bearing blog

Patterns of behavior: exploiting what you've learned.

The notion that there are "competing versions of the self" is a recurring theme in my thinking and writing here at bearing blog.

You know, when you say, "Part of me wants to eat that doughnut, but part of me knows it's bad for me."

Or, "Part of me wants to get up and get started on my day, but part of me wants to sleep in."

I've written about this before:

•  Here's an old post looking at an Atlantic article on the topic of the "multiplicity of the self" -- link still active -- and also to Romans 7 ("What I do, I do not understand.  For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.")  
• Here's my review of the book Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard, a book that divides the self into a metaphorical "elephant" and "rider."  (The elephant is the emotional, powerful, driven-by-desire part of the self; the rider is the intelligent part of the self that knows where he wants to go but has little power to get there on his own.  The challenge is for the rider to intelligently direct the elephant, channeling its strengths to achieve the desired outcome.)

Often, the best advice is to pre-plan:  at a time when you are detached from temptations and short-term gratifications (i.e. sometime when your stomach is not growling, when you are not lying in bed dreading the snooze alarm to go off), to consider how to set up your environment to reduce access to  "bad" choices and improve access to "good" choices in the moment, how to restructure your incentive system.  Putting fruit on your shopping list instead of doughnuts; moving your alarm clock across the room; preparing yourself a little treat to have ready as a reward for doing the right thing.

The concept is to schedule "choice-making" time at the time when you are strong and in control, thereby restricting the choices available to you when you are comparably vulnerable and weak.

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I've internalized this for a long time in some areas of my life; I mastered it with respect to food issues (probably aided by divine intervention) about six years ago.

Just yesterday, I noticed that it's quite similar to something else I do.

One evolutionary biology textbook was on my lap, another one propped open against the wall, and a third book -- this one on general biology -- was spread out between my keyboard and my computer screen.  I had a spreadsheet open and I was dividing up chapters among the thirty-two weeks that will be left in our school year after we deduct a month for our family trip.

Most of the readings will be from this introductory college text... a few supplemental readings from this more advanced text that has a truer philosophical attitude toward human evolution...  Week one it'll be the chapters about the development of evolutionary theory... week two, Mendelian genetics... somewhere in here I'll assign some readings from The Origin of Species... I think I'll assign some Richard Dawkins stuff, probably from The Ancestor's Tale, and we can discuss it... let's see, that should go later in the course...

My goal at the beginning of every year, for every subject in which there's a set amount of material I want to cover, is to have a week-by-week schedule completely fleshed out.

If the material is such that earlier concepts build on later concepts, so that you can't safely skip chapters, I schedule for fewer weeks than there are in the school year -- it leaves room for illnesses and emergencies and still staying on track.  If material is skippable or the order of assignments don't matter, I'll spread it out through the whole school year, and if you're sick we just skip that day, maybe to make it up when we have extra time another day.

I put a ton of work into this organization.  It's the primary work of my late-spring and early-summer school year.  It helps that I enjoy it:  it's solo work that reminds me of computer programming, an activity that I wasn't any damn good at but that I enjoyed immensely back when that was what I did every day.  I do it far ahead of time, and why?

So that when I get up in the morning and have to teach my kids, I don't have the excuse of "ummm what was I supposed to do today?" as a reason to pour another cup of coffee and sit down in front of the computer to find "something to do today."

I already have a Thing To Do Today.  And I don't actually have an excuse not to do it.

Planning down to the exact day ("on day 122 of the school year I will do this... on day 123 of the school year I will do this...") is too fine-grained.   Planning the month is too loose.  I plan week by week, and each week I have to figure out how to distribute the schoolwork and teaching, and that's just about right.

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But it strikes me that in an important way, it is very like the elephant-rider metaphor.  I set the boundaries of our school weeks in advance, when I can think about them clearly and when I have the overall philosophy of education, the big picture, before my attention.  Day to day I try to live by the rules I have set by myself.

This way of organizing the homeschool year and week was obvious to me as "the way that would feel right for me to do it" from the very beginning of homeschooling.  I wonder why I never noticed before how similar it is to a certain technique of practicing self-control in general?  I wonder why I had to independently discover it in other areas of my life?  

Like the Mandelbrot fractal, personality exhibits the same patterns wherever you look and on whatever scale, the deep and the superficial.  One of these days I will learn to generalize and to re-apply the lessons, and save myself a whole lot of trouble.  Maybe.

Pivoting.

Once I heard a very, very good piece of homeschooling advice, perfectly tailored to my besetting character flaw of Stick-To-The-Schedulism.  You know, the kind of thing that makes me inordinately upset about unexpected changes of plan.

It was this:

When the s#!t hits the fan,

or something entirely unexpected (good or bad) falls into your lap,

and your entire day is knocked off kilter,

and you're unhappily surveying the list of Stuff I Was Supposed To Do Today,

at the same time that you are looking at the clock and wondering how on earth you will catch up,

particularly if, against all reason, you are tempted to try to cram the whole day's work into the remaining hours...

