It’s a lesson that you would think I’d have learned by now, but I delude myself, and so I have to keep learning it over and over:
Things are never ever going to settle down.
I think that telling ourselves that things will settle down is simply a way of coping with the fact that we will always have more things that we need to do / want to do than we have the time to do them.
So we pretend that eventually we will have all the time we need.
When things settle down, I’m going to:
… go through the closet and get rid of all the clothes I’ll never wear again.
… finally read War and Peace (or one of those other important books that we would like to have read but haven’t ever put a high priority on actually reading).
… weed the flower bed.
… volunteer at the food pantry.
… learn a foreign language.
And when will things settle down?
When the houseguests leave…
When I get through with all these medical tests…
When there’s a little more money in the bank…
When things aren’t so busy at work….
“When things settle down” is a small-scale version of the “one of these days I’d like to…” syndrome.
I’ve learned to deal with the latter more effectively than with the former. The “one of these days” want to list usually is made up of fewer, more substantial things: One of these days I want to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail. One of these days I want to go to France.
Those “one of these days” things can be turned into reality by putting them on the calendar. You’re never going to make that trip to France unless you put your departure date on the calendar – in ink – and work backwards, listing everything you need to do to depart on that date.
The “when things settle down” items are those things that don’t seem nearly as consequential, and they wind up on a list that only grows longer even as it gathers dust.
So many of those “little” things seem to be beyond our control. Life in a family and in a community imposes obligations, and it is easy for the days to slide away one by one as we accommodate to the obligations we feel.
Once again I am realizing that being more jealous of my time – even if it occasionally makes someone else unhappy – is the only way of getting to those things on the “when things settle down” list.
There’s only time when things will truly settle down, and I’m not really eager to get there.
You can contact Bill Brown at billatthelake@gmail.com
