her able hands

My dear friend Cathy has been such a terrific support to me over the past few years. She’s sort of become my human brass ring because she’s at a stage in her life where her children are out of the house and living their own wonderful lives and she no longer has to grind away at working to make money. She’s actively working on things that are meaningful to her and I suspect she’s on the path to earning plenty of money with her new writing ventures. Recently she’s started focusing on working fast and is having excellent results. I don’t know how to work fast unless it’s because I’ve got a deadline someone else imposed breathing down my neck. Self-imposed? Pshaw. I haven’t developed the self-discipline yet. I say yet because it is my hope and dream, dare I say my goal to have the discipline to put myself and my work first more often.

If you haven’t read Cathy’s blog, you really should give it a look-see. She just started a conversation with a friend of hers who lives in Penzance. Penzance! A painter who lives in Penzance! They’re sharing their letters to each other with Cathy’s readers—posting them in the category mdf, which stands for my dear friend. This makes me very happy.

I’m trying to organize my goals and find that I spend very little time working on the things that are most important to me, on the things that will top my list of regrets if I come to the end of my life without having made a dent in them. I get so sidetracked with working for money, with juggling all of the details of the kids’ day-to-day, with the house that breeds piles and messes, with collapsing into bed with a book by 9:00 every night instead of staying up for a couple of hours to work on those things. Things like my novel, the dozen essay ideas clanging around in my head, the embroidery and sewing sitting in boxes.

This recent load of work at my job has brought to light some of my major shortcomings. We’re pretty much in non-stop emergency mode right now with fires popping up on each of our desks every 3.4 seconds. The level of stress and anxiety in the building is high. Very high. We’re getting direction from too many people who don’t talk to one another and I’m spending at least 50% of my time every day re-doing what I did the day before while my work for the present day gets pushed out to tomorrow. Come Friday I have half a week’s worth of work undone and an inbox of emails loaded with contradiction.

I don’t know how to take control of that. I’m in a constant state of reaction. When I try to stop and look at the big picture so I can break it out into all of the small pieces that have to get taken care of in order for the whole thing to work, then another detail changes and I have to backtrack again. By the time I roll into the driveway at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve spent my entire day being the subject of a brain study on confusion. There’s no way I’m working on my novel now.

But then I read Cathy’s blog, or we have a chat on Sunday afternoon and I know that there’s a road through all of this, that I won’t be living this way forever. I think about my life goals some more and a tiny bit of trust in myself blooms—trust that I will find a new way.

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