JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

I’ve appreciated the practical wisdom in Elizabeth’ Grigg’s posts including how to get over something. Admitting heartbrokenness is hard. I think it’s easier to try to fix the problem. Or at least try to feel as if the problem has been fixed. Throw something at it. Yet when we are heartbroken, we are also human.

In another post she tackled the mythical evil of procrastination.

Our actions are proportional to what we accomplish. As a result, we don’t procrastinate. We just lament that we don’t have enough sleep, or time, or effective painkillers and high quality coffee to make it through the day to our own expectations. The accusation of procrastination – with all its collegiate baggage – is off the mark for those of us who are in what I would call the critical years. Everything counts in large amounts, as they say. And procrastination is not just banished from our lives as if forcibly ejected, but unconsidered.

She argues that during the “critical years” we are merely trading one need for another, not procrastinating. For example, I feel I am constantly choosing between sleeping and accomplishing other tasks. I don’t feel I have leisure time to spend procrastinating.

Yet I do procrastinate. I do favor certain tasks over others. And sometimes, at night, I will choose sleep over finishing a project I don’t like. Or I’ll choose to pay the bills rather than send out an email that requires delicate wording.

Elisabeth’s ending resonated with me:

Rather than getting over our procrastination, I would like to understand how to sit on a porch for years at a time, listen to the phasing bzzzt sound of your and your neighbor’s bug zappers, drink mint juleps, and watch the kids grow up in the most passive sense imaginable.

Yes, I too want to watch the kids grow up in the delicious way one savors a summer evening on the porch. It is difficult to let go of goals. Each day I am teaching myself to pry my fingers off of my expectations and to hold onto the moment, elusive and ephemeral, the way one would hold a butterfly in the hand. Perhaps one could say I am procrastinating, postponing what I should be doing. Sure, I’m making a list of what I want to do when I’m fifty, when this stage of life is long past. But for now, let me sit on the porch. Pass the mint juleps, please.

I also cherished this piece by Koan Bremner titled On asking for, and receiving, and giving…help.

Asking for help – learning to accept it with good grace when it is offered – giving help freely when the opportunity arises.

I recommend it.

Like Koan, asking for help is one of the hardest things for me to do. Perhaps because I was the oldest child who had to run a household at times by herself from a young age. Perhaps because I don’t like to admit when I didn’t fit my own expectations and make the goals I had planned to make. Perhaps because I get caught up thinking others will think less of me if I ask for help.

Yet those people who ask me for help are some of the ones I admire most. It is true, as Koan says, that if we learn to ask for help, to give and receive help with grace, is crucial to our survival, physical, emotional, spiritual. We were not meant to live alone.