Time.

Time is in the new coffee.

I am not saying that time is now or soon-to-be a beverage. This is fortunate. It has, though, become a more constant consideration for me than coffee (which is saying something!). I think about it quite a bit, about how I should schedule it, what I should do and not do with it, and if I'm using it to its best advantage. I have so much I want to do with my time: raise my kids, talk to my husband, get to know and stay in touch with people, serve others, fulfill my creative and intellectual appetites, earn lotsa money so we don't get kicked out of our humble apartment, read every status update in my facebook news feed, and, this seems to happen whether I have time for it or not, just let my brain go and do something relatively useless from time to time. Oh, and sleep and eat and make myself look presentable.

I suspect that if I spend more time caring for my spiritual and physical life, it will result in a net gain overall, so I'm trying to get those things fixed up (as time allows... *cough*). I started on that this morning, actually, with a pleasant and, I think, helpful morning routine. Hopefully it will help move me in a good direction.

Anybody else not have enough time in your life? I feel like I might have heard of this difficulty before somewhere.

Oh, and about coffee: I'm cutting back again. I have a new strategy that I am fond of which involves small (and adorable) coffee cups. :)

equilibrium: disturbed

On Thursday morning I got some unsettling news at work, about work. I think its elements (from my perspective) are 1. sad 2. good and 3. to-be-determined. It definitely means things will be changing with my job, which I wanted, but not like this.

I'm sure it will be for the best once it is worked out. I'm trying to keep in mind that there are a number of good options of where to go from here and that I can be happy and useful to the company in a whole array of outcomes. I'm also trying to keep in mind some wisdom from other sources:

"You should never be too depressed about your dissatisfaction concerning not finding a job you like, a place in the world that fits you. If you analyse it this general sense of mis-fit is one of the curses of your generation, one of the products of the world’s disequilibrium and chaos. It is not confined to your life, it is pretty general."
- Shoghi Effendi

"That's why we call it 'work'. We don't get up and go to 'fun' each day!"
- my former boss

"This is an opportunity to make a really great situation for you." (paraphrased)
- my current boss

On Thursday and Friday it took quite a bit of energy to deal with, but I think I'm back under control, for now, anyway. Don't worry, I'm under no illusions that life intends to let me take things easy for any real length of time.

It just goes to show: We never know what will happen when we wake up in the morning.

Change is coming. The only question is the degree.

free of fear

I recently accepted an appointment to serve on a committee for my Baha'i community. When I first got the call asking if I would be interested, I knew immediately that I wanted to do it. While I didn't feel ready exactly, I was promised training, and one of the things that shows up in the Baha'i writings is the power of doing service to make individuals become who they need to be to do what needs to be done. I also thought of quotes like: "Lose not thy chance, for it shall come to thee no more."

I was really worried about my schedule, though. With everything going on, I was pretty overwhelmed by the idea of adding anything else, and this appointment would be no trivial matter. So I said I wanted to think about it and watched my schedule very carefully for a few days. That exercise itself was actually pretty enlightening and cleansing for me, and ever since then I've had drastically less desire to do some of the trivial things that had been eating up more of my time than they needed to. Based on those few days of observing, I felt like I could make space within what I was doing to do what was needed for the committee.

Then it came time to schedule actual meetings, and the overwhelmed feeling came back. I didn't feel like I could add enough to my schedule meeting-wise and still be fair to my family and my ensembles. But, as I said to one person after a conversation attempting to set up a meeting time, I was afraid to stop playing with an ensemble. I suppose I was afraid it would make me less of a musician, less happy, and I'm not even sure what else I may have been afraid of. The unknown, perhaps.

I thought about that all the way home. It seemed strange to me, distant, unclear. What was I afraid of? What if I stopped playing with ensembles? So what? I like it, but I like playing by myself, too, and I can play tuba during my lunch break and work on material for that CD I always say I'm making some day. Which day, though? Why not this day? Maybe it is time for that, too.

"Love is a light which can never dwell in a heart possessed by fear."

Within the hour my thoughts turned from if I should stop playing with my quintet to how to bring it up. They were actually quite gracious when I talked to them, and found a perfect sub for me the next day. It's like it was meant to happen. I'm on a six month leave, and I'll reassess toward the end of 2010 what seems like a good idea going forward.

In the mean time, I feel happy to be free of the fear and evening rehearsals. I'm also looking forward to playing for myself, and even more, am trying to do my part to be made ready for this new venue of service that has opened up for me.


Current favorite quote:

"The closer one gets to realizing his destiny, the more that destiny becomes his true reason for being."

from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

My Hair

I'm secretly vain. There, I said it. For much of my life my strategy was to try to look nice without looking like I tried, because I didn't want to care, or at least, I didn't want people to know that I cared. Now that I've been in a professional arena for a while, I do want to look like I'm trying to look good, because that is the professional thing to do, but not, you know, because I didn't look good anyway. I'm just adding some nice polish because I am that awesome, and by the way, might deserve a raise. Or something.