... that is the time to pivot to a new mission for the rest of the day:

The remaining hours of this day will be spent putting tomorrow in order,

so that tomorrow will be the best it can possibly be.

 

Look at  it this way.  The few hours you have left in this "ruined" day must be spent one way or another.  You can take them as "extra time for tomorrow" or you can take them as "remnants of today."  Extra time for tomorrow is much more fun, more relaxing, and probably more valuable in the long run, at least for me. 

Sometimes, when I've written off Today in favor of a head start on Tomorrow, we clean the schoolroom.  Sometimes I catch up on records.  Sometimes I make a meal plan or precook tomorrow's dinner.  Sometimes I do long term planning.  Sometimes I read to the kids or cue up a good movie.  The next morning always feels like a fresh start, and usually it really is a good day.

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I bring this up because recent turns of events have led me to apply this same principle to the entire third quarter of our school year.   Maybe the fourth quarter too, it's hard to tell.

Our baby was born Christmas week, just before the start of what I would call the third quarter, and three weeks earlier than expected.   Then just as we were starting up again, H., my partner in co-schooling, pregnant with twins, had to go on bed rest.  She delivered the twins five weeks early, around what would have been week 21 of my school year.

 A month later, of course, we are still nowhere near starting up our "together" subjects again.   My oldest hasn't quite stopped completely; he's working his way through Robinson Crusoe on assignment from H., and he's keeping up with history, but Latin and Geometry have been indefinitely suspended.  H.'s twins (one beautiful girl and one beautiful boy) are doing pretty well, but feeding them is a round-the-clock job for her right now and for who knows how long?  

So it's make-the-best-of-it territory.

•  I have been experimenting with an unschooling approach on the two free days, while I take the extra time to work on next year's curriculum and organize thoughts for the overall high school program.  
• We are using some of the time to polish up our Italian and French for our planned trip in the fall.  
• In a similar vein, we're working through a DVD lecture series on Greek and Roman engineering which we bought last month ($250 would have been steep, but it's been completely worth the $70 or so that we paid to get it on sale.)
• My seven-year-old has rediscovered our favorite chess-learning program.  And she's decided to work towards a sports pin (Bowling) for AHG, so we've checked some books out of the library so she can learn the scoring system.  (Now she wants her own bowling ball, which might not actually be a bad idea since there are never any 6-lb house balls at the local lanes and I have two smaller children coming up behind her.)
• My thirteen-year-old has been building computer circuits out of redstone in Minecraft, which must set some kind of record for meta.
• I've had some time to sit down with my four-year-old and start working on letter-sound correspondence.
• And we're working on handwriting again using a new-to-me program that everyone is much happier with, especially me, because the exemplar font is not unlike the way I really write when I'm writing neatly but comfortably -- a sort of joined-italic-printscript.  (I've had it with handwriting programs that don't have as their primary goals speedy and legible writing.)  One thing that made this program, BFH, good for our family is that you can purchase a "handwriting intervention" program (Fix It Write) for older students.  So my thirteen-year-old is using that, while the younger kids are doing beginners' sheets.
• Finally, I'm still working on my new time management resolutions (see previous posts starting here).

And you know, I think it's going all right.  The truth is, with a new baby myself, I'm not really feeling all that energetic right now.  I'm physically well, but I'm out of shape and tired, and having decided to take it a bit easy is turning out to feel like a better and better idea as the weeks go by and it gets more and more impossible to "catch up."

At some point, we'll just have to declare it Starting Over time.

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I have a feeling that when H. and I come back together again, we're going to be putting together something entirely new, based on our new needs.

But we've done that before, and it worked out beyond our wildest dreams.   So I'm pretty sure that starting over again will work just fine.

 

"The secret to not getting overwhelmed"

This post by Jen Fulwiler fits nicely into the "new baby's resolutions" series I have been working on.

It occurred to me that Mother Teresa must have had more demands on her time than she could ever even come close to addressing — and considering the type of work she did, serving the poorest of the poor all over the world, she must have often felt daunted by how many important things needed to be done compared to how little she could do.

So I asked Fr. Langford: What did Mother Teresa do when it seemed that there was more work than she could possibly handle?

His response was simple and wise, and it marked a turning point in my life.

Go and read.

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New baby's resolution five: Quit multitasking.

I have been writing about a few resolutions I'm making in the wake of bringing a new baby out into the world and into our lives. (The series starts here).

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I decided I have about six categories of things that I do during a typical day:

• rest
• self-care
• meals
• learning time
• activities
• work (which itself can be subdivided -- more on that later)

I have a vague idea of about how much time I have available to do each of these things, but I am resolved to keep that idea vague and flexible from day to day.

 The main point is that it's finite and not all that much; so I shouldn't get bogged down in endless, super-long to-do lists that get carried over because they are never finished.  

