My father who created and maintained the house, was an electrical engineer and early AI developer who died a couple of years ago. In the 1990s, he started corresponding with someone who was trying to create a self-driving car, and that was the arrival of the first of what we fondly came to call his Robot Army.

In the end, he could do many surprising and remarkable things in and around the house; in the end, the system he had was also idiosyncratic and irreproducible. He built it over a twenty-five year period -- meaning, it is unique, it is peculiar, and there are a whole lot of old components and Raspberry Pis tucked around the house that we're not sure what to do with.

Lights turn on and off randomly; speakers in different locations of the house start blasting the Everly Brothers. (At least it isn't Carmina Burana.)

I literally thank God that he set up bypasses for the heat and the lighting, so when a light turns itself on or off we can turn it back the other way, and we can control the temperatures in the house without having to use his smart phone.

I’m also thankful we could unplug the speakers.

I do miss the garage door opening when you drove up to it with his smart phone; somehow that no longer works. And his phone no longer gets an alert when the mail is delivered, so I suppose the sensor in there -- or the app -- or both -- have gone kaput.

My mother has become fond of his last robot, because unlike a cat, it does not need a litter box, and unlike a dog, you do not need to take it for walks in all weather.

But it still has needs.

Nobody HAS a smart house, like you might have, say, a paperback novel, or like an Allen wrench. You KEEP a smart house. You keep a smart house, like you might keep a rare and fussy orchid.

It's a hobby.

It can be a very useful hobby, by the way! When my parents traveled, my father could manage several things at the house.

My own personal filing system is another such hobby. I have over-organized my personal documents and household documents. When I am gone, perhaps it will make things a little easier for my family to find what they need; but I am under no illusions that my beautiful! and comprehensive! and may I say, elegant? filing system will be maintained after I go.

Once the keeper moves on, unless there is a qualified replacement keeper willing to commit hundreds of volunteer hours to step up, level up, and keep it up, whatever was being kept most likely will disintegrate from neglect.

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Notes

This blog post started from a conversation in one of my favorite corners of the internet, about Terry Godier's post, "The Last Quiet Thing."

via Isaac Greene

References

The Last Quiet Thing, Terry Godier. Available at: https://terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing (Accessed: March 19, 2026).

Years ago, I was listening to an interview with Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst who has also been deeply formed by her Catholic tradition.

Estes said that a Roman Catholic nun taught her a prayer: "Teach me to care, teach me not to care." This is a slight rephrasing* of a line from T. S. Eliot's prayer-poem "Ash Wednesday.”

But Ash Wednesday — the rites and worship service — originated in the Roman Catholic tradition, so perhaps Eliot was drawing on an even older prayer, for his poem.

Who knows?

In any case, I think it makes an excellent prayer.

Caring in the right amount, about the right things, at the right time, gives us the energy and motivation to act on what matters. Not caring about things that are distractions (or worse), allows us to let go of needless burdens and redirect our energies where they are needed.

If your experience is anything like mine, however, you wake up at 3:00 a.m. caring too much about things that are best left to resolve without your being a buttinsky. Or about things you cannot personally fix, at all.

At least, that is my experience.

***

I have cared too much about keeping up this blog and finishing my book draft; I have cared so much that it has made it hard to actually work on them. It’s been months since I’ve committed writing in public.

I have cared about the wrong things. I started this blog post several months ago. My files are littered with bits and pieces of this thing. The thought of publishing this post embarrasses me, because it seems too personal, and I care what (I think) people will think, and I care about how bad whatever I end up putting online may be.

And yet I know that such feelings are very common for writers. I go through cycles of caring and not caring what others think of my writing; and lately I have had page fright. I know that intellectually that it is impossible for me to read minds, to guess how others might respond. And I know that it is neither my business nor under my control how anybody else reacts, or if anyone else even reads it. So those are irrational things — stupid things, I tell myself — to care about. Right?

I do not want to care about any of this, and yet I still care.

I also care about getting my writing done. I have found that if I am not getting any writing done, my mental and physical health takes a hit: something in me — on the bodily level — cares very much that I keep writing and posting things, whatever the quality or lack thereof.

I really wish I didn’t care.

But because I do, in spite of myself, and in spite of all the better uses of my time my rational mind comes up with, I am writing this post. If you are reading this post, I’ve obviously published it, mostly so I can stop caring about it. Because then it is too late, it’s out there, I posted it; so then I’ll get an emotional hangover for a few days and after that I’ll care too much about whatever I’m writing next.

I would dearly love to control what I care about, but it seems that what I care about — and what I do not care about — works more like an inner landscape: The cliff edges and rivers and deserts of my caring and of my not caring precede my conscious mind and willpower.

I care about the natural world. I care about my country, and about the social fabric of my nation. I wish I either cared less or had more power to change things, because when you care about something but cannot control it, it means sorrow and grief when what you care about seems to be endangered.

And yet there’s the other side of that coin: when you care about something that you do not control, where its presence strikes a sense of joy. Or awe. I feel that sense of joy around wild things. Around the ocean. Almost any time I am on a boat. When I was a child and a young woman, I lived in some truly remote places: way up in the Colorado Rockies, and on the coast of Western Alaska (the mail plane came once a week, on Thursdays). I seek out the more-than-human world, when I care too much about the wrong things. At this time of year, I go out and look at all the bees buzzing around my purple asters in the back yard.

Oh, wait. That was last month. Page fright for yet another month. Okay, today I go out and look at the last leaves on the sugar maple that fills up our tiny front yard.

I do not care about a lot of things that others care about, but I tell myself I should care more about some of them. Sports, for example. Intellectually I can see the value of teamwork, and striving, and the human element, and appreciate that there’s an art to it, but emotionally I just do not care. I would like to care more about sports, because I care about a lot of people who care about sports. It would be fun to connect with them better over all that, but it is not in my emotional landscape. One of those desert areas for me.

I should possibly care more about theology than I do. Perhaps it is integrated for me by now, a settled thing, after so many books and classes. Perhaps I don’t have to care about it as much now as I once did; perhaps I had to care about it much more in the past, in order to be freed to care less about it now.

Also always there has been tension for me between arguments in books and my own lived spiritual sense. It is not such a tension that I cannot preach and teach my tradition, but at the same time it is a felt sense of the divine that feels most real to me, not so much an intellectual experience or a doctrinal thing. More of a gut thing than a head thing. Like knowing when to speak, and when to be quiet. (Another thing I care about, and struggle with.)

I’ve cared about many things that others find trivial or unimportant. Office supplies and filing things, for example. And I’ve cared about some people more than they have cared about me, and the reverse is true as well. The human condition, right?

I wish that I could control my caring and my not caring. But perhaps that is why this phrase makes such a fine prayer: “Teach me to care, teach me not to care.”

Perhaps there is something that knows better than I what wisdom and care look like, in the shaping of my life and in my interactions with the world.

Perhaps it is best I consider it none of my business.

***

For me personally, assuming I am otherwise taking reasonably good care of myself (taking walks outdoors, connecting with others, eating Not Doritos), prayer is my best mode for resolving this.

When I say “prayer,” what I mean specifically here is taking the thing that you are caring about so much or so little that it interferes with your life, and asking that which is wiser than your conscious mind, to take care of it instead; and simply clue you in when you need to act.

I think of this particular prayer — “teach me to care, teach me not to care” — as handing over the things that are worrying and gnawing on my conscious mind, to something that is larger and wilder and far more wise and creative, that knows in real time what to care about, what to dismiss, and what needs to be done, at the moment.

I call that “God,” but people call that source of wiser intelligence and guidance all kinds of things: intuition, a higher power, the ancestors, lots of names for it.

I really don’t care — really, I don’t — what you choose to call it. But it is real, and many many artists and writers and spiritually inclined people rely on it.

It matters less what you call it, I think, and more than you call on it when you find yourself confounded by how much or how little you care about something, whenever you find yourself thrown off balance.

And in my experience at least, it does respond. Not in words so much — though once when I was in a bad car accident I did hear brief, calm, audible words of reassurance; although I was alone in the car — but through the imagination, the intuition, gut feelings and a sense of inner prompts.

And working with it, following its lead, in some mysterious way, you have all the time you need, to get what is needed, done. And done in a relaxed, peaceful way.

It is very strange. Also really cool.

Sometimes when I remember to rely on this source of wiser intelligence — to call on it for help, and to listen for its responses — it feels like I’m traveling in an intentional river current that is carrying me to exactly where I need to be, to exactly the people and resources I need, to deal with what I, on my own, have been caring too much or too little about.

For me, personally, I am only able to get into this state, step into that river current, with prayer.

Whenever I turn to it, things untangle, sort themselves out, recombobulate themselves. Not on my timeline necessarily; but part of that prayer process, I think, is that one can be released from one’s expectations about the timeline, and trust that things will coalesce and happen when they need to, not when you think they should. Two entirely different things.

And the clue for me to hand things over to that wiser and wilder intelligence, is when I find myself feeling unbalanced because I do not know how to manage my caring and my not caring.

“Help, help! I’m stuck in my own swamps of caring! Help, help! I can’t find the exit from the asphalt lot of apathy! Teach me to care, teach me not to care!”

A fine prayer.

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References

* Eliot’s line: "Teach us to care and not to care"

“Ash Wednesday” - T. S. Eliot (posted 2015). Available at: https://www.best-poems.net/t_s_eliot/ash_wednesday.html (Accessed: 18 July 2025).

Choosing how to use your time to the extent that we moderns can is a luxury for our species; however, our experience of the passage of time — feeling anxious, distracted, unfocused, unmotivated — these are ancient problems. (See, for example, the excellent book The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction.)

And because this is such an ancient problem, there are spiritual principles from various traditions that touch on how we live through our time, how we experience the time that we have.

Have you ever wondered how some people remain so calm in chaotic situations? How some people gain perspective, come to a sense of inner peace? A few lucky souls are born with calm temperaments, but the rest of us have to practice calming ourselves, and finding a sense of inner peace despite what is going on around us.

If you are waiting for the world to straighten itself out before you can allow yourself to have a sense of inner peace, the world has already won. But ask anyone who deals with crises and emergencies on a professional basis: you are, in fact, MORE effective at addressing crises when you learn how to keep yourself calmer in the midst of it. A paramedic in a panic helps no one.

Spiritual principles of time management deal with how to prioritize your time and how to experience your time with a greater sense of awareness, peace, focus, and calm. The more you operate from a state of relative calm and peace, the better you will manage, well, pretty much anything.

This post is the first of a series on spiritual principles of time management.

And first, a promise: I’m not going to tell you how to meditate, I’m not going to tell you how to pray, or even that you have to do any of these things to find inner peace and calm; although personally I believe they help quite a lot. Hopefully you have your own wisdom tradition to draw on that can teach you more about the specifics of these practices, as done in your own spiritual community.

However, because we are all human, when it comes to things like managing our time and attention, I see common threads from various traditions. In this series of posts, I’m going to share some teachings from spiritual communities that specifically address how to manage your time and your attention.

When most people want to get better at managing their time, they look for information from the secular world about getting organized. They look to the business world and they look to resources on household management. And undeniably, this information can be very helpful.

We do not usually turn to spiritual traditions for time management principles, but we ought to. Spiritual matters address the whole person, not just the tasks you check off on your list.

Your inner state matters when it comes to managing your time. So do your priorities when it comes to what kind of life you want to have, or what kind of person you want to be in this world. This is what spiritual principles of time management address.

Time Management with Classic Productivity Principles: “Getting Organized”

It is new for our species to use multiple streams of communication like texts, emails, and chat apps, when for most of human history the only way we communicated was in person. Getting organized to manage your time at work is largely about learning how to manage deadlines effectively: dealing with projects, calendars, metrics, and task lists which all have due dates.

It is also new for our species to have enough clothing to fill a walk-in closet. (I once lived in an 18th-century farmhouse where the original closets were about the width of a chimney; and could hold the contents of maybe five clothes hangers.) Getting organized to manage your time at home is largely about learning how to manage routines effectively: dealing with the workflows around cooking, cleaning, and maintenance, which do not generally have formal due dates (unless you’re planning, say, a Thanksgiving dinner) but do have predictable cycles.

But it is not at all new for our species to deal with strong emotions or trains of thought that swamp our perspective and our peace of mind.

It is not at all new for our species to deal with the consciousness of time passing without our control; and with the frequent disconnect between what we would like to happen, and what we are facing in reality, in the present moment.

Getting organized to manage your time with spiritual principles is about learning to manage your self. It is about learning to manage the flow of your attention and your personal energies. It is about doing things in such a way that you take good care of your inner life.

Whereas secular advice about time management is about managing things in the outer world — communications and closets — spiritual advice about time management is more about managing things within you, in your own mind and spirit, although certainly if you follow these principles this will affect your life outwardly as well.

Time Management with Classic Spiritual Principles: “Getting Yourself Together,” or, Recombobulation

Spiritual principles of time management are about ways to manage your attention and your schedule so that you can live much of your life from a baseline inner state of peace and calm; a state of relaxed focus.

I think of it as going from feeling discombobulated to recombobulating. Feeling peaceful, relaxed, prepared, and calm.

The Milwaukee airport has a dedicated space after travelers pass through security, called the “Recombobulation Area.” You can regroup, reorganize your things, and gather yourself together before carrying on with your trip. I think of spiritual principles of time management as recombobulation practices. They pull us together, they bring our mind, body, and spirit into one place again. And that is the foundation of inner peace and calm.