I've felt a little better about my secret vanity since it came to me one day that beauty is a virtue. Of course! But still, I think I should be happy either way. Wouldn't that be better?

My hair has a surprisingly, and somewhat distressingly, big impact on how I feel. Maybe this is common, I don't know, but it is sure true for me. If I think my hair looks bad or weird, it can a serious social and emotional handicap for me. I think I'm finally starting to realize that, when my hair is having a good or a bad day, week or month, I don't look as different to other people as I do to myself, which is helping me with the old philosophy of "Just smile and act like you look great!" which I've noticed working really well for others in the past. But still. It's there, at the corner of my mind. Distracting.

I recently got a new haircut, with bangs. Among my haircut experiences, it is most similar to the home haircut I used to get when I was in the 4-7 age range, which is saying something, because the cuts are not really that similar at all. Pretty much every day is a big improvement over the state of my hair just before the recent haircut (which was just before Christmas), which is good, but it seems like it is different every day. It's funny, because it's making me feel a little confused! Today it looks pretty good, but nothing like it did when it looked pretty good last week! And some days in between it looks weird, or frumpy, or...just weird. It's like a little tiny identity crisis. Just settle in to one of the good-looking looks please!

You know, hair tends to drive me crazy anyway. I don't like finding it places. I don't like mine long, and anything shorter than long gets complicated to organize. Honestly, I think hair may be more trouble than it's worth and I wish that really short, maintenance-free hair would become stylish, though I'm not willing to be the leader in that trend. Not yet. We'll see, I guess.

Ok. I guess that's enough about my hair. It's funny that of all the things I've been thinking, this is the one I've managed to post about.

I changed the name of my blog, and explaining my lack of posting, in three chapterlets.

1.

I like this name better. It makes me feel like I can say whatever I want, and it's the address anyway, so it seems as nice and natural as something like a blog can be. I think the other name made me feel too...dark, or maybe I was intimidated that I needed to be deep, or something.

(Let the record show that the former name of this blog was "deeper (and maybe darker)".)

(Wow, I like that punctuation string there.)

So. Here we still are. Or "again are", maybe.

2.

I want to clarify that my reasons for posting do not include, "not thinking". On the contrary, I have been thinking quite a bit, and have had things I've actually wanted to post about. However, there is so much to do, I just haven't managed to type stuff up here.

But I will soon. I at least have to post about this concert that I went to on Tuesday. It was fantastic.

3.

Here's a short story about one thing that has kept me from my typing:

This is the second day of trying to potty train my 33-month-old. We put him in underwear and watch watch watch so that when he goes, we can sweep him off to the potty. I think it is working, but I don't know when he'll stop peeing/pooping in his underwear and on the floor, and it is wearying.

Normally I'd put that story on my other blog, except that this is the point of this story right now: it is making me feel very run down. It is actually making me feel glad to be going to work next week to escape from it a bit.

This afternoon I was getting discouraged, and left for maybe 20 minutes to get a latte, the kind with caffeine. And guess what? That stuff still makes me happy. While I was happy, he actually peed in the potty, more than just a few drips! But it wore off, and I am tired again, and he has peed on the floor at least twice since then.

See? I'm so run down I can't even remember properly.

Maybe the lesson is that I should drink more coffee. I wonder if the effect on the child would still exist if I just drank decaf. What if by my drinking coffee, my kid would magically be potty trained? I think that would be awesome.

a bit about work

I got my second monthly update since I've been on maternity leave the other day. It sounds like things continue to change at work, and now even my job has been changing without me. It makes me edgy. I really liked the company before it started changing, and it's hard to see where the changing is going. Some of the new things put me off, though, which makes me regard the whole changing thing with suspicion.

However, I can only do so much about it, and I think I've determined that I have to do my best to go with it and figure out more things to do, actually, to make it work well. I have this strange fear that they'll downgrade my hard-won title of "administrative assistant" back to "receptionist", and then not even ask me if I want the job or not. I wouldn't like that. I don't really think they'd do that, but what do I know anymore? So I will want to come up with plenty of useful things to do, I think, especially since some of the things I was doing are apparently not my job anymore, or at least, not in the same way they were.

I guess I'll learn more about that when I get back to work, which won't be until November 9. So at work I get to be happy with change. For now, I get to be happy staying at home with my family, which is easy. I love it.

I was trying to find a quote from the Baha'i writings to go with the post. It is something like: "If in the course of events, things happen in contradiction to your most cherished desires, it is of no consequence." I know there is a quote like this. If you can tell me where to find it, I will be most grateful. Anyway, it seemed relevant in terms of what happens at work, and also, I just like it.

Why do I spend time thinking about things like this when I'm off work for eleven weeks? I guess I'm preparing. I like to be prepared. I always wanted to be a boy scout instead of a girl scout, but that is a different story.