It's okay to keep a master to-do list with ALL THE THINGS on it, and consult that while making the day's list.  Right now I'm trying out an app called Wunderlist, and I'm using it for the ALL THE THINGS list.   But I'm copying a few things from that list onto an index card each morning.

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I also had some all-the-time goals:  for example, one goal is to demonstrate to my children, interest in the things they had to say to me, and delight in each one as a person.  I feel these things far more often than I make them known, and I wanted to work on communicating that love, interest, and delight all day long through all the things I do.

But I've found that a major obstacle to that is constant multitasking.  I'm always trying to do two things at once.    If I'm resting, I'm answering email on my iPad.  If I'm running a spelling lesson, I'm tidying my countertop while I wait for kids to write down each word.  While I'm chopping onions, I'm supervising my seven-year-old's math homework.  While I'm lecturing my son about the boots that I keep tripping over in the mudroom, I'm photocopying worksheets for the afternoon's school.

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Somewhere, I know, there is a homeschooling parent with the opposite problem who is resolving to learn how to multitask.  I can be quite effective, it's true.   BUT I can't multitask like that AND demonstrate love, interest, and delight.  Rather, such effectiveness tends to give me Resting Bitchface.  Not a good look on a mom.

 So here's resolution five:  Decide what I'm doing, and do that one thing.  

Leave room in my attention for that love, interest, and delight.

Leave room in my attention to be reasonable, to be kind, to be generous.

Leave room in my attention to stop and guide a child back on task before the urge to yell sets in.

Leave room in my attention for ...intention.

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So what kind of practical change can I make that will bring this about?  I think one of them is simply to look at what I've asked the kids to do, and to be doing that same thing.  

So, for instance, if the kids are working on schoolwork, I want to try to stay there with them instead of thinking, "Oh, they're working, I'll go get a head start on lunch."  

When it's time to make lunch, I am going to try to stop their schoolwork, and then we should all leave the schoolroom and start setting up lunch together.  Alternatively, if I need a little quiet time in my own head, I should send them on "break," while I set up lunch by myself or with just one child helper.

This also amounts to "quit multitasking," but on the family level.  My thirteen-year-old is really the only one who can reliably be sent to do something -- be it his algebra or scrubbing a toilet -- and finish it without getting distracted.  It's going to be fine to let him do his own thing.  The rest of them really do need attention and guidance whenever they are given instructions.

So I'm going to try that today, just as soon as I make my to-do list.

Good thing I never count "...and nursing the baby" as multitasking, or I'd never get out of this chair.

How those resolutions are going, and a nifty to-do trick.

I have been writing about a few resolutions I'm making in the wake of bringing a new baby out into the world and into our lives. (The series starts here).

Yesterday, although I am not quite done writing them out yet, I decided to bite the bullet and actually follow them.

In a way I cheated. It was Monday. Mondays are usually the days I spend entirely at H's house, co-schooling and then shuttling kids to scouts and AHG. However, for the last couple of weeks and for a Very Good Reason, we have not been doing school together. So Mondays and Thursdays have been freed up, and I have been using them to catch up on resting, thinking, and once in a while doing a neglected chore or two. Monday's task list was a clean slate.

So. The first thing I did was make a to-do list. Nothing new there. Except that it was a very SHORT to-do list:

(Actual to-do list from yesterday, taken near the end of the day)

I thought to myself, "I only have four hours to do tasks. What tasks should I do?" And that is what I came up with. I used an index card on purpose; it's like eating dinner off a smaller plate. I felt "full" with fewer tasks!

When I was making the list I tried to include some work from each of my four categories:

• Work for school (prepare a Latin translation; buy some curriculum; send an email about history homework)
• Work for the family (buy a gym bag; sort laundry till I find my daughter's AHG uniform; make the kids shovel snow; grocery list)
• Work for others (read some bylaws that I have to vote on this week for an organization that I help lead; remind Mark to move forward on a family service project)
• Creative work (okay, I left that off, but what it amounts to is this blog post that I am writing now).

And look! It is almost all crossed off! I actually got most of that done yesterday.

This felt good.

Here is another thing that felt good: During learning time -- what I really call "school time," I guess, but I am trying to change its name -- I forced myself not to try to do any of the tasks on my list. Instead I sat down and stayed with my kids.

I watched a video about Frederick the Great of Prussia with my 10- and 13-year-olds. I watched the whole thing. And when my 10-y-o had questions about the video, I was right there to hear them, and I wrote them down and afterward we looked up the answers.

I got out the nine-note recorder book and the recorders for my daughter when she suddenly decided it had been too long since she practiced, and let her use them freely all morning.

I let the boys make lunch and clean it up.

I read a picture book to my four-year-old for the first time in weeks.

I led a handwriting lesson and a spelling lesson for all three school aged kids, and I wasn't rushed so I didn't yell at anyone.

I watched another video with the kids about Roman cities (one of those PBS David Macauley ones).

I helped my daughter get ready for her AHG awards ceremony and drove her across town, and took her and her friend out to dinner before the ceremony.