If classic workplace and household productivity principles are about managing your personal information (contacts and communications), your commitments (projects and deadlines), and your routines (dishes and meals and laundry), spiritual principles are about managing your inner state — your emotions, your ideals for the kind of person you want to be as you live your life — and managing how you live out your most deeply held values; that is, what you hope to make real in the world through the way that you live your life.

Quite often when you work with managing your inner life, your outer life will become more peaceful and organized as well.

I've written elsewhere on this blog about keeping a personal rule of life (often called here a personal framework), which is a way to manage time that came from Christian monastic communities. (In fact, I am currently working on a book about that.)

But beyond that, spiritual traditions have a lot to say about how we manage our time and attention in such a way that grows our inner lives, and grows our sense of inner peace and calm. I find when I've come across spiritual teachings from Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist practitioners about dealing with time, that a lot of similar ideas show up.

That is because human wisdom traditions are dealing with the same ornery critter: you, and me. Human beings with similar needs for focused work and for rest. Human beings with similar challenges dealing with deadlines and distractions, chores and interruptions, moods and mayhem.

Operating from a state of inner calm and peace helps you to make better decisions, helps you to prioritize better, helps you to know what you can let go of, and draws you toward what is truly valuable for you to focus on.

And just as our physical bodies suffer when we don't feed them well or move them regularly, our inner lives — our souls, our spirits — suffer when we don’t feed our attention well, or move them wisely.

Your inner life isn't going anywhere; and when it is neglected, it will show up as mental and physical symptoms.

So, the first spiritual principle of time management that is foundational to all the rest, is this: Manage your outward time, by managing your inner life.

Let the cultivation of your own inner peace and calm be your starting point. Let that form your basic training for how you play our modern sport of time management.

I hope with this series to share some old ideas, some time-honored practices, that will help you to do just that.

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Notes

I recombobulate myself by stamping things with rubber stamps, like the illustration for this post. Get your own AI-free mode of illustration from Leavenworth Jackson.

References

Kreiner, J. (2023) The wandering mind: what medieval monks tell us about distraction. First edition. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Independent Publishers Since 1923.

“Reflecting on the world’s only ‘Recombobulation Area’ signs” (2023) OnMilwaukee. Available at: https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/recombobulationsigns (Accessed: 27 May 2025).

We got far more time with him than we imagined, when the first of his cancers roared in, in the 1980s. Because of a brilliant British woman oncologist’s willingness to try a new treatment, his life was saved, although the colon cancer ate out enough of his bowel that he had to be innovative to fulfill his dreams of hiking the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine (he ended his trek in New Hampshire due to a knee injury), or do bicycle rides that were hundreds of miles long. (Which he completed.)

But we had forty more years with him than we thought we would. He got to see his children grow up, get married, have children of their own. He got to see his grandchildren grow up. Forty more years, far more than we expected, but still, not enough. We wanted more time with him, with us, all together in this world, in the present moment.

But yesterday I realized that in my memory he is slipping into the Past. When the loss was so immediate, it felt in a paradoxical way that he was still with us. My thoughts were dominated by his presence, and the incredulity I felt at his loss. I hardly stopped thinking about him. And now I am beginning to feel a sense of my own life energies beginning to move again, around the hard shell of this loss.

Here's my illustration of the grieving process, from an idea that someone shared with me years ago.

At first the grief is your whole world, you can't think of anything else. As time passes you gradually add more experiences and memories around the periphery of the loss, and the proportion of grief and life growing around the grief changes over time.

Notice that the size of the grief remains the same; it is only as time adds on more life After, after the thing that ripped through your psyche like a cannonball, that the grief seems eventually not to be all there is.

Here is the part where some might say that now you start to "get over it."

No.

I wonder if it is a peculiarly American expectation that when we survive a great loss, that we will eventually get over it. Get past it. Move on.

Whether it is a death in the family, or the loss of your sense of safety and trust in the world after an assault, or a diagnosis that tells you your life, or your child's life, will never be the same; whether it's the loss of a career that you drew the sense of your own identity from, or the loss of a relationship that mattered enough to turn your dreams from "me" to "we" — I don't think we "get over" or "get past" these losses that shatter our previous sense of our selves; losses of conditions and people by which we once oriented ourselves.

Here is my functioning body, here is my father, here is my career, here is my child, here is my spouse, here is who I am, and what I am doing, and where I am going, and who I am with — and the loss says, "BOOM: gone. Now, who are you, without this?"

We have abandoned in America once common rituals of public mourning, except for the candlelight vigils and bouquets and therapists that zoom in immediately after a mass shooting at a school. Or, do we do those vigils any more? I stopped following the news a few years ago, so I don't know.

No one anymore wears a black armband for several months, to let others know that one has lost something foundational; and that one is now in the tender and halting process of growing some new life around the hard exterior shell of the gaping emptiness. But perhaps it would be a good idea to bring them back.

So much of the language used in America about what happens after a loss, is language of restoration: When things Feel Normal Again. When we Get Past It. When we Get Over It. When we Move On. When we Recover. The yearning, the prayer, of please, oh please, let me Get Past This... right?

A wonderful writer who addressed grief whose name I do not now remember (but when I do, I will update this post to credit her) said something like, "We don't truly ever recover from a great loss. We return from it."

We return. We return at some point but we will never be the same as we were, before. Before the death; the layoff; the diagnosis; the rape; the house fire; the divorce.

I don't believe that we get over, get past, move on, recover from things that alter our sense of self. What we do, eventually, and often only after a fair amount of time and emotion has passed, is to return.

We don't recover. We return.

We don't move on from it, we don't move past it, whatever it may be that cannonballed through you.

It's still there, the loss. You will never be the same if you've had cancer, or a death in the family. You will never be the same after combat. You will never be the same after you are no longer a couple. You will never be the same after a doctor summons you into a private room to tell you something about your child.

We don't move past it, move on from it. We couldn't get rid of it , undo it, erase it, forget it, get a do-over, if we tried.

We move forward, with it. We move ahead, with it.

My father was not a starfish; he could not regrow the parts that had been cut out of him after the cancers, and that caused him difficulties all the rest of his life.

But he still hiked the Appalachian trail, solo.

He did not recover the body he had had before, but he returned from his ordeal a different person, a person who was still — perhaps more — faithful to his dreams of great cross-country adventure treks on foot and on bicycles.

I have never "moved on" from some of the losses in my life. I have never "gotten over" them.

But I am returning.

And slowly, moving forward.

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References

Dobelli, R. and Waight, C. (2021) Stop reading the news: a manifesto for a happier, calmer and wiser life. London: Sceptre.

For one thing, every human being has a spiritual side, just as every human being has a physical body.

Spirituality is to organized religion, as physical movement is to organized sports and the fitness industry.

You don't have to belong to a team or a league or a gym to move your body; and you don't have to belong to a religious group to move your spirit.

As I go from being a parish pastor to becoming a hospice chaplain, I move from representing one particular denomination in one religion, to providing spiritual care to any hospice patient or family member who requests it, whatever their beliefs or nonbelief.

But everyone has a spiritual aspect to their life.

So, what is spirituality?

Spirituality — like love — is notoriously hard to define, but here are two themes that I've come across repeatedly:

Idea #1: Our spirituality is about our connectedness.

This idea is represented in religions by ideas like Indra’s net — a web of connections. Connections to what? Our connections with our selves, our own inner lives. Our connections with other people, not just the living but our ancestors and descendants as well (the seventh generation principle is a spiritual idea). Our connections with the more-than-human world — the natural world and the life it carries. And, our connections with the transcendent, which can show up with unexpected and mysterious power.

This is why such notions as justice, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, forbearance, acceptance, reparation, penance, healing so often show up in religious teachings. These are drawn on to stay in right relationship with our inner selves, with one another, with the natural world, and with the transcendent.

Idea #2: Our spirituality is about our response to what we cannot control.

We cannot control other people (though we can harm others through attempts to do so). We cannot control aging or disease or death. We cannot control our own bodies. (How long can you go without falling asleep?) We cannot control the weather. We cannot control what we see and hear on the news. We cannot control our own minds; the inner thoughts and feelings and agitations and distractions that arise, often against our will. We cannot even control our own interests: why do you like the things you like? You just do.

So how do you respond to what you cannot control? Do you meditate? Pray? Journal? Take deep mindful breaths? Practice acceptance? Read scripture? Go to temple? Sing? Perform or participate in ritual? Contemplate imagery? Go on a pilgrimage? Go forest bathing?

That, too, is your spirituality, the way you express your spiritual sense.

So perhaps what it means to grow spiritually is to keep aware of the state of your connections with your self, with others, with the natural world, and with the transcendent; and also to keep aware of how you are responding to what you cannot control.

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References

Indra’s net - Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia (no date). Available at: http://www.tibetanbuddhistencyclopedia.com/en/index.php?title=Indra%27s_net (Accessed: 13 September 2023).

PBS.org, Warrior content (No date). Available at: https://www.pbs.org/warrior/content/timeline/opendoor/roleOfChief.html (Accessed: 13 September 2023).

• I changed jobs

• I moved out of a house

• we had to replace a car

• I had to replace my computer

• one family member has been hospitalized a couple of times

• I traveled out of state to visit them

• I took another family member to the emergency room, the other day

Whew!

That’s a lot!

I left my parish and am now working as a hospice chaplain. Because this is a career shift, right now I’m doing a lot of learning, asking a lot of questions.

When I asked one nurse how working at hospice had changed her, she said, “I am learning to live in the moment, much more. To appreciate the moments in life.”

If I can learn how to do that better, I will be glad.

The purple martins are getting ready to leave North America and head to South America for the winter.

Here are two moments — about 30 seconds each — from a few weeks ago, at a local bird sanctuary.

They call to one another almost constantly.

Listen…

…and enjoy your moments.

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I’m also excited about the new job, which starts in August. For now I’ll say it will allow me to build on some of my strengths and also learn some new skills.

A lot of change! Good, but hard. I’m finding it hard to maintain my sense of equanimity.

Recently I added something to my own personal framework: a note to myself about what to look for, when I am losing my mind.

A rule of life, a personal framework, at its core, is a document or set of documents where you write down your values, and you write down the routines that sustain you, and that help you to live out those values.

It can be a one-pager for many people.

It’s analogous to organizing yourself for work by keeping a calendar, and a task list. Some people can do all that with a pocket notebook; some of us … not so much.

Remind Yourself of Your Best Thinking About How You Live Your Life, by Writing it Down

Many of the rules of life used by monastic communities, like the Rule of Benedict, are NOT one page documents. They record decisions about values, roles within the community, and routines. Some of them also go into some philosophizing (the Rule of Benedict has a lot to say about humility), along with practical matters like how to welcome guests, how to clean the kitchen.

My own personal framework, my personal rule of life, is not a one-page document either.

Some people process their thoughts by writing, and I’m one of those people. Since I have to write to think, my personal framework is, well, wordy.

It started in a notebook, and now I use a three-ring binder.

When I sit down to review this, which I try to do once a week or at least a couple of times a month, sometimes I’ll flip through the whole thing. However, if I don’t have much time, I will simply reread what I consider the core document: the two pages where I wrote down my values.

This is enough to remind me of the kind of person I want to be in the world, and helps me as I think through my actions of the last week and think ahead to the next week.

I just keep asking myself, “How can I live out my values next week?”

A Personal Framework Leads You Back Home to Your Self

The great thing about making yourself a document like this, especially when you’re going through transitions, is that it brings you home to yourself. You can get past the surface reactivity and come back to your self again.

A personal framework is a record of your considered decisions about what is important to you, about how you want to live.

Jobs, relationships, opportunities, living conditions change all the time. Sometimes we change our values — or, perhaps, our understanding of our values — but generally our values are relatively stable.

I want to keep the same values, whatever job I do.

My values and my thoughts about what is truly important in life don’t change because I move to a different community, or have different work responsibilities.

When I remind myself of my values by reading what I wrote in times of relative peace and calm, in times when I was thinking clearly, it helps me get back to that mindset even as everything around me feels chaotic right now.

This has been so helpful to me these last few weeks, seeing my most clear thinking about my life written down.

Warning Lights: Write Down How You Know When You Are Losing Your Mind

My own personal framework includes not just that core document about the values I want to live out, but also notes to myself on these things:

• a description of my ideal life: if money was no object, what would my days look like, what would I be doing for work, what would I be doing for fun, where would I live, which relationships would I want to keep going strong?

• notes to myself about my work processes — what’s my quitting time, how will I stay productive and keep on track (this includes reminders to myself like blocking time after a meeting to write up the notes right away)

• lists of things that give me energy, and drain my energy — I want to increase my time doing the former, decrease time doing the latter

• notes to myself about the kind of person I want to be, online

• notes to myself about health-related routines (I’m always working on getting a better night’s sleep)

• notes to myself about financial practices I’m committing to, around budgeting, consumption, saving, investing, and so forth

• notes to myself about how I can foster a spirit of equanimity in myself

• and, most recently, a few sentences that I titled, “Warning Lights”

The “Warning Lights” note is about how I know when I am losing my mind.

I wrote that down!

So I can look at it, and say, “Oh, yeah, I have completely lost perspective right now! Better not make any serious decisions.”

I want to be mindful, not mindless. I know that I am mindless — I know that I have lost my mind, my perspective, my equanimity, my groundedness, my peace — when those warning lights are blinking. Here is part of that note to myself:

“I feel humorless, rushed, tense, and judgmental. I lose compassion and acceptance for others, because I have lost it for myself. I have lost my mind when I am ruminating, perseverating, going over and over things in my mind, or having imaginary arguments in my head.”

