"sleeping girl" courtesy porah on sxc

I think we’ve talked about the fact that my fitness and nutrition emphasis has moved from stabilizing my depression (success!) to losing the 20-30 pounds of extra weight I’m carrying around.  I can’t remember if I mentioned that one factor contributing to that is my upcoming 20 year High School Reunion.

[Random Aside: As we are now all pushing middle age, it sorta makes our school battle cry, "Go, Cougars!" even more fitting. Particularly for the single/divorced ladies among us. But I digress.]

I had a little epiphany this week.  I am not willing to get up at the butt crack of dawn for extrinsic rewards.

First, a brief review of the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards:

• Extrinsic rewards are sort of second-hand rewards. You do something because you like something that results from the activity.
  • (Overly) Personal Example:  Getting my hiney to the YMCA to work out, so I do not embarrass myself at my upcoming 20 Year Reunion.
• Intrinsic rewards are more like mainlining enjoyment directly to your veins. You enjoy the thing itself, and don’t need additional incentive.
  • (Unnecessarily) Specific Example: Hanging out at Bean Street with my lappy and a latte, pecking away at blog posts and short stories and sketch scripts.

The last couple of weeks have taught me that extrinsic rewards, no matter how compelling, aren’t enough to roust me from a really comfy bed extra early…

… BUT… here’s the thing I realized this week:

Getting up at the butt crack of dawn for an intrinsically rewarding activity (writing/coffee shop “me time”) AUTOMAGICALLY builds in extra time to also do the stuff tied to extrinsic rewards (working out).  The point of the “getting up early” thing is to add another hour or two into my day.

Dave Navarro has covered the benefits of waking up early way more completely than I can in this post on Rock Your Day, (he has a whole category devoted to it) so if your ears perked up at the thought of getting more time in your day, toddle on over and check it out.

This post was just intended to be a quick case study. When I switched from “getting up early to work out” to “getting up early to have coffee shop time”–I actually navigated my butt outta bed. And I’ll have sufficient time to work in a workout as well.

[Additional Important Note: I also recruited my spouse to help me with my "getting up early" effort. If getting up early is a battle, recruit allies.]

Any epiphanies, large or small, to share? Drop ‘em in the comments. Feel the love.

Saturday was the last day of Inlaw Invasion 2010.  My husband’s parents live in Tucson, Arizona.  Every year, they come out and stay anywhere from a few weeks to a few months with us. I love my husband’s folks, but after the 3 month invasion a couple years ago, it took me a solid week to get my eye to stop twitching.

I’m an INFP.  Note the “I” there, which stands for “Introvert.”  Also, I’m an HSP (you don’t even want to know how high I scored on that self-test), so too much stimulus frays my nerves pretty quickly.  So having houseguests, even excellent houseguests you love, for almost a month is pretty much going to leave me a frazzled, twitchy mess by about the end of week 2.

At any rate, their last day with us was Saturday, and they had planned to take us to see Robert Shaw, who is apparently a kickass Elvis impersonator who performs in Brown County, Indiana during the warmer months and Tucson during the cooler months . [Aside: How do I get a job where I migrate with the seasons? Because if I could have southern Indiana's spring, summer and fall combined with Arizona's winter, that would be pretty flippin' sweet.]

But first, we had to go to Maddie’s football game at 10AM and watch her cheer.  No problem.  Cheerleading, lunch, a trip to Brown County, hanging around the shops in Little Nashville, fake Elvis, and then back home.  No worries.

Except Friday, we noticed the water in the laundry closet.  At first, we thought it was coming from the washer.  Then it became increasingly clear that the rusty old hot water heater was probably the culprit.

Okay.  We can still do this.  Maddie’s game at 10, Home Depot for a new water heater at 11, lunch, then proceed as planned, fixing the hot water heater on Sunday.  No problem.

Chris and his dad, brimming with school spirit and enthusiasm.

The game went as planned.  Maddie cheered. Her team won.  It was awesomesauce.  And then Chris crawled under the house.

There was a brief, scary moment when he was convinced the water leak was in the wall, meaning we’d need to call a plumber and tear out said wall.  Then we realized that the toilet was not sealing right, and running all the time.  Which probably explains our ridiculous water bills for the last few months.

Grampa French stayed with the kiddos while Grandma French, Chris and I went to Home Depot to pick up the hot water heater and a toilet repair kit.  Chris’ mom graciously offered to front us the money for the hot water heater, since we were smack in the middle of our pay period.  Also, I had the opportunity to share with them on the way out my scintillating story about writing a radio commercial for a toilet repair kit when I worked in radio at age 18.

So we get back home, and Chris is like “I can totally fix the toilet before we have to leave for Brown County.”