I visited H at her house for a little while before coming home.

It was a good day.

I am in the middle of another day that is so far good, too. I will report back on that one later.

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 In the comments, a reader pointed me to this post at Amongst Lovely Things. It's a homeschooling blog, which is why I don't read it regularly, but this post suggests a different way of thinking about the to-do list that I rather like. She calls it "looping:"

The concept is simply this: instead of assigning tasks to certain days of the week, list tasks and then tackle them in order, regardless of what day it is.

Looping can be used wherever there is work that needs to be done regularly. ...Right now I use a looping schedule in our homeschool, for my housework, and for my writing.

Right now this is how I schedule our morning time read-alouds. For example, we're reading All the Swords in England, St. Patrick's Summer, and various plays by Shakespeare. Those are looped during our morning read aloud time (with Shakespeare having a more prominent place on the loop- twice for every once that we're reading the others). Next term I expect that loop to change because I want to read Father Brown, Bible stories, and Our Mother Tongue during morning time.

Another way you could use a looping schedule is to loop various activities within a subject. For example, many homeschoolers have "Fine Arts Fridays." Picture study, composer study, crafts, art instruction, and poetry could be looped to offer a little variety while still making headway through a particular book or curriculum.

Basically, take anything you would otherwise be inclined to schedule into certain days of the week (Monday: history, Tuesday: science, Wednesday: literature.... etc.) and put them on a loop instead. Now instead of feeling behind when the baby gets sick or you are running around putting out life's fires, you still make progress across the curriculum.

I could see this working pretty well for me for household tasks, younger kids' school subjects, and maybe for readalouds, if I ever get back to doing them again. I will think about it. Maybe you will too! 

More resolutions next time.

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New baby's resolution four: Don't get bogged down in scheduling specific tasks.

Part of a series that starts here.  We're coming up with resolutions -- not in honor of the new year, but instead of a new baby's arrival and consequent disruption of all the routines that had been serving us well.

Resolution zero:  to acknowledge our family's most important priorities and give each their due

Resolution one:  of these, designate four as "all-the-time" intentions:

• Serve God
• Show love, interest, and delight in one another
• Model reason, generosity, and kindness to resolve conflict
• Teach diligence

Resolution two:  Simplify the list of things we must "make time for."  I got it down to this:

• Rest
• Self-care
• Meals
• Learning time (since we're homeschoolers)
• Activities
• Work (a.k.a., the to-do list)

Resolution three:  to accept the limits on my time, spending it on a few choice tasks and letting go of the rest of the to-do list

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In the last post  I calculated that, on a typical weekday, I have somewhere between 4 and 5 hours to accomplish tasks of the sort that I might put on a to-do list. 

I don't say, "I have 4-5 hours to knock all the items off my to-do list."  That's because Resolution Three requires me to accept that I will never get them all. 

(I'm thinking that the "to-do" list needs a different name.  "Could-do" list?  No, still implies possibility of completion.  "Might-do" list?  "Task menu?"  Will have to think more.)

 This kind of work includes

• work for the children's schooling including long-term planning, yearly curriculum selection and purchasing, weekly lesson preparation, evaluation and record-keeping
• work for the familyincluding laundry and clothes-buying; dishes; tidying; meal planning and grocery shopping; cooking dinner; and maintaining the family appointment calendar
• work for others including volunteer commitments, helping friends, and any paid work;
• creative work including hobbies, blogging, self-improvement, and other satisfying personal projects

When I made schedules in the past, I thought I had to "do everything" at least once in a while.  That meant that I had to find a time for each task on my list.  If there wasn't enough time to do each thing as often as I needed, I would just have to do everything less frequently:  instead of mopping every week, I'll mop every two weeks.

I did all this by slotting many tasks into specific times of the day or week or month.  For example, Thursday mornings between the end of breakfast and the start of co-schooling was Time To Put Away All The Accumulated Clean Laundry.   Time For Weekly Lesson Planning was Wednesday evening while the children were at church for catechism class.  Set Up All The Week's School Materials Time was Sunday night right before bed.  Blogging Time?  Mornings, before kids get up.

But I didn't always do what I said I was going to do, either because another task felt more urgent or because I thought of some other task I preferred. 

(Often, blogging.)

And then I would berate myself for departing from the schedule, particularly later when I couldn't find any matching socks or graph paper.   I would do this even if it turned out to have been a good trade-off.  There wasn't any room for flexibility or forgiveness. 

I'm just not a flexible sort of person; I'll probably always feel kind of bad about changing my plans.  I therefore conclude that I ought to make less specific plans.  If I don't get around to a particular task now, because it's not so urgent, well -- sooner or later it will become urgent and command my attention.

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But I don't want to get carried away doing only housework, or only school planning -- the two categories that often masquerade as SUPER URGENT MUST DO for days at a time.  I need to use some of my time for creative outlets as well, so I can stay recharged and sharp.  Also, I owe at least a little bit of work to other people.