So how do I regain that spirit of equanimity?

Hey! I wrote that down in my personal framework, too!

The cure for me when I lose my mind, is usually action. (For overthinkers like me, action is usually the antidote. For people who typically act quickly, stopping action, taking a pause, is usually the antidote.)

When I lose my mind, it is time for me to get up and find it, through doing something in the real world:

“I can: go for a walk; plan something awesome to do (always have something to look forward to, on your calendar!); write down my thoughts to get them out of my head; meditate; do some stretches; pet the cats; take a shower; call a friend; make something.”

When I lose my mind, my best thinking is still available to me; because I already wrote it down. I can reread it whenever I need it.

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Most of us know what it is like to be around someone who provides a non-anxious presence when things are difficult. Often, that person is someone who knows how to fix whatever has gone wrong.

Recently I noticed water on our kitchen floor. The strange thing was that the water was welling up from under the floor, beading along the grout and forming puddles on the tiles before my eyes.

I was certainly not a non-anxious presence in that moment, but I knew someone who would be, and that was our plumber. (If you have an old house in a smaller town like we do, you end up knowing plumbers and electricians pretty well.) And now we have a new dishwasher, and the leak is fixed; as our old one was the cause of the leak.

For the clergy, being a non-anxious presence means something a little different. This is the person who practices being able to remain emotionally present with others, in crises and conflict, without becoming lost in the uproar.

I don’t usually get called when something can be fixed. I get called when something seems irredeemably broken: crises that cannot be fixed, but only lived through.

I have learned how to remain present with people in their anger, confusion, and grief, in the face of a dreaded diagnosis, or an unexpected death. I also have learned that human resilience and healing are as real as grief, and that new possibilities for life emerge eventually.

I also have learned that this is a messy process that takes time, much more time than anyone wants it to take.

For me, the secret to being non-anxious (or less anxious) when things get messy is to remember that we human beings are built to be resilient, and to heal. And that things will look different, and better; if not tomorrow, then a few months from now, and almost certainly a few years from now. (Note: during my own crises, I am the one in need of someone who can be that non-anxious presence for me.)

The main thing that people who practice being a non-anxious presence are doing, is holding the space.

You are holding the space for people to express all kinds of emotions. And in holding the space, you are also often holding the inward knowledge that crises have a life cycle, that things do change and settle. You are also holding the quiet hope that people’s natural resilience and healing processes are more powerful than the things that break us down.

We all have hopes and dreams and visions for the way we think life ought to be; which often bears little resemblance to how it is.

So the person who can bring their non-anxious presence is a person who can hold the space in a messy situation with no obvious fix; and yet trusting that there is something more life-giving quietly at work underneath.

Getting over a death in the family, or learning how to live with a chronic illness, is not like getting your dishwasher fixed.

There is no fix for these things. But there is a process.

Growing Into Your Values Is a Long, Messy Process

I think the slow, winding, unpredictable process of human resilience has a lot in common with the slow, winding, unpredictable process of real human growth.

Who has been a non-anxious presence for you, when you have been frustrated with your aspirations? Who has held the space for you when you’ve made mistakes or failed?

Maybe you have done something that took you years to accomplish. Something where you had to develop new practices, where you had to stretch yourself and be uncomfortable. If you have studied something like martial arts, or have worked hard to become a professional photographer, or have earned a degree, this takes years, and it takes learning new skills, and it takes mistakes and failures as well — sometimes very public ones — to get there.

Other things we do might also take years, with less outward recognition.

No one gets a diploma for learning how to be a good friend, or a good sibling, or a good spouse, or a good parent; but it also takes years, and also mistakes and failures, for many of us to learn how to navigate our closest and most complex — messy — human relationships.

Who has held the space for you?

There’s a story about a monk at a monastery who was asked what they do all day, and he replied, “We get up, we fall down, and then we get up again.”

This is an excellent description of what it is like to actually try to live out your values.

The growth process is messy. It has fits and starts, recursions and regressions. It is iterative, not linear.

It is full of falling down, and getting up again, and falling down, and getting up again.

And perfectionism despises this.

Perfectionism has no tolerance for messiness; but learning processes, especially about deeper things, are messy. Learning how to live into your values is like any other kind of deep learning: filled with mis-steps and do-overs and revisions and fresh starts.

There is nothing wrong with this. There is nothing right with this, either. It is just how the growth process is.

You might decide, for example, that you want to live into the value of being a good friend. Let’s say you have a close friend who is a musician, and it means the world to them when you show up at their gigs.

And let’s say you promised to do this, but you struggle.

Perhaps the performances are late at night, and you’re an early bird. Perhaps you’re worried about covid. Perhaps you couldn’t navigate your way out of a GPS-equipped paper bag, and you get lost whenever you try to find the ever-changing venues. Perhaps you have a life-long battle with the clock, and your showing up on time for anything is occasion for comments and jokes.

Perhaps you fail to live up to this promise.

You may end up having a conversation with your friend, and say something like, “I love you, I really want to see you play, but let’s face it, I’m going to be late to my own funeral, how else can I support you as your friend?”

What does the voice of perfectionism say to something like this? “What’s the matter with you, how hard can it be to get out the door and get somewhere on time, for a change? Why can’t you manage to show up for your best friend? ”

This voice kills.

This voice is the stomper of seedlings. This voice withers the tender green shoots in your soul that are not yet what you might become. This voice is afraid of allowing any deviation from its rigid and narrow vision of what being a good friend looks like.

What if there are a lot of ways to be a good friend?

What might someone who completely accepts and loves you as you are, in all your glorious and difficult human messiness, say to you?

What might someone who holds compassionate space for both your anxious perfectionism, AND your capacity for creative change, say to you?

What might someone who is a non-anxious presence say to you?

The practice of learning how you will live out your values is a slow, messy, iterative, unpredictable process of healing and growth.

It needs room.

It needs compassion.

It needs space.

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Bonus: for those of you who like to make cocktails at home, find out the real reason behind the Chartreuse shortage!

Yes, this is the sine qua non of a first world problem.

For its makers, it also became an interesting values definition problem.

Extra bonus: a drawing I just made now, to go with the talk:

Bonus to the bonus bonus:

Here’s the handout I made to go with the talk.

Spring is also exciting for me now because I watch for the birds to return. I keep a nature journal where I log what’s happening on which dates. And it is so fun to record the dates as the birds return. I feel like I’m at a race, waiting to hand out suet instead of doughnuts, shouting and cheering as friends and family come pouring over the finish line.

The robins are back! The tree swallows! Yay!

One spring morning, I saw three tree swallows swooping and diving and tossing a white feather back and forth between them, like an aerial soccer game. As I learned later from a naturalist, they line their nests with feathers. I did not stay long enough to see who won it.

And next come the barn swallows, and the common grackles with their uncommonly beautiful peacock-blue heads and blazing yellow eyes. And next come the chimney swifts, with their constant chatter overhead; and my favorite, the grey catbirds, tumbling headfirst off branches and fence posts and catching themselves just above ground, like little trapeze artists. Catbirds can indeed sound like they’re meowing; but they are gifted mimics, related to mockingbirds, and they can also sing long and lovely songs, amusingly punctuated with meows, and also whistles and beeps like R2D2.

Upstairs, we have a tiny screened-in porch that we call the “catio,” because our (indoor only) cats and I can go there and watch the birds swoop by, right next to us.

It is especially fun at dusk. The last of the chimney swifts shoot past as they hurry to their roosts in — yep, chimneys — and then I start watching our two cats.

If they tense up and start looking wide-eyed in one direction, I turn my head to watch with them, and more often than not, a bat will hurtle close by the catio screens, and then we’ll see it over our (also tiny) back yard, flittering its arc against the twilight sky as it hunts for its breakfast.

On our front porch this year, we kept finding strands of long grasses. Somebody was building a nest.

The beginnings of a nest appeared on the ledge of one porch column, and then we had a very windy day. Grass clumps littered the porch, and the ledge was clean and bare.

A day later, we saw long grasses hanging from another ledge, so it was a robin’s nest. (The nest cups are tidy, but they do love to leave long strands hanging down.) The wind kicked up again, and that ledge too was blown bare.

A day or two later, I looked up and the full robin’s nest had been built on the same ledge.

“I’m afraid the wind is going to blow that down again,” I said to my husband.

“She does seem very determined to build there,” he said.

And then I remembered something I had read by one of my favorite birding writers, Pete Dunne, who was director of the New Jersey Audubon Society’s Cape May Bird Observatory, monitoring one of the greatest flyways on this planet for migratory birds.

Dunne was describing how people get anxious about the birds they see in their backyards; whether the birds have enough to eat, or too much to eat (should you feed them in winter?), or are building their nests in the wrong place, and so on.

Don’t worry, Dunne wrote somewhere in one of his books.

“These are professional wild birds.”

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Notes

I can’t remember which book he said that in, but I do love Pete Dunne’s bird books. If you are interested in watching birds, I highly recommend these two of his (many!) books, The Art of Bird Finding and The Art of Bird Identification.

They are short, funny, and their principles apply to bird watching anywhere in the world.

References

Dunne, P. (2011) The Art of Bird Finding. 1st ed. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.

Dunne, P. (2012) The Art of Bird Identification. 1st ed. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.

Technology Increases Individualism

Twenge explores the demographic differences between generations — the Silents, the Boomers, Gen-X, the Millennials, and Gen Z — to show how technology accounts for the rise of individualism.

Increasingly, machines do for us what we once could only get done by cooperating with — or coercing — other people.

My neighbor, well in his eighties, lives in a house by himself. He also spends a lot of time golfing.

In 2023, this is possible for him because he has a machine that allows him to mow his lawn, and another machine that allows him to wash his own clothes, and another machine that allows him to travel to a grocery store, and another machine that allows him to preserve his food, and other machines that allow him to heat it and cook it.

In 1723, if he wished to live alone, he would have had to be able to tend and climb up on a horse. He would have had to be able to swing a scythe. He would have had to wring out his wet clothing before hanging it to dry. (I lived without a washing machine for a few months, using a wash board and a bar of soap; wringing out heavy, wet clothing takes real physical strength.) He would have to be physically able to chop wood. Tend a fire most of the day. Till soil. If he wanted to eat meat, he might have had to tend chickens, fish, hunt. And after the basic drudgeries of survival, he would probably have little time or energy left for golf.

As our tech allows us to turn up the dial on individualism, it simultaneously increases the ability for more people, like my neighbor in his 80s, to live independently rather than having to rely on others’ physical labors for his food, clean clothing, and heat.

Conversely, the Amish have the communal life they do, because they do not use the tech that would reduce their need for one another’s physical labor.

Communities and Coercion

We are also less bound to communities to meet our psychological needs.

I remember a conversation with an elderly woman who told me about growing up in the 1920s in a strict religious community — not the Amish, but another faith community known for its opposition to war. She married a man from a different tradition, and I assumed that was why she was no longer with her childhood church.

I told her I admired her first tradition for its commitment to living out its values. I asked her what her childhood church was like, and if she missed it. She said that she thought sometimes people outside the tradition romanticized what it was like to be in a community like that.

Her childhood church was opposed to physical violence, including the violence of war; and took pride in this. However, she said the community relied on psychological violence like public shaming, exclusion, and excommunication to enforce its beliefs, which had real social and economic consequences in the wider community.

“It was cruel,” she said. “It tore families apart, it destroyed people’s livelihoods, you couldn’t do business or remain friendly with someone who had been excommunicated, even a family member, or you might be excommunicated. There was so little grace.”

She continued with many of the spiritual practices and beliefs she had learned from her childhood tradition, but chose a more inclusive church as a young adult, before she got married. She met her husband in her new church. Her choice to find a new faith community was hers.

Because I am in the church, I often hear laments about the breakdown of community.

Because I am online, I often hear laments about how closed-minded church communities are.

Twenge discusses how as technology increases, participation in any kind of volunteer community drops, including participating in organized religion. But even if organized religion disappeared tomorrow, we would still have to contend with the dark side of human communities.

Sometimes online communities replicate the psychological violence, the shaming, the shunning, the public condemnation, and the excommunications that my friend described in her childhood church in the 1920s.

It requires real, conscious, applied reflection and effort to live out values like grace, inclusivity, tolerance, and openness. And sometimes you might have to change communities to find that.

Knowing Your Values Helps You Find Life-Giving Communities

Being in community is a basic human need.

Because of technology, we are no longer forced to belong to communities to get our basic physical needs met. Because of technology, even people who live in small, remote places can find like-minded people online.

We can choose the communities to which we belong.

The degree to which we can do this now is unprecedented in human history.

I participate in multiple communities, in person and online. But the woman who grew up in a clannish faith community in the 1920s and chose to find another community that better aligned with her values, is a role model for me.

She knew her own values. She sought out a group that aligned better with her values around grace. (I can’t think of a secular word to describe the concept of grace; it draws on qualities like humility, love, forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, peace, humor.) She also lived out that value. I got to know her because I was drawn to the way she lived a life centered around the value of grace.

I believe orienting yourself with something like a rule of life or a personal framework (my non-religious description of this practice), where you identify your values and the routines that allow you to live those values out, helps you find your community without losing your integrity.

The first rules of life were developed by religious people, already in religious communities, who still felt like they were being pulled away from their values.

It is a good thing to make some time to figure out — and write down — what you really stand for.

Technology has freed so many people from being dependent on others’ physical labor to survive.

