TASK #31:Â QUIET TIME
“Truth is the safest lie”. Unknown
I don’t know about you, but I am never far from the next problem. My mind is always filled with the various and sundry troubles that seem to come at me from every angle and every corner of my life. I try to solve them as they come in, but I usually can’t, and they pile up in my head like cord wood and pretty soon I’m running into walls, and nothing’s getting resolved. I’M OUT OF SYNC.
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I don’t know about you, but I am never far from the next problem… I try to solve them as they come in, but I usually can’t, and they pile up in my head like cord wood and pretty soon I’m running into walls, and nothing’s getting resolved.
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Things are bothering me. I didn’t like it that Trump wasn’t invited to McCain’s funeral. I mean, I know why and I get it, but it bothers me. So does this thing with Urban Meyer. Like any other Buckeye fan I was beyond happy when they laid the wood on Oregon State, but something wasn’t right, and it ain’t as simple as Meyer not being on the sidelines. And as I told you all last week, this whole pedophilia outrage in Pennsylvania has me troubled–made worse of course by my crazy neighbor who calls me Cat-lick queer every time he sees me.
These things are not in my sphere of control and will work themselves out without any input from me. But there are other things closer to me that have me troubled… and I feel like I’m walking with a limp, metaphorically speaking…
As a kid, when I had problems, I would just walk outside and keep walking. We lived in a place where you could do that safely. I would walk and think about every problem I had, one at a time, and come up with a solution–even if it wasn’t always the right solution. What I noticed was that sometimes after you get rid of the smaller problems there was a bigger one lying under all the rest, buried in my cranial junk drawer, and when I found it and isolated it, I could deal with it.
Now I understand that the problems I had as a kid were pretty simple, and usually involved homework, girls or parents, not necessarily in that order.
Now that I’m older, my worries have become more serious, more nuanced, more deeply felt, and facing them more difficult. So I have to walk farther, dig deeper and be more honest with myself.
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Now that I’m older, my worries have become more serious, more nuanced, more deeply felt, and facing them more difficult. So I have to walk farther, dig deeper and be more honest with myself.
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So the other day I left the house at 8am and walked down the road ’til I got to town, then I went to the little league park and sat in the empty bleachers and I thought about my job, my kids, my car, my health, my 401k, my fantasy football team, my flabby belly, my friend Rick’s new Lincoln, my son’s acne, my other son’s money issues, and finally, my wife.
I figured out what was bothering me. Actually two things were fighting for first place in the problem arena: I am unsettled at work–I feel like I am getting less and less relevant there, and I’m sensing that if things don’t get better, I may lose my job. And I need to tell my wife about it. I have been lying by omission about my job and I need to tell her that…
So I did.
TASK
–Find yourself a free hour or more.
–Find a quiet place to walk. Don’t worry if you go around in circles. It’s not about how far you go, or what the scenery is.
–Focus on the minutia of the life around you. The way the wind blows the leaves, the rustling of the grass, the sound of your steps.
–Then start ruminating about your problems. One at a time. When you isolate WHAT bothers you, question WHY it bothers you. Try to come up with a solution. Be honest. You never have to lie to yourself…Then move onto another problem.
Photos courtesy of Joe doe and by SHTTEFAN on Unsplash