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Resolution Four is about the moment of choosing which tasks will and won't happen in the four hours and change that I have available for it every day. 

I resolve to regularly choose tasks from the categories of creative work, work for the family, work for others, and work for the kids' school. 

I'm not promising equal time for each category and I'm not promising to hit every category every day.  But I am resolving to hit them all in their turn, each day choosing what makes the most sense for that day, and -- what's harder -- letting go of what doesn't.

 

New baby's resolution three: Know how much time I have in the day.

Continuing a series that starts here.

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I figured out in the last post that there are about six basic ways I can slice up the hours in my day.

1. Rest and sleep
2. Meals
3. Self-care
4. Learning time
5. Activities
6. Work

"Work" encompasses a lot of different things, but I found one easy way to figure out if a thing is "work:" might I put it on a to-do list and then procrastinate it, possibly for days, while feeling guilty about not getting around to it? If so, it is work.

I do not tend to do this with, say, taking a shower or eating lunch or going to the gym. That is how I know that showering is not work, but self-care; and lunch is not work, but a meal; and going to the gym is not work, but an activity.

I do tend to do this with housework or school planning or home improvement projects or even many hobbies that I enjoy, such as writing blog posts. So they all count as work of one kind or another.

I suppose instead of "work" I could call that category "My To-Do List." That isn't a bad idea. I will consider that.

Anyway, it's all the stuff in "work" that tends to dog me.

I. Cannot. Do. It. All.

I need to let some of it go. But how much to let go? Do I even know how much time I have to do these things?

 Let's figure it out, roughly.

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 "Roughly" is the best I can do right now. I have a 6-week-old baby and my efficiency is consequently unusually low, plus it swings widely from day to day depending on his nursing pattern. ( I am taking advantage of the resulting low postpartum schooling and housekeeping standards to write these blog posts while the kids play poker downstairs.)

If I was in a more stable pattern, I might try another time study like the one I did a few years ago, only with the time categories chopped up a little differently. That was a lot of fun, and I recommend the exercise to anyone who is curious about how they spend their time. But that measure takes a week, and I need something a little more quick and dirty -- just an estimate.

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 We start with 24 hours in the day. I estimate generously that I should sleep for about eight hours -- about 10:30 pm to 6:30 am. That leaves sixteen hours.

Meals -- this does not include real cooking, just serving and eating and putting away -- are variable. Breakfast is fairly self-serve and not messy, so let's say I spend half an hour on that (including unloading the dishwasher from the night before). I take longer, maybe an hour, for lunch and post-lunch cleanup -- that's because I have helpers. The same for dinner. Then we have two snacks in our day that probably add up to a half hour. That's about three hours in a typical day at home. Remaining balance: Thirteen hours.

A day's bathing, dressing, grooming, and getting ready for bed -- let's say 45 minutes. I think that's pretty generous. Remaining balance: Twelve and a quarter hours.

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Let's pause here to notice that activities, learning, and work -- plus any extra rest I might need -- have to fit into twelve and a quarter hours. From day to day, the allocation of that time among those three categories probably fluctuates quite a bit. But I am looking for a reasonable, realistic estimate of how much time I have for the to-do list. So let's truck on with estimates of time spent on activities and learning.

I allot about five hours a day (9:30 to noon, and 2 to 4:30) that at least one of my children is doing schoolwork, and I really should be engaged with them for most of that time. So let's say that I am busy that whole five hours with "learning time." Remaining balance: seven and a quarter hours.

That time gets divided up between work and activities (unless it's used for extra rest). Sometimes there isn't any special activity at all, of course, leaving the whole 7.25 hours free.

(Did I say "free?" Ha. It is telling that I am now beginning to think of the "knock-things-off-my-to-do list time" as "free time." Can we say, "workaholic?" Can we say, "defines self-worth in terms of accomplishments?")

Anyway, typical evening activities are swimming lessons at the Y, or religious education classes at church. The swimming lessons take us about two and a half hours when you count travel time, changing, and showering. Religious ed is two and a quarter. So let's estimate generously and say that two and a half hours go to activities, when there are any.

Remaining balance that I can count on having for "work" on this typical, imaginary day:

4 and three-quarters hours.

Well, now. That isn't so bad. It is less than I would like, and it's true that it needs to be broken up throughout the day -- a half hour here, an hour forty-five there -- but it isn't like there is no time at all. And when there isn't a scheduled activity, or if I get out of it for some reason (say if Mark volunteers to take the kids to RE) -- there's bonus time. And any time I don't spend that time working, it could be used for resting.

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That calculation being finished, we come to the resolution part of the post: to accept that those 285 minutes in each day are what I can expect to use for work, give or take a little.

 So here is resolution three, in full. I resolve

• to stop pretending I can somehow stretch those 285 minutes out;
• to value them, and try not to waste them;
• to quit berating myself for not doing more than I could reasonably have done in those minutes;
• to decide what tasks to use them for, and then to delegate the rest or let them go.