But we as human beings, social beings, still need communities. And technology does not change the fact that all communities live out values. All communities express certain ways of being, ways of treating people inside and outside the community.

Our communities either help us live out our deepest values, or hinder us in doing so.

What communities are you choosing?

And how well do your communities help you to live out your values?

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Reference

Twenge, J.M. (2023) Generations: the real differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents - and what they mean for America’s future. New York: Atria Books.

But it left long before we did.

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For me, at least, that was true: I got to a point where my life was too complicated for me to manage it without a productivity system. And so I learned about systems for managing time and information and tasks and goals and projects.

These systems have allowed me to get a lot more done, than I could have without them.

But the danger is that we might too easily substitute getting things done — checking off tasks, chores, projects — for living a life of depth and resonance.

For example, I want to take a couple of hours for an adventure to visit a heron rookery nearby, so I can see dozens of Great Blue herons nesting.

But nesting season for herons coincides with my busiest time of the year.

If I tell myself that I need to get everything done before I take time to see this, nesting season will be over. I will miss the experience of seeing them. (And I still won’t get everything done; I can always think of more that I would like to have done, than I can actually do.)

Stop Asking Yourself How You’ll Get Everything Done

Most productivity and organizational systems are geared toward the world of work, paid or unpaid.

Few talk about managing your time so that you can pursue important relationships and activities that feed your spirit, but not your bank account. (Laura Vanderkam’s recent book, Tranquility by Tuesday, is one exception to this.)

But what we call “leisure activities,” non-work or chore activities, non-productive activities in the economic sense, are the very activities you might look back on as the most important to cultivating a well-lived life: a life where you’ve had rich relationships, where you’ve taken time to create things that gave you pleasure to create, where you’ve taken time to contribute your energy and efforts to make this world a better place.

Sometimes the belief that you must finish everything on the list, whether it’s paid work tasks or chores around the house, robs you of leisure time: “But I can’t stop working until I get everything done!”

Part of the solution for this is using time management techniques such as paying yourself first.

But part of it is also reframing the question.

Ask Instead: What Do You Want to Make Real in the World?

What if, instead of asking yourself, “What do I need to get done,” you ask yourself: “What do I want to make real, in this world?”

What do you want to make real?

What do you want to bring from your imagination, into real life?

What do you want to make real, that you can experience? Hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine? Having clean socks on a predictable basis (seriously, that is one of mine)? (Next level: having clean socks on a regular basis, while you are hiking the Appalachian Trail.)

What do you want to make real that other people can enjoy or use — learning to play music, starting a non-profit program, creating a useful app?

What do you want to make real, that makes this world a better place: provide housing for purple martins so they can keep migrating to North America; provide housing for human beings, so all can live with dignity?

We will all have different things that we deeply want to become real, in this world. We will all have different experiences and accomplishments that we hope to look back on, at the end of a well-lived life.

I personally believe that if everyone took one thing they wanted to see changed in this world, and worked toward making that one thing real; that we would all be much better off.

Making Things Real in the World Can Take a Lot of Effort; or, Almost No Effort at All

Lately my key productivity question to myself is: what do I want to make real, in this world?

What do I want to make real, today?

This can be very small! The other day what I most wanted to make real, was some clean socks. (Doing the laundry, a care task I dislike, is much more satisfying for me when I cheer myself on, saying, “You go, Anna, giving yourself clean socks, good for you!”)

I also want to write a book, which is a lot more work than throwing a load of wash into a machine.

To make my book real in the world, I’m going to have to put in consistent thought and effort over time. The same is true for making things real like starting your own business, learning a trade, socializing a dog to become a beloved part of the family.

But some things that are important to you, and that bring you a lot of joy, you can make real without much trouble at all.

Making Things Real is About Responding to Opportunities

When I was a child, I lived in the Southwest of the U.S., and in northern New England: places where cherry blossom trees don’t grow.

Every year during the spring I would see the Cherry Blossom Festival pictures in Washington, DC, and I thought that those trees looked like blooming clouds, banks of flowering clouds, on the banks of the Potomac. I dreamed of seeing them in real life.

It wasn’t until my thirties that I got to experience the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC, in real life rather than in my imagination.

That memory of walking under hundreds of flowering cherry trees, with dark rain clouds overhead playing up the lightness of those short-lived blossoms, remains one of the most vividly piercing things I have ever experienced.

By that time, we lived in an area where cherry trees could grow. However, our house already had such a large old maple shading the yard that we couldn’t plant other trees.

One day, a storm came and toppled our maple tree.

I was saddened to see it go, but realized that now our small yard had enough sun and space to plant a Yoshino cherry tree, just like the ones in Washington, DC.

And so we did.

It took less than a day to plant it. That was fourteen years ago.

Now, it is full grown.

I can see blossoming branches from my bedroom window, nodding in the breezes, with birds flying in and out of them, and wild solitary bees burrowing into the blossoms. Yoshino cherry trees bloom even before dandelions bloom.

Being able to see the cherry blossoms each spring, from a flowering tree in our own yard, from my bedroom window no less, is — for me — one of the best things I have ever made real in the world.

And it was hardly any work at all.

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References

Vanderkam, L. (2022) Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters. New York: Portfolio.

Byington, C. (2016) Purple Martins: The Bird That Relies on Human-Built Nests, Cool Green Science, 12 September. Available at: https://blog.nature.org/2016/09/12/purple-martins-the-bird-that-relies-on-human-built-nests/ (Accessed: 28 March 2023).

Most of us have important things we want to do in our lives, to live well-lived lives, that will not pull in a profit.

You might wonder how to make time in your life for activities like making art or writing or woodworking; volunteering for causes that are important to you; spending time with family and friends.

Thinking about time like we think about money can help you compare the value of different ways to use your time. This mental model can help you prioritize.

What if you thought of your time, like money?

What is true about both time, and money?

Two Eternal Truths About Time and Money

1) There are lots of competing demands for both your time, and your money. Everybody wants your money, and everybody wants your time. And you also need other people's money and time, in order to live. This is the way of the world.

2) If you spend money or time, you do not still have it available to use in a different way, later on: you can't both spend it, and keep it in reserve.

Money is exchanged for goods and services. Time is exchanged for experiences: right now, I am choosing to have the experience of writing this article; but part of me would really prefer to throw my binoculars in the car, and visit the heron rookery up the road. Another part of me would like to scroll stuff online. And I really ought to get some laundry done…

But I can only do one. You must choose, and your choices for any given moment will rule out all other choices for how you could have used that moment.

These eternal truths still annoy me; but there they are.

Pay Yourself First to Make Time for Your Deepest Aspirations

Pay yourself first with your time, as well as your money.

With money, "pay yourself first" means that as soon as money comes in, the first thing you do is to reserve some in savings for yourself, for your own well-being, for freedom from debt and anxiety in the future. (Obviously if you literally cannot afford to meet basic needs for survival, this is a very different problem.)

With time, “pay yourself first” means that before you schedule anything else, you FIRST reserve time for yourself to do what it is most important to you. Everything else can, and must, wait. (I also think of this principle as scheduling for constants and variables.)

Schedule your writing time first. Schedule your art-making time first. Put your meditation time, or workout time, or whatever it is that restores your soul — pay yourself first with that time.

Contemplative monastic orders schedule meditation and prayer time first. All of the rest gets worked in, after that. When the bell rings, everything else stops, and it is time for prayer. Otherwise, they would never have time to do it.

Paying yourself first often also means managing your anxiety: if, for example, I am anxious about my writing and procrastinate by scrolling on my phone, I do not get my writing done. I have let my anxiety use up that time.

If I am anxious about other people's reactions to my reserving some time for my deepest priorities, and instead I spend my best time meeting other people's demands, I do not get my writing done.

It is uncomfortable, especially if this is new to you, to pay yourself first when it comes to time. Expect the discomfort, and do it anyway.

Sooner than you think, this time may feel so viscerally important to you, that you will protect it without guilt.

In my case, I found that making time to write paradoxically makes me more relaxed and available to others, when they need my time.

Taking Time for Self-Care is Your Life Energy’s Savings Account

You need to set aside time to tend to your body and mind, to build up your physical and emotional reserves, and to restore your perspective and personal resilience.

Sometimes I think of my body and my emotions as if they were a beloved pet dog, needing daily care, and loving attention.

It takes hours every day to feed yourself, walk or exercise yourself, rest yourself. I don't know about dogs' inner lives (although I am sure that dogs have inner lives; one only has to watch a dreaming dog’s paws twitch), but humans' inner lives and social lives also take time.

It takes time to connect with your own inner voice through activities like meditation or journaling, and time to connect with people who are important to you.

You are not an exception to this rule.

Like all human beings, in order to thrive, you need: time to acquire and eat nutritious food, time to move and exercise your body, time to cultivate good relationships, time to reflect, time to do things that replenish your spirit, time set aside to get a good night's sleep, and time to tend to a home that is a sanctuary for you.

Investing Your Time, Versus Spending or Wasting Your Time

When you invest your time, you get returns in the future. It gives you something in the future. Also, it’s cumulative. Small, regular investments of time can pay off later in life in a big way: better physical health, rich relationships, a body of creative work.

When you invest your time, it grows more of something you want, in the future.

Making something, or learning something like drawing or playing the Irish flute. Building your skills. Cultivating richer and deeper relationships. A blog with a lot of writing on it, that turns into an intellectual asset. Better physical and mental health.

One of the best ways my husband and I invested our time, was reading books to our kids each night. We started with board books when they were infants on our laps, to sitting on the couch together and reading long novels a chapter at a time, when they were in middle school.

It built relationships, it gave us time to relax together, and we all pride ourselves on our voice acting. And our shared investment of reading time brings wonderful memories for me, that bring joy whenever I think of them.

Win. Win. Win.

When you spend your time, you are doing something that will not give you returns in the future.

Here is where time is NOT like money.

You cannot save time to use in the future. (”Oh, wow, next week looks busy; let me just move this slower day from this week, so I can give myself eight days for next week…”)

When we save money, it means we’re holding onto it and have the option to use it in the future, but time passes, passes, passes.

What are some things you do to “pass the time?”

If I spend time, there are no calculable returns in the future. For example, perhaps I watch a mystery show, by myself. I have enjoyed the time, but I haven’t built relationships by watching it with someone else; and I haven't learned anything that will help me in future. I just passed the time watching a show by myself.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

I just want to be sure I’m also investing time, and paying myself first.

When you waste your time, you’re doing something that puts Future You in time debt.

Wasting time is doing something that costs Future You more time to deal with the fallout.

When you waste time, you are doing something that puts you in debt to the calendar and the clock; you’re doing something that actively robs you of time in the future.

Let’s say instead of sitting down to get some work done, I succumb to the temptation to noodle around online. Perhaps I feel a little anxious about what I’m working on, so instead of focusing on the work, I decide instead to procrastinate by scrolling.

And sure enough, I come across something that pushes a hot button for me. I click some more links. Outrageous!! Splutter, splutter, splutter — ?How could they even —?!!! What’s the matter with those people, let me just put in my two cents.

For me, this is a waste of time.

An investment of my time, in response to something that outrages me, would be for me to mindfully donate my money and/or my time to alleviate the problem.

Self-righteous outrage is a feeling I wish I didn’t enjoy. But on some level, I do enjoy it. I’m sure there is a good evolutionary reason for this; but now that I am aware of the dangers that mindlessly following such feelings poses, I try to receive the message the feelings are giving me (“oh, wow, my moral code violation alert is clanging!”) and consider how I can usefully, constructively respond.

If I choose to waste my time on anger-tainment — expressing outrage online with internet strangers rather than investing my time to alleviate the problem; or I choose to read content that is algorithmically designed to snag my attention by whipping up my outrage, to keep me reading and clicking more links, growing ever more bug-eyed and red-faced — my focus is then shattered.

Now I am in time debt.

Now I have to take up some time that I could have invested or spent much more pleasurably on other things, to get a grip.

I have to use extra time — time I had other hopes and plans for — to calm down, to regain my focus, and to remember my true priorities.

The Currency of Time is Your Attention

Time is attention.

What you are doing in your head, is what you are doing with your time.

You might have had the experience of driving down a familiar highway and realizing you don't remember the last 25 miles because in your head, you were busy having an imaginary argument with someone.

What you turn your attention to, is where you spend your time.

What you turn your attention to, is also what you get good at doing.

Put your attention toward the things you want to be good at. It takes small, regular investments of your time and your attention to get good at something.

What do you want to be good at? What do you want to grow, in your life?

What do you want to look back on with satisfaction and quiet pride, where you say to yourself, that the time you used toward that, added up to a well-lived life?

When you know what that is…

Pay Yourself First.

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References

Hillary Rettig’s and Oliver Burkeman’s books below sparked my thinking for this essay.

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four thousand weeks: time management for mortals. First. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Rettig, H. (2011) The seven secrets of the prolific: the definitive guide to overcoming procrastination, perfectionism, and writer’s block. Hillary Rettig.

“[The author] was at the library when she first read about a painting exercise called, “One Hundred Demons!” The example she saw was a hand-scroll painted by a Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku, in 16th century Japan. (…) She checked out some books, followed the instructions, and the demons began to come. They were not the demons she expected. At first they freaked her, but then she started to love seeing them come out of her paintbrush. She hopes you will dig these demons and then pick up a paintbrush and paint your own!” (Barry 2017, pp 8-13)

When we take something that haunts us, and give it a name and an image, we can begin to free ourselves from it.

