Whoooo!

OK, so here I am after saying life would be less crazy this week/month, and so far I've been proven totally wrong! ^_^! Good news is that I finally got the data I've been working on out the door to the boss last night so he can write his paper. Bad news is, it took 3 nights of working late during a breeding week to pull it off, so again my schedule has been all whacked out. Today, I'm taking a bit of a break to write, so I can feel like my job doesn't control me. I really do like what I do, honest. Its just life can be a bit much.

My mum's been giving me a nice load of 2x4's lately to chew on. (For all of you who think I only dole them out, ha!) The biggest one is about how you manage your time. According to her, and this is between two women you understand, you really only have enough time to pour yourself into 3 things and do well, such as motherhood, church, and being a wife. When you try to do more than that you burn yourself out. Very quickly. Which means that you end up making some hard choices about what you do and don't do, so you can succeed in those areas.

For me, the breakdown probably looks more like work, church, and dating Jeremy. What I've been trying to do, with limited success, is add on a full training program in Aikido, working with my kids, acting as a social coordinator for my friends, studying, and traveling all over tarnation for various events and such. And its been a bit too much. Now, I'm usually all for pushing myself to do all that, especially if the semester is almost over and life would change in a few weeks. But guess what, Toto! You're not in school anymore, and there are no summer breaks or finals weeks. You're in for the long haul now, so you'd better figure out how you're going to last. This is especially true in a job that regularly breaks the 9-5 rule.

So what am I going to do about it? Well, I don't know yet. That's going to take some serious thinking, and I'm screaming with frustration that I'm not able to handle it all. I don't WANT my work to become my life, or any one thing to become that actually. But I'm all to familiar with this sort of pattern, with having to cut back or give up some things to succeed at the hard ones. So I'll probably figure something out.

The other thing that's been spinning around in my head lately has been the difference between change and growth. Basically this is coming from watching some of my kids struggle with some things. Everybody seems to think that the best way to handle your problems is to change something, like your environment, or a relationship to whomever, or your performance or grades or desktop picture. Change can be good, sure. But it doesn't imply that you're actually growing, necessarily.

The way I figure it, to grow means to internalize a concept and apply it to your life such that your behavior/thinking/emotions/actions become different than they were before. It requires a lot more thinking and praying and questioning yourself than just changing your environment does. When I shuffle stuff around on the outside of me, things may affect me a little differently for a while, but that effect goes away as soon as I leave or change that environment again. Growth is something you take with you no matter where you go, or what your environment is. It develops who you are on the inside.

I know this game really well, actually. Back in high school when I was in counseling for my parents' divorce, I did a lot of stuff to change the outside of me, thinking that it would help, or get my couselor off my back, or that it was what I was expected to do. I became really tied up in legalism because of that...how I believed the world thought of me was directly linked to what I did, and not to who I was inside. But I wanted it that way. The person I thought I was, I despised with a passion. And I didn't want to grow because in order to do that, I would have to let myself admit that I was that person, to be that person. Its been a lot of hard work to retrain the tapes in my head, to tackle my baggage, to learn to know and be who I am. There were days and months I didn't want to pay the price.

I'm not anywhere near like that anymore, thank God, because He's taught me that true growth is worth all that. Its one of the few things in life that can never be taken away from you. But there are still times when I find myself substituting change for growth, because I don't have the energy or don't want to deal with it or don't think its fair that its always ME who has to adapt. So I always am asking myself if I'm falling into that trap...and I have to tell you that after years of working with this I have a pretty good idea when I am slacking off. But I also know that its not worth it to play that game. You can't go anywhere, do anything, dream about anything real or love anyone if you try to build all that on a persona that depends on the world around you. That's like building on sand.

So that's what's up with me. Now I've got work to get back to *ick*. Time to practice what I preach! Later, gang!

~A