Easier said than done, of course, but by counting them up (roughly) I am at least a bit closer to having my eyes open.

 

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New baby's resolution two: Simplifying the list of things that there are "times" for.

Part of a series that starts here.

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Last time I wrote about my post-baby resolutions, I said that I'd identified some intentions that wouldn't become part of a "schedule," but would rather be things I would try to keep in mind all the time.

Essential ingredients for every time-block.

These were:

• Serving God in everything
• Showing each other LOVE, INTEREST, & DELIGHT in one another
• Anticipating/resolving conflict by modeling KINDNESS, GENEROSITY, & REASON
• Helping each other work by teaching DILIGENCE

You may have noticed that these don't correspond quite exactly to any of the "essentials" that I identified in my first post. They are distilled from some of those "essentials" in order to get their total number down.

One thing is for certain, we'll never get anything done if we are running in too many directions at once.

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So of those essentials, what remains?

• Connecting with God.
• Resting.
• Showing love to, and taking delight in, each other.
• Connecting with people outside our family.
• Resolving conflict and encouraging generosity, particularly among the children.
• Helping each other work, and learn to work, with diligence.
• Caring for our bodies (and that extension of our bodies, our clothing and appearance).
• Meals.
• Physical activity.
• Order in our environment.
• Learning.
• Creative work.
• Work that serves others.

And can these things that remain -- the things that "there are times for" -- be simplified even further?

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Our days and weeks must have "times" for

• rest and sleep
• meals (planning, shopping, preparing, eating, cleaning up)
• health (physical activity, hygiene, medical care)
• clothing care and dressing ourselves and grooming (purchasing, laundry, haircuts, etc.)
• maintaining an orderly environment

• intellectual development (teaching, school planning, curriculum, chosen hobbies and such)
• connecting with the outside world (volunteer work, seeing friends, paid work)

But that's a lot of different stuff.

Far too overwhelming to make anything even approximating a daily or weekly routine.

And some of the categories are nebulous.

"Physical Activity, Hygiene, Medical Care" only go together in an abstract way as "healthy" things to do. They are not anything like one another in a practical sense. They're not done at the same frequencies or at the same times of day or in the same places. They can't be substituted for one another: one hour in the bathtub, one three-mile walk, and one doctor's appointment don't have the same effect on my overall health.

Better to re-formulate the categories and condense them, without micromanaging the details. Mother Teresa's rule for her sisters famously included time blocks that were simply labeled things like "Work for the poor." It wasn't subdivided into individual tasks. I need the same generality categories, because in this season of life, I need to stay flexible. At a particular time in the afternoon, I may need to spend some time homemaking, but I don't want to say "laundry at this time, bed-making at this other time, return phone calls from then until the next time." I need the flexibility to do whatever household task is most important and then let the rest of the to-do list go when I have to move on to some other activity.

So what I came up with was this list:

Things we make "times" for

• Rest
• Taking care of body and clothing
• Meals
• Learning time
• Work
• "Activities"

Much simpler, isn't it?

 

I got away with so few categories by making several of them broader. For example, "rest" includes naps, quiet recreation (such as reading for pleasure or surfing the web in bed), and sleep. By thinking about clothing as an extension of the body, I was able to collapse the whole of the processes of getting up in the morning and getting ready for bed, encompassing dressing, bathing, dealing with hair, and even putting clothes away. "Meals" includes the necessary clean-up afterwards.

 

"Work" encompasses several kinds of work, some enjoyable, some not my favorite. I guess now that I look at it, "work" is anything that I tend to procrastinate. It includes work for the family (a.k.a. homemaking), work for the kids' schooling, creative work (aka hobbies), paid work, and service. This category probably needs to be subdivided some, however, so that none of the kinds of work gets short changed; but maybe on a weekly rotation.

 

"Learning time" is not called "school" because I need to separate it from the "school work" I have to do every day, week, and year: curriculum purchasing, planning, grading, and record keeping, not to mention maintaining our materials and space. Rather, "learning time" needs its own turn at the top of my priorities. By "learning time" I mean the time that the kids spend directly engaging with their schoolwork and that I spend teaching them or keeping them on task. I am always tempted to wander off and get something else done the instant that everyone appears to be working independently; but what they really need (especially the younger ones) is for me to stay focused and present to them for a good-sized block of time.

 

"Activities" sounds pretty nebulous, but in our family it is immediately obvious what this word means. It's the stuff we do after dinner and on the weekends. Family gym night; swimming lessons; Wednesday night religious education; going to Mass on Sundays and holy days; Scouts and AHG; shows at the Children's Theatre; the occasional outing for bowling or a movie; potluck and board game night with friends. Nearly all of it optional, and none of it has to be "made up" if it's missed for reason of illness or crisis.

 

Now I have gone and expanded them, but remember that it all collapses into just six categories.

 

Rest, meals, learning, work, self-care, activities. To everything there is a time. And each of these to be met, all the time: in a spirit of service, loving one another, peacefully, diligently.