Consider the vivid image of the “hungry ghost” from Buddhism: the name, “hungry ghost,” and the image (a being with a narrow neck and giant stomach, whose cravings can never be satisfied). A wordless, image-less emotional experience — the sense of never feeling satisfied, always needing more; the inner gnawings of craving, addiction — is captured in a name, and in a picture: the “hungry ghost.”

Once you have a mental handle to grab back at what’s grabbing at you, then you can wrestle with it.

This is why naming and portraying something for ourselves is so powerful. We can stand apart from it, say, “Ah, there you are, you are showing up today, I wonder why?”

We can be mindful, instead of mindless about it. When we take inchoate emotions and put them into words, put them into a drawing or a painting, we get a grip on them, we get a mental handle to grasp them by. We gain new insights and awareness when we can name something, and picture it. We regain perspective, and self control.

Barry recommends painting your own demons with an inkstone and brush, like the Buddhist monks (and, bonus, she gives instructions on how to do this at the end of the book).

I also tried drawing some of mine.

That works, too.

What Hijacks Your Attention?

In the East and in the West, demons are spiritual parasites.

They feed on your life energy, optimism, perspective, and hope. They lure your thoughts and energies to swamps of anger, resentment, rumination, and regret. When we are unaware, unconscious of our personal inner demons and monsters, this emotional hijacking can lead us to let our inner trolls run the show.

But you can take away much of their power by drawing or painting them: capturing them in an image. By giving them a name: capturing them in a phrase.

This will help you become aware of when they are activated, trying to yank your chain to pull you back into the swamp.

Wisdom comes in part from coming to know yourself: not just knowing yourself in the career counselor sense, knowing your gifts and skills and strengths; but especially from knowing the unlovely, unloved things that pull at your psyche and wake you in the night.

In One! Hundred! Demons!, Lynda Barry wrote a story about “Girlness:” a child longs to have girly things — frilly dresses, a beautiful doll — but is scolded and ridiculed by her mother, who had grown up in wartime, and said that little girls who had such things were spoiled.

At the end of the story, as an adult, a surprising encounter opens the way for the narrator to delight in something unabashedly girly; something she had long believed was not for the likes of her.

We cannot destroy our own demons, or our shadow side, or the things that haunt us. The drive to purify, the illusion that we can rid ourselves of that which we don’t want to claim, is its own kind of demon.

But we can become more conscious of these parts of ourselves. We can grow in awareness of how these parts get activated and how they affect us.

This gives us more wisdom about how much power we give them.

To name something is to gain power over it. To create an image of something is to gain power over it. When I draw a demon, it can no longer swamp me so easily, because now I can grasp it. Now, I can wrestle back.

“Ahhhh,” I say to myself, when I am afraid to write or to publish something (like this post!). “Here comes the Husher! Shall I let it tell me what I can write?”

A strange thing happened as I began to paint and draw my demons, and to write down what they were saying.

Many of them made me laugh, when I saw them on the page. And laughter is power; especially over demons.

But a more surprising thing happened that I did not expect at all: I began to feel affectionate towards them.

Some of them are trying to protect me.

Others of them, once I draw them, have much less power than they had when I was unaware of them. They threw big shadows that scared me, but they look much smaller on the page.

And some of them seem glad to be known.

Some of them seem to have been waiting for me to come to my senses. Some of them, once I draw them, seem to say, “At last — very good, now you can see me; my work here is done.”

And some of them are actually others’ demons, which were piggybacking on my shoulders until I twisted, and threw them off onto a page.

I wonder if the “Girlness” in Lynda Barry’s story was more the mother’s demon than the child’s. Nevertheless it rode the child well into her womanhood, whispering, “You can’t have things that delight you; you’ll be spoiled, you don’t deserve them.”

Try It Yourself

Drawing or painting brings up insights that will not come to you in words. I always get surprised by the imagery that comes up when I draw these.

With the Husher, I set out to draw a lock on the box that the Husher is sitting on; but instead my hand drew a little skull.

I didn’t plan that; but it certainly gets the message across that it is deadly for my inner life if I obey the Husher and refuse to allow myself to write and draw.

Another thing I learned from Lynda Barry: draw as if you were a small child. Make marks on the page, draw or paint loops and lines and scribbles and see what emerges.

Narrate as you go, or narrate what it is after you’ve drawn it. This is how small children draw. Little kids make words and drawings together. They draw, and narrate while they draw.

Little kids are also not worried about whether their artwork is “good.” (That’s a demon that older folks hoist on young shoulders.)

If right now you are saying to yourself, “But I can’t do that,” then QUICK!

Draw that one!

That’s your first demon, you’ve spotted it in the wild!

Pretend you are four years old, and remember that no one has to see your drawing but you. Draw the one that tells you that you can’t waste your time drawing your demons, or it’s stupid to do this, or that your drawing isn’t good enough.

Draw it down, capture it on the page. Write down what it’s saying, about why it thinks you cannot, or should not do this.

Why doesn’t it want you to draw it?

Find out.

Drawing these things feels great!

Drawing my demons has been one of the coolest and most helpful things I have done. It’s also a lot of fun.

Whenever I draw one, I get a grip on it: I can then decide whether or not I will keep mindlessly obeying it; I can then decide how much time, attention, and energy I will keep feeding to it.

It makes me feel more alive. It frees all kinds of creative energies.

Try it.

See what shows up on the page.

I bet you will be surprised.

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References

De-Conditioning the Hungry Ghosts | Psychology Today (2017, 5 September). Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-true-refuge/201709/de-conditioning-the-hungry-ghosts (Accessed: 3 March 2023).

Barry, L. (2017) One! Hundred! Demons! First Drawn & Quarterly Edition. Drawn & Quarterly.

Resources

Lynda Barry was named as a MacArthur Fellow in 2019. She has written several books about how to draw and write, especially for those who think they cannot do either. These books are also thought-provoking meditations on images and memory. Here are two of my favorites:

Barry, L. (2008) What It Is. Drawn & Quarterly.

Barry, L. (2014) Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor. Drawn & Quarterly.

When you know your rules, you know your boundaries.

There are three levels when it comes to defining your work-related boundaries: the job description level; the professional ethics level; and the level of your personal values and roles.

Your Rules: The Job Description Level

Your job description is generally the most well defined of these three levels; however, even this is usually poorly defined.

What are your deliverables? What are your job responsibilities? What are the agreed-upon expectations between you and your colleagues; you and your manager; you and your clients or customers; you and other stakeholders?

Note that these are your job responsibilities, as you understand them.

Most jobs have unwritten expectations; and most jobs can be done well, by — for example — an introvert or an extrovert. No two people will live into their job responsibilities in exactly the same way, no two companies will formulate exactly the same expectations even with jobs with the same titles.

Also keep in mind that other people, even people who work closely with you, have little understanding of what it is that you actually need to do, in order to do your job.

It is not other people’s job to understand your job.

It is your job to understand your work and how it impacts your time, your energy, and your personal commitments.

It is also your job to communicate your boundaries clearly and respectfully to others.

Bear in mind with complex jobs, that it can take a long time to truly understand your work: I know a couple of ordained pastors who are also trained as secular licensed therapists. Both told me it took them years to sort out the finer distinctions between these two jobs which both involve counseling and accompanying people through crises.

It is hard work to truly understand a complex job. Be patient and kind with yourself as you learn what is yours, and what is not yours, to do.

What are you responsible for accomplishing at work?

And what do you need, in order to deliver? Example: I need to block at least four hours a week to write a sermon. Usually I can do it in less time, but I need to reserve those hours each week. You can’t force creativity; and sometimes the Muse dawdles.

What we want to do here is distinguish between what only you can do; what you and others can do; and what is — quite literally — not your job.

What are the things that ONLY YOU can do? What’s in your wheelhouse?

What are the things that, if you left your job, would mean that your workplace would have to find someone else with those skills? What makes you hard to replace? How would your workplace be disrupted, what would fall apart or not get done, if you were suddenly gone?

What are the things you do, that others can also do — what can you cross-cover for, what can be delegated to others without much disruption in your workplace’s functioning?

Finally: what is definitely not your job? When do people say, “Well really, [people in your profession] should…” — and you know they literally do not understand the context of your work? (And remember, it’s not other people’s job to understand your job: it’s your job to understand it, and to communicate graciously what you do, and what you do not do.)

• Write down a list of at least three things you’re now doing, the deliverables you’re delivering, at work.

• Also, list two or three things that people THINK is true about your job, that is a misunderstanding*. What do people repeatedly get wrong about your job?

Go through that list and sort the items into these categories:

• ONLY I can do this

• Others can also do this

• Definitely not my job

This exercise sharpens your focus about how you add value to your workplace; and what is, and is not, a good use of your time.

What is your job?

What is not your job?

Write it down for yourself. Make a list.

Look at it when you plan your work.

In my case, it is my job to write and deliver a sermon each Sunday. When I plan my week, I make sure I first block out on my calendar the hours I need for writing a sermon. I have to deliver at least one each week (two if there is a funeral); it is one of those things that ONLY I am responsible for; and I need to reserve a solid half day each week to be able to do this.

That’s a boundary.

Your Rules: The Professional Ethics Level

What are the rules of your profession’s game?

Some professions have formal, written ethics codes, and enforce them.

Lawyers can be disbarred, priests can be defrocked, soldiers can be dishonorably discharged, doctors can lose their licenses to practice medicine.

If you belong to a professional association that has a statement of ethics, print it out so you can reread it.

Write down how you practice your profession. If you swore an oath to do what you do, print it out so you can reread it when it’s unclear how to handle something.

You might already have a straightforward ethics-related mantra that you use to help you cut through the fog.

A medical person in my family must sort out which actions to take when lots of interests collide between the patient, the patient’s family members, other caregivers, and multiple bureaucracies.

He frames the problem with this core question: “What’s in the best medical interest of the patient?”

Boom. Clarity.

It is his role to advocate for the best medical options for the patient. He’s the medical guy. That’s his job.

The other stuff is for family members, social workers, medical billing and health care insurers, and hospital administrators to wrangle out.

All professions have codes of conduct. However, many professions pass them along informally.

If you didn’t swear an actual oath, what WOULD be in your oath of office as a software engineer, a community manager, a jeweler, a tech writer, a pub owner?

Think about the people in your field that you admire, and the people who taught you your skills. Complex jobs have apprenticeships, sometimes called internships, and sometimes simply pairing newer folks with more established people in the field. In an apprenticeship, you learn not only a skill set, but the norms and values that go with that line of work.

Who are your mentors? Who are the people in your field that you look up to, and aspire to be like? What have you learned from them about how to do your work in a professional way, with excellence and integrity?

Who do you admire, and why do you admire them? What are the professional norms and the ethical standards they operate under?

It’s sometimes easier to see what your unspoken, internalized professional standards are, when you see people violate them.

What if you were away from your job for three months, and the person assigned to cover for you turned out to be an absolute disaster?

You come back to chaos and conflict left in this person’s wake.

What did they do — and what did they neglect to do — to create a mess that you’d have to clean up?

What would you have to do, to re-establish trust, integrity, and good order, with your colleagues, your clients, your customers, your managers, your communities, your direct reports, the general public?

Any actions that you’d need to take in order to establish trust and integrity in a broken situation, are your to-do list for living out your professional ethics at work.

Write those actions down.

Make a map for yourself to consult when conflicts of interest arise.

You can get started by writing down three “yeses” — three things you will always strive to do; and three “noes” — three things you will never do.

If you think of more — write them down, too.

Writing down the professional ethics you practice in your work, will help you say “yes” and “no,” and to set boundaries.

Here’s one of mine from my blogs and newsletters: I promise people who subscribe to my newsletters, that I will not share or sell their email addresses.

And: I will not do that.

Firm boundary. Hard no.

Your Rules: The Personal Commitments Level

What are your other important life commitments and roles, apart from work?

I read** about a man who had exceptional professional skills who was being pressured by his new client to come in to work on a Saturday.

He said, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I can’t do that. Saturday is the day I dedicate to my family; I’m not available on Saturdays.”

Then the client said, “Fine, we’ll make it Sunday.”

And the man replied, “Oh, but I’m not available on Sundays, either; that’s the day I dedicate to God.”

They met on Monday.

Write down a list of your other important roles in life that you are committed to putting your time and life energy into, that are NOT your job title.

They could be roles like: Aunt, Son, Sister, Friend; Citizen; Writer; Woodworker; Advocate; Human Being Deserving of Self-Care.

Write down three boundaries you set, in relation to your work life, that allows you to live into those roles.

These could be things like:

• “In the mornings, I pay myself first.” That is, before you start your paid work for the day, you get outside for a walk, or perhaps you do some journaling.

• “If my nieces and nephews are coming to town, I schedule time off to be with them.”

• “I do not take my work laptop with me on vacation.”

When you know your roles, you know your rules.

Write down your rules.

When your rules are written down, outside of your head, you can re-read your rules in times of internal or external conflict.

This gives you the courage to live by them.

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Notes

Regarding writing up your own boundaries, you might also check out writer Annie Mueller’s “No I Will Not” page.

* A pastor friend, who was being pushed to take on a time-consuming non-work-related project during the week, was told in all sincerity: “But you only work for an hour on Sundays, what do you mean, you don’t have the time?”

** The story stayed in my mind, but I can’t recall where I read it — I’ll be glad to share the source if I find it again.

References

‘No I Will Not’ (no date) annie mueller. Available at: https://anniemueller.com/no-i-will-not/ (Accessed: 17 February 2023).