OK.  No problem.  We won’t have time to browse around Nashville, but we didn’t have any money to do more than window shop anyway, so we’re golden, right?

And we would have been, too.  If the toilet tank hadn’t cracked and broken into four pieces when Chris went to reattach it to the seat after putting the new guts into it.

Our oldest is a teenager.  We’re good with him watching the younger niblet for the evening.  But asking him to do so with no functioning potty in the house seemed a little mean, even for us.

So we started scrambling around, calling everyone we knew to see if they could have the kids over. Because by God, we weren’t missing the Elvis impersonator on Chris’ parents’ last day here.  Broken potties and leaking hot water heaters be damned.

Apparently, it was a busy weekend for lots of people.  We finally managed to get my brother-in-law, who was free to have the kids over (my sister having taken their kids to Holiday World.)  I shuttled the kids to BILs, explaining the whole situation.

Well, in the words of Inigo Montoya, I sum up.  No time for a full explanation.  But even so, he mentioned I should call my dad, because he happened to have a spare, nearly brand new hot water heater he had no use for. (Score!  No need to go into inlaw indebtedness!)

So I called Dad while texting Google to see how long it’s supposed to take to get to Nashville from Palmyra.  1 HR 36 minutes.  I love you, Google SMS.

It was 3:35 PM.  Elvis went on at 5:00.  Damn you, Google SMS.

Dad called me back and said I could definitely have the hot water heater.  I pulled into my driveway to discover Chris and his parents already locking up the house.  We shifted seats like a Chinese fire drill, and left Pal at 3:40 PM.

We pulled into the Red Barn at 5:11, having driven up 135 the entire way to 46.  If you’re not from here, you should know that 135 between Salem and Nashville has roughly the same curvature as The Tail of the Dragon.

But  we did get to see Elvis. And he and the Lonely Street Band really were very good.  Chris’ parents seemed to really enjoy it, and I enjoyed watching them, although I think Mom French was a little disappointed that she didn’t get one of his silk scarves.  She mentioned later that she’d already gotten lei’d at the luau they’d attended in Tucson.

Show of hands for who thinks I managed to not break into giggles at my MIL’s announcement that she got lei’d by Elvis?  Um, nope.  I don’t think I could have resisted even if I hadn’t been a jittery mass of raw nerves.

So we had a nice steak dinner at Holy Cow in Nashville with Chris, his parents, and his cousin and her boyfriend (who had been waiting for us at the Red Barn).  We drove out to pick up the kids, and Maddie wanted to spend the night with her cousins.  So all the parents were down with that.  She said her goodbyes to the grandparents, since they were leaving early Sunday morning, and we all crashed into our beds.  That was Saturday.

I woke up at 9AM Sunday, and Chris’ folks had already left for Arizona.  That’s when Chris reminded me that my nephew’s birthday party was at noon, and we still had a broken potty and hot water heater to deal with.

I was very much in favor of starting off  the week with indoor plumbing.  So I agreed to pick up Maddie from Sister #2′s house, and pick up a gift for Sister #1′s son’s birthday.

I was hoping I could manage that in time for all of us to arrive in one car at Sister #1′s house.  Probably because I was delirious from exhaustion.  I picked up Maddie, as well as a hot tip for a good birthday present (two words: Paper Jamz) from Sister #2, and headed off to Wal-Mart.  After picking up the present, it was immediately clear that the men and women of the French family were going to have to arrive by separate conveyance, or else late.  We opted for separate conveyance.

The birthday party was great.  The weather was chilly, so when the sisters and I went out to the patio to eat, we pretty much had two whole minutes of uninterrupted peace and quiet.

But  alas, too soon it was time to face the indoor plumbing issue.  Dad volunteered to help out, which relieved Chris a great deal, since he and copper pipe are not exactly best buds.  We (and by “we,” I mean mostly Dad and Chris, while I watched) replaced the hot water heater, returned the new one to Home Depot, picked up a new potty, and the guys got it installed.

Somewhere in there, Maddie had a meltdown over her inability to master a double crochet, and Josh shared with me the beginnings of the chorus of a song he’s writing.

But in the end, we started the week with functional indoor plumbing, and nobody attempted to strangle anybody else in the house (although we did need to let Maddie use the throw pillows as a punching bag at one point on Sunday).

Welcome to Monday.  Population: 1 grateful me.

[For our purposes, "bandwidth" = "my ongoing, finite capacity of time and energy."]

Effectively, I have failed to balance my time and energy budget for at least the last year, probably longer.

A little over a month ago, I agreed to take on a pro-bono web project for my church’s counseling ministry. My pastor asked me, very sincerely,

“How do you know that you’ll have the time to do this?”

