Doing Unimportant Things

Over three days, I've been sharing three major take-aways that I've had from reading the children's book The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (Random House Children's Books.)   First, I explored becoming a Miracle Maker, and I challenged all of my readers to go make a miracle.  Yesterday, I learned to notice what is often missed.  Now, I will look at doing unimportant things.  Today's lesson is particularly stinging for me.  It is one that I am certain I am better at than I was 20 years ago, but I mastery is a long way off.  On his quest, our young protagonist Milo is challenged to only do unimportant things.  Here is the conversation in which he asks why he should only do unimportant things.

"But why do only unimportant things?" asked Milo.  The answer: "Think of all the trouble it saves...If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult.  You just won't have the time.  For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and...you'd never know how much time you were wasting." 

What I "really should be doing" is writing more--writing this blog more regularly again, finishing the memoir I started during the winter, and placing The Game Called Life on Amazon as an ebook, a process begun last fall.  What else I should be doing is exercising more.  Why don't I what's important to me?  My answer is always that I don't have time.  More truthfully, the answer might be I am doing unimportant things. I had almost two hours to watch a movie last night, and I've had time at least two nights in the last 10 to watch mindless (truly mindless) television.  Those are unimportant things.

But, the answer to the "Why don't I?" question isn't as straight-forward as it may seem.  I work long hours, and I come home so brain-dead that making dinner, making lunch and coffee for the next day, and falling on the couch to watch something mindless are the extent to which my brain will function.  That, however, is an easy-out, and it begs the more probing question, "Why do I work so many hours?"

I'd like to say that it is because I care about my customers, and I want to make sure they get the services they need in a timely manner.  That is absolutely true.  I'd like to say it is because my boss has no clue what she has assigned me, and it is way more than any human could handle in the 40 hours that I am supposed to work.  That is absolutely true.  Yet, while both are absolutely true, there is more to the story.

I am a recovering work addict.  Maybe back-sliding work addict is more accurate.  Like all addictions, once an addict, always an addict.  A person who isn't a work addict would have gone to my boss and put all the stuff on my plate in front of her, and then asked, "What don't you want me to do?"  I haven't because I am afraid the answer will (in other words) be, "Don't take care of the customers," and instead do some meaningless task that someone will never notice. 

Are the things that I do at work unimportant?  Some are.  Could I work smarter to eventually get ahead of the curve?  Certainly, but my bosses can't see the strategy beyond today's demands.  So in order to protect my important work, I do way too much. I work this way because I am a work addict.  While I have made progress over the years, I have a long way to go.  I totally own it.

(I gave up fall and spring housecleaning, a Midwestern practice where every inch of the house is cleaned within a few days twice each year, decades ago. You'll probably find the same dust bunnies under my bed that were there a year ago. I am now OK with friends visiting and seeing my almost-always-cluttered desk, which would have mortified me a few years ago.  I've learned to live with the cracking paint on my balcony instead of repainting it, so that I have time to sit and contemplate the forest a few feet further away.)

Approaching life so that the writing, which feeds my soul, and the exercise that physically reinvigorates me drop off my plate is ripping the soul from me.  Sacrificing these essential activities for lower priority activities just isn't working any more.  When I read Milo's question and his collaborator's answer over the weekend, it pierced me.  You will notice that I have written three nights in a row.  Yeah!! 

Tonight has been difficult.  I had to choose between exercise, writing, getting the fob which allows me to enter the building validated, and helping a neighbor during his vacation.  Exercise ate it tonight.  Tomorrow evening it will most likely be writing that will slip, but I will get exercise walking to my dance class and light exercise in the class.  I am making peace with that and even contemplating that I might write on my iPhone app on the train when I am coming home. 

What is really important about making these hard choices is that I am really making them. That is what living with intention is really about: making conscious choices, based on my important priorities.  I am not doing unimportant things like falling onto the couch to watch mindless TV.  I am looking at my priorities and choosing among them.  If I do this every day, who knows one day I might actually get that memoir done and The Game Called Life may soon be available for your Kindle.  Better yet, one day I might actually ask the boss to take something off my plate.

Noticing What Often Escapes the Eye

Yesterday I mentioned that I'd just finished reading The Phantom Tollbooth*, Norton Juster's delightful children's book that I think should be required reading for every adult over 35.  I am not sure that I had realized until I started writing this post that the challenges, which are faced by young protagonist Milo on his quest, might be viewed as the tollbooths, or impediments, that stop us from doing all that we might do on the highway of life. 

That's why I think the book should be required reading for adults because in the process of becoming adults and getting us ready to succeed, we are often cautioned out of living the life that might be ours to live.  How is it that we can learn and gain wisdom without being stopped on the miraculous journey that is ours to live?  Milo "pays the tolls" and learns to embrace the challenge the proverbial "tollbooths" along the way stop him.