This is true for my daily plan, with my appointments and tasks written out; and it is exponentially more true for my journaling.

My journal is how I discover what decisions I need to make, and what things I need to do, that I believe will lead me to a well-lived life. Journaling for me is about getting the right things done: the meaningful things, the things I hope to look back on with pleasure and not regret. I use my journaling practice to examine my life, and to make decisions about what actions I’ll take, going forward.

Sometimes journaling guides me into new territory: New decisions to make. New things to try.

Sometimes journaling guides me to hold fast, and stick with something, when I feel impatient.

My journaling practice has helped me to:

• take interesting risks, like starting blogs and businesses

• dramatically improve my mental and physical health

• navigate important relationships

• navigate emotional turmoil

• figure out what is really important to me, what I want in life

• be creative, make all kinds of things

• figure out logistics for the day: what’s for dinner, when can I squeeze in that errand?

Journaling can be a form of meditation that guides you to specific actions, that help you to shape — and change — your life.

It has certainly transformed mine.

Western Spiritual Contemplative Roots are Action-Oriented

People journal for all kinds of reasons: some people keep notebooks for art or writing ideas, or record what’s going in the natural world.

The journaling I’m talking about is journaling that incorporates your thoughts and feelings about your life, and records the ideas that bubble up for you, about what to do next.

My own journaling practices are influenced by the idea that contemplation and action are linked; which is a marker of Christian spiritual practices in the West.

Well-known practices that come from Eastern traditions like mindfulness meditation, insight meditation — at least as I have learned about them in the popular Western press, through practitioners such as Jon Kabat-Zinn — are not directly linked to actions, although a practice of mental discipline like mindfulness meditation will certainly help you to choose wiser actions.

But a wide stream in the Western contemplative tradition, largely developed through the Roman Catholic church, DOES link contemplation with taking action in the world.

Most people when they think of monasteries think of contemplative orders who live separately from the world; like the Trappists, the order to which Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating belonged.

But many monastic orders in the Western church were dedicated to taking action in the outside world.

Some orders were known for preaching (the Dominicans), others for service to the wider community (teaching orders like the Oblate Sisters of Providence; the many religious orders associated with providing medical care). Universities and hospitals in the West evolved from institutions established by religious orders.

Taking action in the wider world is part of the Western spiritual DNA.

Many specific spiritual practices developed in the Western church are also meant to move individuals toward making good decisions and taking right action.

In the 16th century Reformation, Martin Luther took an established monastic contemplative practice — lectio divina, that is, reading scripture very slowly and reflectively for spiritual enlightenment — and tied it to action. Luther’s last step for contemplative reading is “tentatio” — try it out! In other words, when you engage in this practice, take the intuitions and inspirations that came to you during this form of prayer; and try them out in your daily life.

Contemplation, oriented toward action.

In the Counter-Reformation, Ignatius of Loyola — who was a warrior before he was a priest — came up with several psychologically astute contemplative practices, which people still use today, to help people make decisions and take actions in a state of spiritual freedom and awareness. The religious order that Ignatius founded, the Jesuits, are quite action-oriented.

One of Ignatius’ psychological insights (to put it in modern secular terms) is that if you make an important decision in a time of relative mental peace, you can put more trust in it later on, when the inevitable doubts and second-guessing come up.

This is something I use in my own journaling, that I learned directly from Ignatian discernment practices: my journals record my actions, my decisions, and my mental states around those actions and decisions.

Unless new evidence comes in that would prompt a change, I trust the decisions that I make in a state of relative peace and groundedness.

That Western spiritual sense linking contemplation with action continues today: the Franciscan priest and writer Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation, because, he said, we need both.

And in seminary, students go through chaplaincy training (known as clinical pastoral education, or CPE), usually in a hospital setting.

The model for learning in CPE is called Action / Reflection / Action.

You visit a patient, you present the case to your supervisor and fellow students; you talk and think through what happened and how it connects with wider perspectives; you take what you learned about yourself and about others, and you carry that learning and reflection toward future actions.

So, my journaling practices are shaped by this Western spiritual conviction that contemplation is linked to action.

How To Journal For Taking Action and Changing Your Life

What to write about?

There are two things you can always write about, for a contemplative action-oriented journal:

1) Whatever is on your mind: it is very likely that whatever is on your mind, has something to do with your life; and that your mind is chewing on it because your mind thinks, “Hey, we ought to do something about this!”

…Right?

Otherwise it wouldn’t be on your mind. So, you can simply write down whatever is on your mind.

2) What you did during the day (that is, what actions you took during the day), and how you feel about them.

I journal for a longer time in the morning, and for a very short time in the evening.*

In the evening, I write down a few sentences about what I did that day. Then I write down how it made me feel. This is so I have a record of what I was doing, and how my actions relate to my state of mind. It takes me about five minutes, tops, on a regular day. I review this periodically.

My morning journaling session does more of the heavy lifting.

When I’m journaling in the morning, I write down whatever is on my mind, whatever chatter in my head I’m waking up with. I write down how I feel and what I think. I consider what I will do next, and write that down.

Then, if there is anything actionable there, I copy that into my productivity system.

Sometimes my morning journaling is quite straightforward: I’ll write down something like, “Wow, I sure do have a lot of appointments today, and I also want to get XYZ done, how am I going to do that?” — and then I might keep writing to myself, keep thinking it out: “Well, maybe I can schedule in XYZ after that 11:00 a.m. meeting…”

Journaling gives you the time and space to do some simple planning, to think through the logistics of your day. This is straightforward.

But sometimes journaling is much less straightforward. Perhaps you’re going through a time of turmoil, or transition.

You can — over time — journal your way from a state of not even knowing what you want, or what to do; to a state of having plans and having confidence in acting on those plans.

You can also incorporate meditation and prayer into your journaling practice.

Write It Down, First. Decide What It Means, Later.

Sometimes it is not obvious what I should do next, or what is important for me to pay attention to. In that case, I pray for guidance on what to do, or what to pay attention to, next; and relax my body and mind (some deep breathing helps here), and listen inside, and then write down whatever comes back to me.

I think of this process as prayer, but you could also just think of it as a form of meditation: asking a question for your deeper mind to answer; taking a moment to settle your mind in a quiet and meditative state; and writing down whatever comes back.

If you try this, it is important not to censor what you write. Write down whatever comes to you. You can decide whether you will do anything with it, later. But first, you want to record whatever came to you: a thought, an image, whatever. (And sometimes nothing comes back; but often I’ll get an insight later in the day.)

You are totally free to ignore whatever you write.

You are in control of what you decide to do, about whatever comes up in your journaling.

And — if nothing else — your journal should be one place where you are completely honest and uncensored. You don’t have to act on ANYTHING you write. Give yourself great freedom to write whatever comes to mind.

What’s rising up in your consciousness? What are the thoughts or images running through your head and heart?

You are in partnership with the unknown; the unknown parts of yourself, for sure; and depending on your spiritual leanings, perhaps something more. Your journal is the meeting place for this encounter.

The simple act of recording what’s on your mind will already begin to change it, and spark new thinking and ideas.

This is the beginning of reflection.

Now you might ask some questions about whatever you are writing: how do I honestly feel about this, what should I do, what does this mean?

More ideas might bubble up; write them down.

Remember, you don’t have to act on anything you write down. Just write it all down now, and decide what to do with it, later.

The journal is just a container for whatever comes to your mind.

Every Thought Is Welcome in the Journal

I am not at all judgmental toward myself, with any thought I write in my journal: I assume that if I write down something that I wouldn’t want to act on, that I probably needed to vent and express it.

I assume if I write out my feelings of anger or frustration, that those needed to be expressed so I can work through them to a wiser perspective and course of action.

But every thought is welcome in my journal. That is the safest place for my thoughts to go, and allowing my thoughts to be acknowledged and expressed — allowing my thoughts and feelings to have their say — allows many of them to move on. When those feelings are heard, then I can think about what would be a wise way to handle the useful information they gave me.

For example, perhaps I express some irritation about something. That feeling has been heard: now it subsides and now I have the mental bandwidth to ask myself — in writing — “wow, I guess I’m really irritated about that, what should I do?” Maybe I’m irritated because I realize I didn’t eat anything, and I’m hangry. Or maybe I’m irritated and realize I need to have a conversation with somebody. (Or both.) I write down those thoughts. Then I can act on them later, if I choose.

This is why journaling can be such a healing, meditative practice. It helps you recognize problems, AND their solutions.

So, just write down whatever comes to mind. Do not censor it. Just write it down, now.

Evaluate it, later.

Use Limits

Some amount of time spent journaling is helpful.

Too much time spent journaling can turn into unhealthy rumination.

Especially if you are journaling to help yourself take action, setting limits is a good reminder that the practice is meant to help you go about your day, and live your life; not to become another distraction that keeps you from living your life.

So give yourself a limit: a maximum number of pages, a maximum word count, a maximum amount of time. Julia Cameron’s morning pages practice sets a limit of three pages. You might also give yourself a limit like 500 words, or no more than twenty minutes.

Try Out Actions That Come From Your Journaling Practice

After experimenting over the years, I decided I would take whatever action I wrote down in my journal; as long as the action was an ethical and life-giving thing to do.

Even if it didn’t make immediate sense.

Often the ideas that come up while I’m journaling will be very simple and straightforward, like remembering to send a text to someone.

Other times they will seem to have nothing to do with what is in my mind: I might be stressed about something at work, and get a sense that I ought to spend a little time decluttering a closet.

Often when I follow the action — decluttering the closet — I then get an insight about what to do about the work situation.

It’s not always a linear process, but I have found it to be a trustworthy one.

I journal to gain better understanding of what is going on in my life; AND to find out what I should do next.

My mental and physical health, and my creativity, depend on my journaling practice. It is my foundational contemplative practice for my own well-being. If I do nothing else in a day, I write in my journal; unless I am literally too sick to hold a pen.

If I were to pick the one thing that has most powerfully changed my life, it would be using journaling as my tool for action.

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Notes

* My journaling practices change over time depending on my needs. But I keep the following journals fairly consistently:

1) Morning pages — before I look at my phone, before I turn on the laptop, before I allow other people’s thoughts and opinions in my head, I get up and write three pages about whatever thoughts go through my head. For details on exactly how I do this, here’s my post on my other blog, analogoffice.net.

2) In the evening, I write a few sentences about what I did that day, and how I felt about it. This is SHORT. This is FAST. But it is useful in helping me make connections between how I am living my life, and how my actions make me feel.

3) I also use a day planner to make brief notes about health-related habits; my post about keeping a habit journal is also on analogoffice.net, right here. I’m talking two to three sentences. It’s enough.

Ceremonial actions shift your mindset too. Ceremony — ritual — is about transformation: ceremony, like a sturdy little boat, carries you from one mental stream to another.

If you have ever wondered why people get so fervent about religion, sports, and politics, part of the reason is that leaders of religious events, athletic events, and political events all embed ceremonial actions, words, and objects into their gatherings. (Watch for it: it’s fascinating.)

Religions have survived for thousands of years in part because ceremony is effective. Ceremony reverberates on the bodily, nonverbal level, even when a ceremony uses words (for example, using another language like Hebrew or Latin instead of English; using chant; using rhetoric, song, poetry).

And just as with ceremonial objects, we as individuals can make use of ritual actions, ceremonial actions, to shift ourselves from one mindset to another.

Ceremonial Actions Prepare You for Transitions

I often work from home, which notoriously makes it difficult to separate the work day from, well, everything else.

So when I end my working day, I turn off my laptop; and then I stand up, and ring this loud and lovely bell three times:

Do I feel silly doing this? Yeah, sometimes; especially when other people are home.

But I do it anyway — because it instantly shifts me from work mode, to home and family mode.

The action and sensations of physically striking the bell, my fingers grasping the mallet; the sound of the bell literally ringing in my ear, the vibrations of the bell literally buzzing through my hand, are just unusual enough to signal to my body, as well as my brain, that work is done for the day.

When I ring the bell after I do my daily shut-down routine , it’s weirdly effective in quieting my mind for the evening: “We’re cool; you don’t have to think about work until tomorrow.”

The ceremonial action of ringing the bell tells my body and mind to make the shift. Now, I can turn my full attention to other important things, like drawing, making dinner, playing with our cats, connecting with people I love.

Ceremonial Actions Also Prepare You for Shifts in your Sense of Self

Sometimes you know that a big change in your life is coming — something that will change your sense of self — but you do not know a lot about what it will be like, when it happens.

We’re talking here about changes big enough to potentially prompt an identity shift, a shift in your sense of who you are.

Changes like: making a cross-country move (“…if I live in Arizona, am I still a Midwesterner?”), getting married or divorced, becoming a parent, changing your career, retiring from your career.

It could also be a significant lifestyle change, that changes your sense of self: such as going from thinking of yourself as a smoker, to thinking of yourself as a non-smoker.

I once did a training program called “From Couch Potato to 5K.” I had thought — unhappily — of myself as a couch potato; by the end of the program, I thought of myself as someone who was fit enough to run a 5K (and I’ve got the tee shirt!).

Ceremonial Actions Prepare You for the Unknown

Sometimes people do not even know what the change will be; they just know that some kind of change is needed.

You might feel a sense of restlessness. You might try one thing, and then another, to re-engage with your life as it is, but your spirit remains restless.

One day, at a staff meeting over lunch at a large suburban church I worked at, the youth minister — an athletic young man who normally had an appetite to match — sipped slowly at a cup of hot tea, but he ate no food. When someone asked if he felt sick that day, he explained rather reluctantly that he was fasting, because he was facing an important decision.