I was sort of stumped by the question for a moment, and then I responded “Well, last fall I was taking college classes two hours two nights a week. So I can work this project in during those times.”

I was ignoring that those two college classes didn’t actually fit into my time and energy capacity, either. I got an incomplete in my public speaking class, ironically because I was travelling too much on business to do public speaking to meet the attendance requirement.

So, probably not surprisingly, I have not made a lot of progress on the project that was supposed to theoretically fit in the slot vacated by something that didn’t actually fit, either.

I think it’s time to stop the insanity, friends.

Planning your bandwidth budget is a lot like planning your financial budget (not that I have a fabulous track record with that, either). You can’t realistically and honestly budget it till you know how much you really have available. And you can’t know that if you’ve been running at a constant deficit for as long as you can remember.

When the criteria for how you spend your time and energy is “what fire needs dousing worst?” it’s exactly like when your criteria for budgeting your money is “pay whatever is about to be shut-off/foreclosed/repossessed.” Which is not a fun place to live.

And I’ve been in both places a lot, so there’s no judgment here. I’m a pilgrim on the journey like everyone else. If you’re looking for a guide or a guru, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m happy to walk alongside you.

A little parable one of my mentors shared with me several years ago talked about time/bandwidth as a jar, and the things you wanted to do as rocks (the most important stuff), pebbles, sand and water (the little stuff). You have to figure out what’s a rock, what’s a pebble, what’s sand and what’s water. You start with an empty jar and the rocks, work your way down, and what fits, fits.

Next week, I go on vacation. For a whole week. Nine days of uninterrupted unscheduled time.

It could be the greatest thing ever. I could go completely bonkers two days in. Hard to say.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

My floors, they are teh awesome now.

Last weekend I had a plan.  I would spend that weekend getting a big home improvement project completed.  Then I’d spend this last week getting caught up on my work and blogging, so I could take this weekend and Monday through Wednesday of next week off to do a personal retreat.  The idea was to deal with my increasing level of burnout and come back refreshed and refocused.

My daughter got sick Sunday, which meant I had to take Monday off from work to stay home with her.  Tuesday morning, we got word that my husband Chris’ grandma had passed on.  So most of Tuesday was spent running my daughter to the doctor’s appointment, keeping a grieving Chris busy/distracted, and preparing to have houseguests (his parents were coming in from Tucson).

Wednesday I spent at work, frantically preparing to pass off my daily responsibilities to my coworkers for the next week and making travel arrangements.  Thursday, I had one last client meeting before traveling to Danville/Stanford, Kentucky for the visitation, where I spent the evening wrangling two bored kids till 10:30 pm.

The French Family: Back in Black. And lavender. But mostly black.

Friday was the funeral, burial and funeral meal.  I caught a quick nap after the meal, before driving back to Indiana.  Saturday morning I had breakfast with a friend, and it all caught up with me at once: sick kid + constant running + already low on internal resources = getting so sick that I literally slept the entire day.  I laid down at about 11 am and aside from getting up briefly to take some Nyquil and eat a bratwurst, I was out till 7:30 this morning.

Today, the kids are arguing while the Wii is playing full blast, and my father-in-law is talking on the phone so loudly that I think surely, if the person on the other end is in the same area code, she can hear him without using the phone.  I tried going into my bedroom and shutting the door to write, but my daughter, who has been talking non-stop for six hours, followed me before I got two sentences complete.

in reality, I'm left-handed, but this was the only way I could take the picture.

So now I’m writing, longhand, from the front seat of my truck.  It’s started to rain a bit, and flocks of geese are honking overhead as they make their way north for the warmer months.  The field that is my next door neighbor sits fallow and quiet for now.

Between the rain and the geese and the birds, it’s not that much quieter out here, I suppose.  But it’s a different kind of noise.  I don’t feel like I need to attempt to tune in to the rain in case it asks me something.  The geese are noisy, but they make no demands of my attention.

I’ve been thinking about attention a lot lately.  My attention can’t be a gift if it’s not freely given.  It can’t be a resource if I’m not allowed to conserve it.

I’ve recently been struggling to balance being responsive to other people while also being responsive to my own soul and its care.

People will not stop making demands of me.

People will not stop making demands of me.

People will not stop making demands of me.

So the answer to “how do I balance my external and internal responsibilities?” is not going to be “take care of myself when others stop wanting anything from me.”

It’s not going to be ditching my family and other relationships and responsibilities altogether to go “find myself.”

It’s probably going to be lovingly, compassionately telling people “no” a lot more often.

It may even be lovingly, compassionately telling people “Hell, no” from time to time. (Because some people seem to have a really hard time hearing just plain “no.”)

It may mean backing away from people who won’t take a loving “No” for an answer.

