm not going to carry the scepter and wear the mantle of Queendom, and I most assuredly am not, what shall I do instead?
This morning I decided to take inventory. That has a nice, organized ring to it. Sounds like someone who's ready to take charge, make changes, forge ahead --- all that good stuff. Because nothing happens in my world without a great many words attached, I took out my journal and wrote several analytic pages before actually making the inventory chart. Simple, though. Three columns: Positive things now, Negative things now, What's next. Fill out one column at a time, left to right.
I was surprised at how many positives there were. They flowed easily from the tip of my pen. The negatives in the next column flowed just as fast. Oh well. I wound up with 17 in each column, quite by accident. At a glance, that would appear to mean that overall, it balances out. But that's not true.
The final column, Solutions, or What to do Next, took a little more thought, but was not too difficult. It came in at 12 items, with rather a long sublist under number 9. I took off the cover sheet that I used to prevent me from jumping back and forth from one column to another, and just sat with the visual presentation. Lots of words, as usual.
As I read it over I realized several things. First of all, I was glad I used that format. It's similar to the format for a 4th step inventory in AA, which gave me confidence in the process. The next thing that struck me was that there is not a lot of big change to be done. I'm not going to suddenly make huge changes in my life, and I don't need to. That's reassuring. What I need to do is simply bring things back into balance. I'm spending too much time on some things and not enough on others, so my teeter-totter is all out of whack.
I also realized that I don't have to do everything on the list all at the same time. If I do, it won't work. That's unbalanced, too. Baby steps, that's what it takes. And what's more, I can organize it make it as entertaining as I want to. So yes, there WILL be gold stars. And glitter. And probably some colorful, shiny fabric as well as trips to the dollar store. This is MY project. To hell with intrinsic motivation. I'm going for the extrinsic rewards!
One of my third column items was to spend more time outdoors. Doesn't matter doing what, just being outside. My baby step today was to take the book I'm editing and a pen and doing it at the table on the deck. That's all. But it led to eating both breakfast and lunch outside, and playing stomp and run with Buddy for a little bit, and chit-chatting with Jill as she puttered around in the yard. It also meant I didn't even turn on my computer until 4 o'clock --- another one of those column three items: less facebook and game-playing on the computer.
Gold stars? That's next. I've got a whole box of stars, stickers, glitter, fancy paper, and award certificates upstairs in my teaching materials. If it's good enough for seven-year-olds, it's sure as hell good enough for me!
No comments:
Post a Comment