Soon after that, he resigned his position at the suburban church, and moved to a war-torn country overseas, where he worked with children in a refugee camp. Fasting was his ceremonial action, which he combined with prayer, to help him decide whether or not to make this change.

Before he left, he told me that he had been feeling restless, with a sense that something was missing from his work at the suburban American church: a sense that he was supposed to be doing something else.

But he did not know what that “something else” was.

So, to prepare himself for change, he fasted for a few days.

Fasting was his ceremonial action, a signal to himself — mind, body, and spirit — that he was taking his inner sense of restlessness seriously; a signal that he was open and willing to make a big, risky change. Even if he did not know exactly what the change would be, or what it would entail.

Ceremonial Actions Help You Transform Yourself

Transactional actions are when we do something, to get a predictable result back: cause, effect.

This is so direct, even my cats know how to do transactional actions: They jump on Food Lady early in the morning; Food Lady (that would be me) groans, flings off the bed coverings, and serves them their little kitty-cat breakfasts.

Most of your actions are transactional: you do a load of laundry, and then you have clean clothes to wear. You tap your phone wallet on the device at the grocery store, and then you get to take the celery and the tortilla chips and the laundry detergent home, without getting arrested. (Wait… was that your grocery bag?)

Transactional actions are direct: when you do X, then you get Y.

But ceremonial actions are transformational actions. They are not direct, but can be very effective.

Transformation is an indirect process, more mysterious. Transformation is about identity shift.

By transformation, I mean major shifts in attitude, that lead to outward changes. Most of our transactional actions are routine, and don’t affect our sense of ourselves, our sense of our own identities.

But transformation always involves some kind of inner shift, some change in your sense of your own identity.

A career change, a change in family status, embarking on a large and risky project — all of these are transformative rather than transactional. They reshape your life and update or entirely revise your sense of who you are, as a person.

My friend the youth director had to stop seeing himself as a suburbanite, and start seeing himself as a person resourceful and resilient enough, to work near a war zone.

Transformations change your sense of self.

Ceremonial Actions Carry You From One Mindset to Another

If you feel stuck in your thinking about a problem, try a ceremonial action. Maybe you have to get out of your brain, and do something that speaks to the rest of you. We human beings can often act our way into new ways of thinking. But the actions don’t have to start out with being direct. You can start with a ceremonial action now, to prime yourself for direct action later.

Ceremonial actions prepare your inward self to to be willing to venture into the unknown, to take risks, to be surprised, to do a new thing.

Unsurprisingly we can look to spiritual traditions all over the world to find all kinds of transformational actions, ceremonial actions, which prepare their practitioners for change, for taking on risk, for going into the unknown.

I have a friend — a businesswoman — who never goes into a meeting, without saying a short prayer first. The prayer helps her set her intentions for the meeting, reminds her of the personhood of everyone present, and helps her release her anxiety about the results. It prepares her, mentally and emotionally, before she walks in to negotiate.

This is how religion works. It’s much more about actions than beliefs. Often religious people are called “believers,” but I prefer another term: “practitioners.” When it comes to belief, some people take everything literally, and some people take everything as metaphor. (Fine either way. It’s my job to challenge people to go deeper in their theological thinking; it’s not my job to be a mind cop.)

But if you want to understand a religion, reading about its doctrines isn’t enough. You practice a religion. You must do the religion, do what its practitioners do, in order for it to be understood; and for sure, for it to be transformative. You do the actions, many of which are ceremonial: pray the prayers, pack food for the food bank, recite the words, chant the chants, sing the songs, gather with the others, study and discuss, participate in rites and rituals.

Doctrine is informative. Practices are transformative.

Thinking is important; planning is important; visualization and imagination are important: but action is what changes you.

The cool thing is, that rites, rituals, and ceremonial actions work for individuals, as well. They can be personal.

The cool thing is, you can come at transformation sideways.

Show Yourself That You Are Serious About Making a Shift, By Practicing a Personal, Ceremonial Action

We can tap into the power of transformative, ritual, ceremonial actions for making personal, individual change.

What makes a regular action, perhaps even a routine action, into a ceremonial action?

I think the main thing is, tying it to a specific purpose.

The youth minister fasted because he had this purpose: he wanted to get internal clarity about whether he should move from something stable that he was used to (working at an affluent suburban church), to something risky that he had not done before (working at a refugee camp).

So the first step is to be clear about what you want to prepare yourself for. Then, you tie your ceremonial action to that.

You show yourself that you are SERIOUS about change, you show that you are SERIOUS about being open to new opportunities and risks, by tying a ceremonial action to your intentions.

Let’s say you know you have to downsize, but you’re not ready to do that, yet. Maybe your ceremonial action is start by saying “thank you” to any objects you put in the compost bin, recycle bin or trash can, as you dispose of them.

Might you feel silly doing that? Sure.

But play a game with me for a moment, and try that action; say “thank you” out loud to the banana peel as you dispose of it; see if it sparks some new thinking for you about consumption, disposal, and letting go.

Perhaps a sign that your action is truly a ceremonial action, is that it makes you feel a bit silly when you do it.

We are brainwashed into believing that all of our actions ought to be immediately useful, “productive.”

But ceremony is much closer to play.

Ceremony is interwoven with the arts.

Ceremony is much closer to the child’s “let’s pretend,” than the adult’s “let’s get it done.”

My friend the youth minister would be the first to tell you that the ability to play is vitally serious and important. Much of his therapeutic work in the refugee camp was to help traumatized children learn how to play again.

Play allows us to approach what we fear: and most human beings fear change.

Your ceremonial action helps you become more open to change. More open to surprises. More open to seeing yourself, and seeing your life, in a different way.

By changing up your old routine — even in a small way, even for a short time — you signal to yourself that you are open to bigger transitions.

You might try things like fasting (but check with your medical provider first, on that one).

You might set time aside for activities devoted to contemplation: such as journaling, drawing, prayer, walks outside without your phone, meditation.

Walk a labyrinth. Light a candle. Ring a bell. Beat a drum. Draw your demons. Listen to music.

Go on a pilgrimage. Go to an art museum. Go to the woods.

Go on retreat: maybe a weekend by yourself in a cabin, maybe a day at a retreat center.

Give something up that you are habituated to having, like sweets.

The idea of a ceremonial action is to help to prepare yourself and strengthen yourself for transitions, for change and the unknowns that come with it.

And for some of us; it’s also an excuse to ring a bell.

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References

Barry, L. (2017) One! Hundred! Demons! First Drawn & Quarterly Edition. Drawn & Quarterly.

The service is conducted with the warm, golden, dancing light of candles over everything, and everyone.

But wouldn’t our overhead LED lights that we normally use in the sanctuary be more efficient on Christmas Eve (a night-time service, after all) than candles?

Brighter? Easier for reading the hymn book?

Absolutely.

Would the LED lights be better than lighting the sanctuary with candles?

Absolutely not.

For the Christmas Eve service, candles are BETTER.

Effective versus Efficient

A large room flickering with the light and warmth thrown off by candles, puts you into a certain mindset that no electric lighting can put you in. Using candles instead of overhead lights transforms the experience.

Candles are neither the most efficient nor the most practical way to light this large room.

What they are, is effective. Candles are ceremonial objects that make this service feel special.

Ceremonial objects transform your experience. This is why old churches use candles and incense (effective) rather than fluorescent lights and Febreze (efficient).

You, as an individual, can also make use of ceremonial objects to influence your mindset and transform your own experience.

Choosing and using a ceremonial object can help you do hard things that are important to you.

When Ordinary Objects Become Ceremonial Objects

Go into any sacred space, and you will see ordinary objects which have been crafted to be more beautiful, more luxurious, than strictly necessary. Plastic and paper cups hold liquid just as well as a ceramic goblet. But we signal that something special is happening when we use an artisan-made goblet instead of a plastic cup.

In old church sanctuaries, we do not use plastic, paper or plexiglass for lights, plates, goblets, seating, books, windows, and tablecloths. We use candles; metals; ceramics; carved wood; stone; stained glass; embossed and gilded books; embroidered fabrics.

Every bit of this signals nonverbalized meaning to people’s bodily senses; which then shapes their mindsets.

Every object in an old church sanctuary communicates the intent to be a place that is separate from home, from work, from Walmart.

Furnishing a sanctuary with ceremonial objects instead of purely functional ones, is part of what turns a big empty room into a place where people hope to encounter the Divine.

Decorating a room, perhaps because this pursuit is closely associated with women, has often been dismissed as frivolous. But your surroundings and the materials you handle and touch, impact your thoughts and feelings powerfully.

Architects, designers, decorators, and the clergy of liturgical churches know this power very well: and we use it.

Individuals can tap into these mind-shifting powers of design by using ceremonial objects, as well.

Change Your Behavior with a Ceremonial Object

If you want to change your behavior, find a ceremonial object you can make use of, in your process. Use something connected with the change you want to make, that is much more beautiful, more luxurious, than it strictly needs to be.

So what is a change you want to make? Maybe you want to do less of something.

Maybe you’re observing Drynuary* and want to cut back on alcohol. Maybe you habitually have had something alcoholic to drink around dinner time and don’t want to feel dependent.

Consider dedicating a ceremonial glass for yourself, that you reserve for drinking something non-alcoholic, around dinner time. This does not have to be expensive: Thrift shops and vintage and antique mall shelves are brimming with crystal and silver and ceramic glassware.

Or — maybe you want to do more of something.

Maybe you want to write more, or journal more, or get serious about organizing yourself with a good planner.

If you are looking for an excuse to get the handmade leather planner cover, the imported thread-bound lies-flat notebook, the buttery-smooth index cards with the bespoke box and stand, a pen or pencil you might have to budget for… this post is an argument for why this might actually help you write more, and plan better.

Draw Yourself in, By Delighting Your Senses

We don’t just think with our minds. We think through our bodies.

You’re not just a brain. Your brain is part of your body; your mind is entwined and knotted into the physical world. Your body takes in all kinds of nonverbal sensory information that feeds and focuses — or scatters — your thinking.

This is why taking your body out for a nice walk, will usually clear your mind.

And this is why aesthetics and design matter so much. How a room is furnished and decorated can literally change your thinking. The objects you use, can literally change your experience.

Our rational capacity — the home of all our good intentions — is the most evolutionarily recent. But the older functions of our body and brain — the emotions, the senses, our faster-than-thought automated reactions — can grab the keys, slam out the door, rev up the car, and peel out of the driveway, while the rational mind is still fumbling for its flashlight and bunny slippers, wondering what the hell just happened.

Strengthen your good intentions with material objects that have some ceremonial heft to them, that bypass the rational mind and speak directly to your body and to your emotions.

Find objects that attract your senses, and draw you toward using them.

Your Ceremonial Objects Signal to Your Body That Your Intention is Serious

Treat your body as if it were sacred; because it is. If you want to drink less or eat more health-giving foods, use ceremonial vessels. Put the mocktail (or the iced tea, or the water) into a sumptuous glass that you use only for this: a glass that delights your eye and hand when you use it. And if it’s crystal, it might delight your ear, as well. I love hearing the ring of a good crystal glass.

Maybe you intend to snack on carrot sticks more often than Doritos. Lay the carrot sticks on a beautifully broken, beautifully repaired kintsugi plate.

Maybe you intend to write more, or plan your time better.

Treat your thoughts and ideas and plans as if they are sacred; because they are.

The way we show to our own minds that something is important, is by using ceremonial objects when we engage with it.

Pour your thoughts into a resplendent notebook that is hard for you to stop touching, using a pen or pencil that, when you make marks on the page with it, feels to your hand like a key clicking smoothly into a sensory lock.

It is a sacred act to care for your body, which allows you to be alive in this world. Care for your body by using objects that spark your senses.

It is a sacred act to record your thoughts and develop them to deepen your own life; and maybe even touch the lives of others. Care for your thoughts by using objects you can’t stop picking up and touching.

It is a sacred act to organize yourself: to consider what, of all the things that are important to you, and all the problems and opportunities your life offers to you right now, which of those you will — or will not — do today.

So: use sacred-feeling objects to help you carry out your important intentions.

Use objects that speak to you, body and soul; objects that are more beautiful than they strictly need to be. Objects that tell you that what you are doing is special, and important, and deserves your time and effort.

Delight your eyes and hands and ears and nose with the objects you use, when you decide to make changes in your life.

. . . But Ceremonial Objects Are Not a Magic Fix

I wish they were, though. Wouldn’t that be cool?

I have seen people make dramatic, sudden, significant, and lasting positive changes in their lives. It happens, but it’s rare.

Back in the 1900s, I managed a clinical trial site testing a product** to help people quit smoking. On average, people quit smoking about eight times, before they stay quit.

For most of us, most of the time, making a life change is full of stops and starts and dead-ends and backtracking. Real change depends more on your willingness to get up again, learn a little more about what worked and what didn’t, and try it again. That’s the real heroism, the real magic.

Using a ceremonial object to help you change something you want to change, is just that: it’s a little help, a little nudge you give yourself, to get going in the direction you want to go. It’s not the solution; but it can be one more tool in the toolkit.

It’s a little bit easier to snack on carrots instead of Doritos, if you put the carrots on a plate that you reserve for this purpose, that makes you smile every time you use it.

It’s a little bit easier to make yourself sit down and review your calendar, if you have a beautifully made planner that you love to write in.

So, ceremonial objects are not magic — but they can surely help.