Because no one benefits from my soul walking around half-starved and empty.  And there are some really important yes’s I’m not getting around to, because first come, first served stinks as a methodology for prioritization.

img courtesy sdamsgaard on sxc

Three weeks ago, I started blogging every weekday here, and commenting more often on blogs where I found interesting stories happening.

That change has already brought new connections with people, new readers, and a little recognition (which is always nice).

Two weeks ago, my husband and I started paying more attention to our finances.

That change has already brought increased peace and decreased anxiety, as well as some really amazing conversations between the two of us about what we value.

A week ago, I started paying more attention to what I eat, trying to eat out less often, and restarting my yoga practice.

It’s a little early to see the results of that change, other than it’s helping with the “paying attention to the finances” change that came before it.

Thursday, our family went back to our community group from church for the first time since summer.

Yesterday, I had coffee with a friend from that group before work.

But then again, I haven’t blogged here since last Thursday.  I missed Friday and yesterday.

The big lesson I gained from 2009?  That my life has a capacity.  It has finite volume.

Only so many things will fit.  I know this, because I hit my capacity last year.  I may in fact have exceeded my life’s safe capacity last year.

Last year, I made a conscious decision to let things in that I ordinarily would have kept out.  I let other things shape me, push me, expand the borders of who I thought I could be. I was a smaller me, this time last year (and not in the physical sense–in the personal growth sense).  I know that I’m capable of a lot more than I ever, ever thought I could be.

But by December, I was like a stretched-out sweater that had seen one too many laundry cycles outside its recommended care instructions.

It wasn’t pretty.

By the end of the year, I was clearing out EVERYTHING.  I emptied my office of personal stuff.  I emptied my house of a lot of junk.  I stopped getting together with even my closest group of girlfriends for a bit.  I considered huge, “pick up the family and move to a better climate” life changes.

It was “FIRE SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!!!” time, baby.

And then, I spent a week just sitting in the empty.  Enjoying the empty.  Revelling in the empty. But empty gets boring–quickly.

So three weeks ago,  I started blogging here again.  Which takes us back to the beginning of this post.

I’m adding things back into the space that is my life.  The only one I believe God is going to give me.

I’m doing this really intentionally.  Things aren’t going back in just because they were in before.

I’m doing it really slowly.  Because I don’t want to be three or four big things past capacity before I realize I’m past capacity this time.

I’m pacing myself, and I never, ever pace myself.

It’s not a pace that is set by anything other than my own natural energy and enthusiasm, but it’s still different than what I’m used to doing.

When you’re burned out completely, you don’t need a recharge.  In fact, you get to a point where you resent any attempts to recharge you just enough to keep doing what you’ve been doing.  Because that’s not going to help matters.

You don’t need to “top off” your energy tank.  You need to empty and refill with high-grade.

What’s “high grade” for you?  And what needs to get siphoned out first?

I’m currently a somewhat lapsed devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system for personal productivity and organization, FlyLady‘s household management system, David K. Reynold‘s Constructive Living therapy, Dr. Willard Harley’s Marriage Builders program, and Sacred Space/Pray-As-You-Go‘s daily prayer practice.

What do all these things have in common? They each touch on big, massive, shudder-when-you-think-about-it Major Life Goals.

• Getting your schedule under control and making sure you get what’s most important to you accomplished.
• Creating an uncluttered, nurturing, non-chaotic home environment for your family.
• Managing your neurotic emotions and living consciously and gratefully in the present.
• Protecting and enriching your lifelong romantic partnership.
• Developing a rich, reflective inner spiritual life centered in the presence of God.

Whoa.  Big stuff, there, right?  It makes my head hurt just thinking about any one of them, much less all of them.  But the thing is, I want all of them.

Except each of these different systems, different programs or frameworks, focus on the small stuff. They don’t focus on the elephant you’ve got to devour.  They focus on the next bite.  What’s my Next Action?  How much clutter can I clear in a 15 minute burst of activity?  What needs doing, despite what I’m feeling?   What is the most effective thing I can do each day to demonstrate love to my spouse?  What’s happened in the last 24 hours, and where do I feel God’s presence or absence?

These are manageable things. I can think about each of these questions without feeling a headache or a vague sense of panic and overwhelm.  I can attack any (and maybe all) of those questions in the course of a single day, with all the energy and enthusiasm I have available for that day.

Ultimately, it comes down to practices. A “practice” is something we do because we’re not perfect–but we’d like to be better.   Usually, it’s something we have to do daily, or at most weekly, because if we don’t, we get “out of practice.”  We lose what we’ve learned, to an extent.   But the nice thing is, most practices are like riding a bike–we may get rusty, but if we mastered it once, we can generally pick it up again.

With a little more practice.

img courtesy torli