Little changes can make huge differences!
Recently, we’ve been playing furniture Yahtzee again. It’s a Feng shui thing.
For a while now, the only chairs in my studio space have been my marvelous Relax Your Back chair and a cool desk chair Bill camps out in. Oh, and three dog beds!
I’ve been seeing coaching clients in the family room. In theory, it was a good plan.
In practice, not so much.
One of the things I’ve been pondering lately is the notion that things have the meaning we give them.
Holidays are a good example. Memorial Day is, perhaps, an especially good example. This is a place in our culture where food seems to be deeply involved in meaning. Consider for a moment the many folks who, in the course of our conversations over the last couple of weeks, have asked questions like, “Is it still Memorial Day if I buy the potato salad?”
Or, “My grandson is allergic to watermelon. What do we do for Memorial Day?”
Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a land far away, I was a young nurse in an operating room.
It was a medium-ish general hospital. We did all kinds of cases. I still remember many of mine. One of them more than most.
Our patient was five years old, about a year older than my Dave at the time. She had a broken arm. Badly broken.
I’m not sure how she got to the ER. In any event, her parents could not be located.
She needed surgery to fix her arm.
She couldn’t have surgery until someone signed the consent forms.
It seems I have a grandsnake.
This is not a blessed event for which I was hoping!
The granddog and grandcat are great. I’m good with the grandfish and grandlizard.
I’ve barely recovered from the dearly departed grandrats, Princess and Cinderella.
Just between you and me, I don’t miss them. And a boa constrictor doesn’t seem like much of an improvement.
Nonetheless, Bubbles is part of the family now.
When I was a high school sophomore, I started fainting. Frequently. Inconveniently. Embarrassingly. Sometimes, painfully.
I tried to explain it to my folks. Perhaps I was less than convincing while upright and coherent.
My classmates were really supportive the day I fainted in World Religions, fell out of my chair, and got everybody an extra day to study for the exam.
Then, one day, I fainted in gym class. It might have seemed like simply a good plan to escape a context that made me feel uncomfortable, except for one detail.
I was on the top bar of the uneven parallel bars when I fainted.
As my Qigong guru would say, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
Or, perhaps in my case, when the student is ready she’ll notice the teachers all around her!
Lately, I’ve been learning about expectations.
The head of my teaching team on this subject is Luther, our newest rescue dog. Somewhere between very large and huge, depending on your perspective. Hairy. Slobbery. Luther usually has a bit of his most recent meal left on his nose. He’s not yet a fan of face washing. Like all good teachers, he started where his student was.
True confession. I am a person who does not care too much for routine.
Dictionary.com has some clues as to why that may be:
2. commonplace tasks, chores, or duties as must be done regularly or at specified intervals; typical or everyday activity: the routine of an office. 3. regular, unvarying, habitual, unimaginative, or rote procedure.
Ick! (Though you may find that comforting and that’s great, too. The world needs all of us!)
I’m also a person with a lot of projects, all going on at once just now.
Recently I realized that there’s so much that needs to get done that I’d gotten a bit overwhelmed. Not much was getting done.
The calendar in my iPhone is much easier to tote around than the ancient Aztec version pictured above, but not a good process match for me in many ways.