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References

* “For long-term, daily, heavy drinkers, [Drynuary] can cause some dangerous health effects.” (see link below for more)

Drynuary: What is it? Should you do it? (no date) SalemHealth. Available at: https://www.salemhealth.org/you-matter/post/drynuary-what-is-it-should-you-do-it (Accessed: 6 January 2023).

Notes

**We tested the 4 mg. Nicorette patch. Our record-keeping systems for that clinical trial were what got me interested in organizing skills… and got us through an FDA audit.

To my mind, the main reason to learn how to manage our work, is so that we can make time for important things besides work.

We work on managing tasks at work and at home SO THAT we may experience much more in our lives than “getting things done.”

Much of the teaching that’s lumped under the word “organization,” is about setting boundaries around needs and inputs that never end; like meals, and messages.

Organizing yourself is primarily about building in limits: corraling your work, figuring out when you’ve done enough work — whether that work is done on a screen, or in a kitchen — SO THAT you can make the time to do the things that make your life feel like a gift, and a joy.

For a well-lived life, we organize ourselves not only or even primarily to get things done; but to get to doing the things that are worth doing, while feeling at peace that the work we have done for the day, is good enough.

My writing about personal organization aims toward how to organize yourself so that you can have a whole, well-lived life; so you can make time for leisure, contemplation, companionship.

So you can look back someday over a life that felt much richer than simply getting work done.

This is productivity with a purpose: to manage your tasks, so that they do not steal your whole life. To manage your time, so you make ample time to do things you will remember, with joy.

A well-lived life is not just about — or even primarily about — getting work done. When we look back on our lives, hopefully at a very old age, we’ll want to have wonderful memories to savor: people we have loved, places we have explored and rejoiced in, projects and pursuits that have delighted us.

Many people hold the mindset that organizing yourself is about organizing your work, full stop: setting up templates for email replies, or setting aside one day a week to power through the laundry.

I think organizing yourself is about organizing toward time away from work.

We can easily fill our time with work; there is always more than you can actually do. The hard part is making time away from work, while still fulfilling our work-related commitments and responsibilities.

Focus on what you do with your time, when you are NOT working.

When people look back on their lives, they often talk with me about what happened during the times when they were NOT doing paid work, or household care tasks.

I’ve been surprised, more than once, reading the obituaries of people in my parish who accomplished remarkable things in their careers, in some cases things that had national impact… and never once mentioned those achievements to me.

Ten, twenty, thirty years after they retire, they don’t talk with me about CV and résumé things. They talk about what happened in their lives, when they were NOT working.

What careerism casts as the the background noise, might actually be the most important part of life. Certainly for many, the most resonant; at the end.

Better to look back on things like rich and deep relationships. Better to look back on adventures and explorations. I’ve heard stories about long drives, in pursuit of visiting all the state parks. Hikes. Trips to the beach. Playing music together. Learning to build a dog house. Playing cards with little kids who giggle and cheat; and think they’ve fooled you.

Here’s something I’d love to try, when I’m not working: Hosting an open house some winter holiday, with a crackling fire, hot chocolate, a pile of books, and friends coming in and out.

Organize yourself so you can set some boundaries around work, and do interesting things besides work.

New Year’s Suggestion: Work Out a Simple Schedule Where You Focus on What Happens When You are NOT Working

In my church communities, I teach a workshop about creating a rule of life, and what participants leave with, is a simple schedule.

I walk people through a process which gives them time to think — and to write down — commitments that arise from thinking about relationships to these life areas: your relationship to God / Life (or whatever other name for you, refers to that deepest aspect of reality), your relationships and roles with other people, with your self (body, mind, and spirit), with the natural world, and with technology.

And then we spend time during the workshop making a schedule: what are the things you might do on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a semi-annual basis to live out the commitments you want to make?

The short version of this workshop takes about 45 minutes; and what people leave with, is a schedule.

A schedule of things they are committed to doing, when they are NOT doing tasks for paid work, or for the household.

Make 2023 the Year of Scheduling Something Important to You, But Not Urgent; on a Regular Basis.

One definition of “work” — whether it’s done in front of a computer or done in front of a kitchen sink — might be that “work” is about attending to something that either is urgent, or will become urgent: you answer that email, or other problems build; you do those dishes, or other problems build.

Perhaps we might think of work as anything that will become urgent if we ignore it, e.g. putting air in the car tires, paying the bills, etc.

But the most important — and the most wonderful — things in life, are not urgent.

A paradox.

No one is going to pester you to do your writing; make your art; keep in touch with your friends; go out for a walk in the woods; learn to play a guitar. Years can go by with you telling yourself, “I’m going to learn to play an instrument,” and you just keep streaming other people’s music.

And some industries are perfectly complacent about soaking up all of your life energies on their behalf, even if it robs you of time for leisure and contemplation, ruins your mental and physical health, destroys your marriage, and blights your relationship with your children.

I’m a great believer in the mighty power of small changes to transform lives.

Your schedule — a realistic and friendly schedule that you can actually live out — is a mighty power.

With a daily routine that a) incorporates at least one thing that gives life to your spirit, and that b) you are committed to CHANGING until it actually works for you, you can transform your life.

For Individuals, Schedules Take Time to Build, and Much Grace and Realism to Maintain

By “functional schedule” I mean that if you decide you will meditate ten minutes a day before 5 p.m., you actually do meditate regularly before 5 p.m. (But not necessarily daily or even for ten minutes — read on.)

I love the research psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s image of the elephant and the rider: Your conscious mind is like a person riding an elephant.

Your body, your unconscious mind, your emotional mind, is the elephant.

Compared to the rest of your body and mind, your conscious mind is weak and tiny. Our conscious, well-meaning intentions are no match for our elephants.

Your conscious mind cannot force the rest of you to follow its agenda. You’ve got to get the elephant to cooperate, in order to make real change.

It’s a process of trial and error, patience, persuasion, befriending the elephant, learning to work together, getting to know when and how the elephant balks, trying something else.

Most people will not be able to create a schedule that is sustainable, at first. We get too ambitious, and we are usually too hard on ourselves.

If you can create a working daily routine for yourself, you have a tool to draw on, when life changes blow up your current routine.

If you can — by 2024 — learn how to STOP WORKING and attend to the important but not urgent things into your life, you will have a skill that you can draw on for the rest of your life.

You will have to periodically figure out, all your life, how you are going to make time to do the things that matter to you.

You do it with a schedule, a routine, that you can actually live out.

Draft A Daily Schedule with ONE Small, Important-but-Not-Urgent Thing On It

And keep it blindingly simple and minimal.

Consider what you might like to do on a daily basis, to refresh your spirit and give you a mental re-set, a re-boot.

Something you are not doing now, that you would like to do regularly.

Common activities: journaling, walking, meditating, doing some reading that sustains your spirit (poetry, scripture, philosophy).

If you are already doing something on a mostly daily basis that sustains your spirit; pick something else you’d like to do regularly, that is important but not urgent (in other words, pick something that you want to do; that no one will pester you to do; and where nothing will imminently malfunction if you ignore it).

Maybe it’s making something.

Maybe it is learning to play an instrument, or drawing, or whittling, or bird watching.

Something you can pick up and do in short, regular periods of time.

You keep the guitar out of its case, and you work on learning a tune for fifteen minutes a day or so.

You get a sketchbook and set a timer for five minutes and draw something you saw, each day.

Pick one thing. One important-but-not-urgent thing.

ONE.

Low Expectations, Slow Results, the Willingness to Keep Experimenting = Major, Lasting Change Over Time

Let’s say you do want to learn to play an instrument, and you never have done. Maybe the first couple of months of 2023, you use small, regular amounts of time to figure out how that will happen. Deciding what you want to play, researching online tutorials.

Maybe it takes you ten minutes a day over several months to work out: that you want to learn to play the Irish flute; buying a flute; finding an online tutorial, etc.

Maybe it takes the whole year before you have an actual flute in hand, and a way to learn to play it.

Maybe it’s 2024 before you are actually sitting down and working out a tune with your own flute in your hands. We usually underestimate how long it takes to set something up, so we can actually do it.

So what if it takes you until 2024 before you’re actually playing an instrument?

It will be 2024, anyway.

If it takes you all of 2023 to work out how you are going to do the important-to-you but non-urgent goal of learning to play an instrument, then you get all the rest of your years to play it.

Most of the really good things in our lives start very small; and build very slow.

We live in what is probably the most impatient culture, in the history of human civilization.

But growing something new takes time.

The Suggestion is NOT To Stick With This Schedule! It’s to Give Yourself a Whole Year, to Learn How to Build a Schedule You Can Stick With

Whatever you have put down for what you hope will become a regular personal practice, lower your expectations some more.

Less time. Less effort.

If you have decided you want to meditate daily, start with trying to do it regularly for one minute.

It’s going to take time to figure out where and how you’re going to do this; when, during the day, that you can realistically do the new important-but-not-urgent thing; and how long you can devote to it. And whether you even remember that you were going to do that. (”Oh yeah, I wanted to meditate today!”)

Give yourself patience. Give yourself friendliness. Give yourself time.

Why It’s So Much Easier For Monks and Nuns and Lieutenants to Live by a Schedule, Than It Is for You and Me

This idea of creating a daily schedule that prioritizes what is important-but-not urgent, came from the monastic practice of a rule of life; creating schedules that set aside regular time for contemplation and prayer.

A lot of people (me very much included) are drawn to the idea of living with the discipline of a monk or a nun — stopping work in order to meditate a few times a day, for example.

But monks have entire communities supporting their efforts. EVERYBODY stops, at set times. The community bell rings; the gong sounds. And everything, and everybody, stops to pray.

Monastic communities have a lot in common with the military. Both military and monastic communities live in systems with well-defined roles, expectations, and schedules.

And both military and monastic communities require obedience: with sworn oaths, and sworn vows. A monastery can kick you out if you don’t obey. The military can prosecute you if you don’t obey.

If you volunteer to join the military or a monastery, either way, you are making a solemn, witnessed vow of obedience… within a community… that operates with a hierarchy… that enforces a schedule.

Remember the metaphor of the rider and the elephant? Communities that require obedience and have the means to enforce it, get lots of riders and elephants in line, quickly.

Also, there is something that monastics and the military DON’T have to deal with, that we ordinary mortals do.

And that is care-work.

Monastics in contemplative communities don’t have care-giving responsibilities for young children or aged parents.

Military personnel, when they are deployed or on duty, are also not simultaneously running relatives to doctor’s appointments, trying to launch a marketing campaign, picking up kids from soccer practice.

Monks and nuns in those communities are not also single-handedly, simultaneously trying to juggle: full-time jobs, bill-paying, house maintenance, car maintenance, commutes, care-giving, grocery shopping, bathroom cleaning, yard work.

But me?

And probably, you?

We are lone riders, on big elephants.

We don’t have the structure of a whole community behind us, to prod our elephants into following a schedule. Most of us also don’t have the luxury to simply delegate entire, extremely demanding life areas like care work.

So, because we don’t have the external structure, we need instead to rely on patience, grace, humility, a sense of humor, friendliness toward ourselves (and our elephants) and our own willingness to reflect and innovate… until we do, eventually, in time, come up with a schedule that the rider and elephant both agree on.

Secret Sauce for Individuals: Three Times a Week Counts As “Daily”

Time management expert Laura Vanderkam — who, with five kids, is intimately familiar with the demands of juggling work tasks and home tasks — proposes a rule that doing something three times a week, counts as a habit.

In other words: if you manage to meditate three times most weeks, consider yourself a meditator.

If you can manage to do that ONE thing, three times a week — and by week, I mean an ordinary, routine week, not a travel week, a week where anyone is sick, a week with intense work demands — consider this experiment a success.

If you decide to try this, to work out a daily schedule for yourself where you are including something that sustains you but that is NOT task or chore-related; the main thing is to have patience, and remember that this schedule is supposed to serve you; you are not here to serve it.

And, if it doesn’t work for you, and you abandon the schedule — consider that a success, too.

You tried it, you learned something. This is always a win.

Structure is not for everybody.

Lots of people live wonderful lives, without bothering with written schedules. You may be one of them.

But for me, I have found this practice of keeping a schedule set up around NOT working, set up around making time and space for the important-but-not-urgent, to be transformative.

It’s also cumulative.

I started very, very small. This practice of keeping (and revising, and reworking) a schedule is the most important spiritual discipline I follow; the one that supports all the rest.

John Mabry, a spiritual guide, asked his client Sandra what it was like for her to work out her own daily schedule, that prioritized important but not urgent things.

She said she didn’t follow it rigidly, sometimes didn’t follow it at all, and she still kept changing and revising it.

He asked if it had been helpful.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“It really helped me focus. I never woke up with that feeling of vertigo, you know, that ‘what the hell do I do now?’ feeling. I always knew what I was going to do next, even if I chose in the moment not to do it.”

“It … held me.”

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References

Conley, M. (2022) ‘This is a rant about beds at work’, homeculture by Meg Conley, 13 December. Available at: https://homeculture.substack.com/p/this-is-a-rant-about-beds-at-work (Accessed: 14 December 2022).

Mabry, J.R. (2006) Noticing the Divine: An Introduction to Interfaith Spiritual Guidance. Morehouse Publishing. Quote from Sandra: Kindle location 2742

‘A Christmas Day Plan – Rhoneisms’ (2018, 3 December). Available at: https://www.patrickrhone.net/a-christmas-day-plan/ (Accessed: 20 December 2022).