 

More details in the next resolution.

 

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Semiannual maintenance post, May 2013.

Five years ago this week, I woke up one day and decided to try being hungry for a change.  Those of you who've been through my archives know that this decision eventually led to my dropping 40 pounds and 6 pants sizes, and returning myself from BMI-obese to BMI normal.

I guess it's sticking for now.  I guess it's real.

I try to remain detached from the number if I can.  For instance, I always keep in mind that if I have another pregnancy, or when I go through menopause, I could wind up at another weight.  Mostly I think I've learned to manage that detachment, but from time to time I forget.

+ + +

Last month I forgot for a while.  

From time to time I think back to the months while the number on the scale was dropping.  During those months -- May to November of 2008 -- I was, frankly, obsessed and controlling and fearful (that whatever magic was working would stop working).   I was developing good habits, but at the same time I felt very driven by the numbers.  And yet I look back at that time with amazement at my power and self-control.  

Sometimes I start worrying, "What if I gain weight and I need to lose it again?  Will I ever be able to do what I did then?  Maybe I'll never recapture it, if I ever need it."

And I say to myself, "I know how I can make myself feel better.  I'll prove I can still do it.  I'll lose 1 pound, starting right now.  Even though I don't objectively need to lose any pounds, I'll just lose 1.  If I still have what it takes, it won't take long, just a couple of weeks, a month at most once I get back in the groove again.  I'll crack down really hard on myself and I'll lose 1 pound, and I'll prove to myself that I could still lose weight again any time I want to."

And then I can't "crack down on myself" as hard as I think I should, and the little line I still plot on a chart most days goes down a little and up a little and down a little just like it always does, and I fret some more.  Maybe I'll never get that groove back, even if I need it.  If I can't make it happen whenever I want to, whether I need it or not, will I be able to make it happen someday if I do need it?

And then I imagine a future where everyone makes fun of me because I blogged about overcoming gluttony but then I got fat again.  Seriously?  This is what I worry about?  Becoming a data point on the nobody can lose weight and keep it off side?  Or is it being proven wrong?  Am I a thin-person impostor?  Are the size 2's only a disguise?

This is not a healthy mental space to be in.

+ + +

So, last month I confessed to Mark that I was trying to lose ONE POUND and I couldn't manage to do it.  

(I mean, obviously my weight fluctuates day to day, but I wasn't seeing a permanent shift downward that would stick.)

And he reminded me:  

You are getting it backwards again.  

If you are worried about putting the weight back on, look at your behavior, not at the numbers.

Look at your habits.  Are you developing habits you don't want to develop?  Are you losing good habits you wanted to keep?

Because if you are slipping back into old patterns that you associate with the time when you were heavy and when you ate constantly, then that is a problem.  And it's a problem you can do something about.

But if all your habits are good, then you don't need to try to force the numbers to do ANYTHING.

+ + +

He's right.  He's absolutely right.  And I know this.  I don't know why I keep forgetting it.

But I do forget it from time to time.

I cannot directly control the number on the scale.  

I can directly control the choices that I make.

And I want to make choices every day that are compatible with living out the rest of my life in a healthy relationship to food and physical activity.

That's what I want.  To make choices now that are good for the rest of my life.

I can't really go wrong doing that, no matter what the numbers do.

+ + +

Fretting about the numbers often accompanies feelings of loss of control over those good habits.  And I usually find that, if I can remember to examine the habits instead of the numbers, I find that I have some places I should re-commit to.

The "diet mentality" has always been a mistake for me.  The idea that I can or should deprive myself strictly for some temporary period and then return to "normal" eating once I've acheived some number.   This has only been destructive.

(The only exception:  On occasion, I've found it helpful to cut out sugar and cut back on carbs for a few days, just to break a spiraling descent into a carb-craving cycle.   I don't think of it as dieting.  I call it detox even though I know that's a stupid word for it.)

Instead, I need to look at each behavior I engage in, and ask:  

Do I feel confident that repeating this behavior, regularly, for the rest of my life, would be good for me?  

If I made it to the end of a long life and looked back, what habits would I be telling everyone were my secret?

+ + +

Here are some of them, I think:

• Eat just enough at meals so that I have a real appetite when I sit down at the next one.  Pay attention to how much that takes, and learn.
• Have sweets and desserts at any meal time that I wish, but keep them small.  
• Go to bed a little bit hungry.  Have a drink in the evening instead of a snack. 
• Keep alcohol portions modest at dinner--or at least put off the drinking until the food's cleared away.
• Sugarless gum after meals -- good for teeth, and good for reminding me not to nibble as I clean up.
• Prefer dressed vegetables to carbs.  Use carbs judiciously to extract the maximum textural experience from each portion.
• I only typically need one snack, in midafternoon:  make it small, balanced, pleasant, and on a plate.
• Share my food with people who ask.
• Half sandwiches.    Most sandwiches are too damn big, at least for me. 
• Graciously accept some of whatever I'm offered, but I don't have to eat all of it.
• Refuse to think of an occasional, deliberate choice to enjoy food for pure pleasure as a "failure." 

