On messing with the mind
maybe I am too distracted to deal with my stuff
But this year, I can’t seem to untangle the confusion that is in my head. I find myself wishing for winter. Are we doing too many things at once?
It’s Saturday morning and we’re walking around the house trying to get a better view of the back patio by looking out different windows.
“Are the paver stones covering half of the bottom step?” says my spouse Janyce, “That can’t be right.”
The workmen have left for the weekend and everything is exactly where they left it. There’s a tractor parked sideways, still filled with sand in the shovel, and deep wet ruts span the entire length of the backyard. Everywhere you look, you see random tools strewn about, half-unwrapped pallets full of pavers, and piles of stone and dirt mounds. Everything feels like a huge muddy mess.
I google bluestone and fieldstone steps and pull up a page of images of back slider steps that abut stone patios. Then I walk over to meet Janyce standing at the dining room slider, frowning at the newly constructed steps.
“Look at these,” I say, and hold my laptop in front of her face, “They obviously didn’t dig down far enough.”
Janyce is one step ahead of me and has already texted the foreman. “You didn’t mean to leave it this way, right?” she said, “The paver stones cutting off half of the bottom step? The steps should all be the same height.” She sent along a picture.
“Did he respond?”I say.
“Yep, he just texted back and he wrote, ‘I will have to fix it.’”
Now we’re both annoyed and frazzled. We’ve missed the brief window of time we had to get to our morning class at the gym. Swirly feels it too and she runs over to jump up on us and lick our faces, only to run back to her chair, and then to her bed, and back again to her chair.
“Did she eat?” I say.
“No, she’s all jacked up on nervous energy. She can feel it in us,” says Janyce.
“Why is everything so hard lately?” Janyce said to me last week. I know what she means. I remember now why it took us five years to finally put in a patio after we replaced the slider door and tore down the old wooden deck. It’s not just the money. I think it’s actually because of the mess and what the mess can do to your mind.
I’m usually ready to take on new projects especially in the fall. But this year, I can’t seem to untangle the confusion that is in my head. I find myself wishing for winter. Janyce feels it, too. And we’re wondering what it’s all about. Are we doing too many things at once?
Mel Robbins talks about how sometimes people can deal with a feeling of overwhelm by constantly clearing things away and rearranging their stuff. She says that when you do that, though, you’re actually not moving forward and you are just distracting yourself and trying to avoid something.
But what about when everywhere you look you just see a mess? What about when you feel so paralyzed and out of the rhythm of life because of all the visual clutter? Right now the garage is full of piles for the transfer station and laundry, my car is full of dog fur and random cups tossed onto the floor, and when I look down at my toes, the blue polish has peeled off several of them. Our tidy house is still holding on to some semblance of order, but I feel those seams starting to pull apart a bit, too.
“Are you okay?” said Janyce last Sunday night after we had set down bags of groceries and dropped our weekend overnight bags in the kitchen by the closet door.
I was furiously scrubbing our copper sink that had turned its familiar greenish patina over the weekend. I found a few crumbs in the flatware drawer so I also had all the knives out on the counter, too.
“It’s just re-entry” I said, starting to leave the sink project to begin emptying the dryer. And I thought that was all it was, but now it’s a week later and I’m still more frazzled than ever.
“Are you still writing that blog?” says Janyce, entering the kitchen with her arms full of our farm share produce and a folded fuzzy blanket still warm from the laundromat. It’s nearly 3pm and I’m now in the kitchen distracting myself by making a salad with all the leftover vegetables and olives and scraps of parmesan cheese I could find in the refrigerator. I left a whole chicken resting on the counter next to a bunch of summer squash and carrots lined up on the cutting board to make for dinner later, but then suddenly found myself making a salad.
“I can’t write. I don’t have a flow,” I say, depositing big chunks of lettuce and vegetables from the salad bowl onto deep oval plates. I hand one to Janyce. “I’m going to roast this chicken next.”
“That’s good. Just do something else for a while,” she says. “Remember, perfection is the enemy of good enough,” she says, setting a blush wine bottle down on the edge of the counter. “And by the way, I am on a roll getting through the stuff in the garage.”
There it is. I’m distracted yet again, but this time by Janyce’s sunny, folksy way. I laugh under my breath at her retort of perfection is the enemy of good enough and I remember that just this morning I heard her fussing with the boxes in the garage while muttering under her breath “no good deed goes unpunished.” That’s my Janyce, taking care of all the mess and easing my cluttered mind.