Pretend It Is Still Monday

This is Monday morning’s blog that isn’t being posted until Thursday.  I had to board the plane before I could hit “post”.  Oh Well.

Wow….it’s Monday morning.  I am sitting at the airport waiting for my plane to board and feeling really good about the fact that I made it here—early, no less!  Of course, last night was seriously short in terms of the required number of hours of sleep my body requires, but that is a small price to pay in light of the fact that last week I just couldn’t see how I would even make it through the week.

All things considered, things went extra ordinarily smoothly.  A lot of that was in direct relationship to a paradigm shift I consciously tried to make.  As I mentioned in a previous blog, I recognized that the things I had to do didn’t fit into the available time slots and as a result, my predictable M.O. started to kick in.  Panic.  Turn the adrenaline up.  Shift into hyper-drive.  Work like a maniac.  Focus so hard on the have-to-do’s that I don’t even take a breath to enjoy life.  So this last week I committed to take a different approach and tackle the week’s task with sanity, an eye on reality and at least a little willingness to ask what my “higher power” wanted me to do rather than fixating on what I felt I needed to do. 

In the process of taking this new approach, I realized that whole syndrome stems from yet another addiction I have—I am addicted to control—more specifically, to me being in control.  I don’t like to feel vulnerable, let alone incompetent or inadequate.  If there is a task to accomplish, regardless of the magnitude or practicality, I will conquer it. It there is a problem I will solve it.  If there is a hurdle, I will jump it.  I don’t like uncertainly or unpredictability. I don’t ever want to fall victim to something that I could have or should have seen coming and prevented.  There is an element of perfectionism in it.   

These traits are actually fairly useful most of the time.  However, occasionally (okay, constantly) it causes a level of insanity and stress that are just plain not healthy.  So, why am I that way?  Good questions.  I don’t have the answer, but I do have a few thoughts that have been jogging around in my head.

All those character traits stem from pride—the self-sufficient kind of pride that says I am all-competent: I can do anything.  I am all-wise: I know exactly what actually needs to be done at any given point in time.  In the process of spending so much energy trying to run the world I have a very hard time letting go of things and focusing on the narrow arena of things that are really mine to manage.  A classic case of pride.

I think that a lot of my success this last week stems from the fact that I actually remembered that in many ways I was powerless and my life was unmanageable—at least unmanageable in the way I wanted to manage it.  I was a little more willing to (not meaning to throw in all the OA clichés…) “let go and let God”.  Hum.  That sounds like the opposite of pride. And interestingly enough, it actually worked. 

Now, if I can just remember that…for today.