These are not difficult to live by and don't represent deprivation, but they do take a little bit of attention.  And when my attention slips, I make choices that aren't as good.  It's as simple as that.  I need to pay a little attention to make good choices regularly, but the choices I want to make are choices I can feel happy about for the rest of my life.

More on "spiritual poverty."

Melanie picked up my ball in the last post and ran with it:

Especially in the online world it can be so hard to see others’ humanity, to risk being flamed at by approaching what seems like a scoff as if it were an invitation to a dialogue, to risk seeming like a fool for enagaging a “troll” instead of dismissing him with scornful words. And in Catholic comment boxes you also risk being chided by your fellow Catholics for engaging with such angry hurtful people. “Don’t feed the trolls,” they warn you. But perhaps that’s exactly what we are called to do? To feed them? Couldn’t it be that the troll who regularly hangs out at Catholic sites someone who is hungering for the truth but afraid of rejection so is preemptively rejecting those who he feels have already shut him out?

Mind blown by the sudden new meaning of the term "to feed trolls."

You still have a responsibility not to feed the troll on the property of the person who has the "don't feed trolls" rule, i.e., in their comment box.  But you could invite them to your own blog or you could contact them off-blog.  And you could certainly engage respectfully (and skillfully) in a manner designed to be peaceful, all light and no heat.

Having started down that line of thinking, how there is a need for the spiritually impoverished to be fed, especially online I began to imagine that some individuals might have the vocation of doing just that. Then as I talked it over with Dom he said, it couldn’t be individuals. It would have to be people living in community. And as we talked I began to envision a new sort of religious community: the Missionaries to the Digital Continent. A cloistered contemplative order who live the Benedictine motto ora et labora whose days are ordered around the monastic hours and Eucharistic adoration and who are dedicated to bringing Christ to all the darkest corners of the internet. 

Aw, man, you beat me to it.  I've been thinking of this for a long time but haven't written about it here.  Instead I wrote it in Dorian Speed's Facebook comments.  This is what I wrote after she went on her rant about that Vatican website using Comic Sans:

Dorian, I think you're just the person to take this idea and run with it (when you are done with Electingthepope.net of course): The Church needs a new religious order of blogging and HTML-savvy monks and nuns. We need to set up a cloister with high-speed Internet connection and excellent tech support. In between praying the Liturgy of the Hours, attending daily Mass, and working in the refectory and gardens, they'll do pro bono web design for struggling Comic-Sans-using parishes and church organizations everywhere. They'll also surf the Internet looking for combox discussions into which to inject a note of charity and wisdom. Also they will pray for trolls.

and in another comment, an afterthought:

We can put the adoration chapel in a Faraday cage so they don't get distracted from what really matters.

Anyway, not to get too distracted about it: 

Melanie suggests organizing the effort to be "spiritually poor" around the seven traditional Spiritual Works of Mercy.  (You can find these enumerated here.) Since we're talking about an analogy anyway, let me list the seven Corporal Works of Mercy first:

• To feed the hungry;
• To give drink to the thirsty;
• To clothe the naked;
• To harbour the harbourless;
• To visit the sick;
• To ransom the captive;
• To bury the dead.

The seven Spiritual Works of Mercy are

• To instruct the ignorant;
• To counsel the doubtful;
• To admonish sinners;
• To bear wrongs patiently;
• To forgive offences willingly;
• To comfort the afflicted;
• To pray for the living and the dead.

Just as the charism of the Franciscans was to perform works of mercy from a position of being intentionally corporally poor, we are envisioning a charism of performing works of mercy from a position of being intentionally spiritually poor.  

The intentional corporal poverty was a means of demonstrating (among other things) that none of us can pat ourselves on the back for acheiving our material riches, because so much of it was out of our control and all of it, our physical life itself, is a gift.  We may have had a hand in taking and shaping God's good gifts to our profit, in making good decisions along the way (we do believe in free will after all, and that God lets us participate in the development of our own futures) but in the end we owe it all to God.  "No shroud has pockets" indeed.

So the intentional spiritual poverty would be a means of demonstrating (among other things) that none of us can pat ourselves on the back for achieving whatever spiritual riches we have.  The intellect with which we absorb the deep theological musings of the doctors of the Church, and craft arguments to defend her teachings?  Gift from God.  The desire we have to come closer to God?  A gift.  The gift of emotions, of sorrow at the Passion, of joy at the Resurrection?  A gift.  True contrition?  Gift.  Gratitude to God for all his good gifts?  A gift in and of itself.

I am not sure how to demonstrate it outwardly except, as I said, by a radical non-judgmentalism of the person.  Even the most objectively horrible people must be reached out to with love and compassion and a recognition of "there but for the grace of God go I."   

It strikes me that, if the contemplative wing of this order be called to Internet surfing and commenting, that the active wing be called to prison ministry.