Almost every page of The Phantom Tollbooth carries a lesson that I needed to learn...again and again.  While I appreciate that I may be projecting, I think many of my adult friends could also benefit from the lessons.  I won't burden you with 250 lessons, but yesterday, today, and tomorrow I will share ones that I know in my heart I need to learn.  Yesterday was on accomplishing the impossible.  Today, I will write about noticing what often escapes the eye.  Tomorrow will be about doing unimportant things.  By that point, if I haven't tantalized you into reading this book, I will dangle the carrot of Jules Feiffer's wonderful illustration as added incentive.

On Milo's quest, he encounters a number of characters, some of them help him on his journey, and others--the demons--impede his progress.  As he is parting from a visit with Alec, a most unusual boy of Milo's own age, his new friend gives him a present for his journey.  It is a very special telescope.  As Alec presents Milo with the glass, he says,

"Carry this with you on your journey...for there is much worth noticing that often escapes the eye. Through it you can see everything from the tender moss in a sidewalk crack to the glow of the farthest star--and, most important of all, you can see things as they really are, not just as they seem to be.  It's my gift to you."

 

"...see things as they are..."  I've been accused of being a wide-eyed optimist and believing in magic, even miracles.  (See yesterday's post.) I proudly cop to it all.  A former partner even cut out an old Peanuts cartoon strip, which suggested that my head was in the clouds, and I needed someone to keep my feet on the ground.  While I am flattered that he recognized that my head was in the clouds, I am not sure that our feet are supposed to be on the ground--I know mine aren't.  Where's the fun in that? 

Yet, having achieved a graduate degree in business, I have been well-schooled in looking for the potential flaw or the impediment to a plan and then planning for the problem.  By necessity, focusing on flaws or impediments causes us to miss "what often escapes the eye"--the miracles. as it were.

 

Even as I finished reading this book, what I recall is all the impediments and demons Milo overcame.  What? There were a lot of helpers on the journey, not least of which is the fact that "time flies," and could carry Milo and his companions over the demons, making it possible to accomplish the impossible.  Now how often do we think of "time flying" as a facilitator of miracles?

In a world focused on identifying and mitigating risks, it seems to me that we each need to have one of these special telescopes to help us "notice what often escapes the eye."  I can sit and count dozens of personal miracles in my life--times when things just worked out almost as if "by magic," but my graduate school training did not teach me to mitigate risks by planning on miracles.  However, miracles have saved my skin at least as much as my planning for risk mitigation.

The truly remarkable thing is that when I focus on the risks, I miss the miracles, the gratitude, and the joy that come from feeling supported in life.  I miss the feeling of being in the middle of a miracle, and it is an awesome feeling at that--a giddiness unlike any other.  I am not sure when the tide in my life happened.  I know I focused on the miracles long after graduate school, having my books published in multiple languages, and even having doors to global consulting magically open for me. 

Even after the combination of the dot.com bust and 9/11 sucked the life out of my publishing, coaching, and consulting life, I retained my joy in miracles.  I remember feeling intense gratitude as I sat to write The Game Called Life, at that time.  I'd been hungry for the time to write, and during what I thought was a pause in my business, I had time to write my first piece of spiritual fiction.  I was giddy.  I was giddy a week later with the first draft done to receive a significant financial gift from former clients.  I said the Universe was paying me for writing.  I was giddy when I walked in a dance not long after that and learned of a university teaching job that I was hired for three days later.

I certainly saw the miracle in an unsolicited job offer just when the lack of integrity of a former employer was making my work environment intolerable.  And the offer was for more international work: how much more of an miracle could I have asked for?  I even saw the miracle in the ease of my hiring for my current position at an Agency which had been the focus of study and writing for 20 years.  Could I neglect the delight I felt when a significant cash gift arrived from my father's estate 28 years after his death...on the very day I had closed on the purchase of a real "fixer-upper" home?

Somehow, I've recognized these small miracles when they happened, but along the way, the focus on the flaws has robbed me of my optimism and with it my ability to see that, by and large, things are working pretty well in my world.  Yeah!

Tollbooths slow our journey, usually for a fraction of a minute.  (Maybe less with EZPass.)  They are not intended to stop us.  All of the snags which Milo encountered slowed him a bit, but they didn't stop him.  He remained focused on his intention--to succeed in his quest.  I think I've allowed the tollbooths in my life to slow me to a halt, rather than being a minor impediment.  My intention is and has always been to help the world to connect through love.  It is time for me to move through this tollbooth that I've allowed to become a semi-permanent stop.

I wish for myself and everyone out there who has been tainted by graduate school, the business world, project management tenets, the media, and every other beast our modern world has created to distract us from seeing the truly miraculous world in which we live one of these special telescopes.  It is time to make some miracles. Wishing you a day of noticing what often escapes the eye...

*The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster with illustrations by Jules Feiffer, Random House Children's Books, 1961.