Best
Laid Plans
Girlfriend is out of town this week, so I
have had the chance to engage—unimpeded and uninterrupted—in what used to be my
favorite morning ritual. I wake, and
stay there in the covers, thinking through my day.
Except.
The ritual has changed. Or maybe
I have changed. This morning, I was thinking
through this problem with the renovation—this half-inch gap were drywall needs
to go; this gap I probably should have planned for. I discovered a solution. As so often happens in these lazy morning
ponderings, the answer floated in and rested there before my eyes: simple, realistic, doable.
I’ll make this small confession: just before I started this sabbatical, I
spent some Advent moments thinking about angels. Coveting a visit, actually. Thinking just how cool it just might be, to
have someone appear and tell me what to do.
I considered, also, that angels mostly bring bad news, and figured it
was probably quite all right that I lived in an age sans visitations.
Except that I’ve begun to reimagine angels and their messages. Maybe they’re not all so big and
shining. Maybe small, still voices
count. This morning, while I wasn’t
really thinking, and the answer to the problem simply came, I wondered: would an angel talk to me of drywall and of
1x2s?
And so I had this shining moment of the
problem solved, with all these glittering angelic implications.
And then I had a problem. I kept laying there, the thoughts of angels
disappeared, and I began to think all on my own. Is there time, with Girlfriend gone, to regrout the kitchen and the bathtub? Do I have everything I need? How will I get it—which day should I
drive? Do we have the money? What about the other jobs we haven’t finished
in the kitchen? In no time, I was
pressed against the mattress by sheer dread—too much to do, not time enough or
money, neither the skills or focus, energy nor nerve.
A few months back, under the direction
of a self-help book, I gave up three habits:
jeans, and beer, and not shaving my legs. The exercise called for me to give up, for 3
months, things that others might identify with me. In case, I was confusing these habits with
myself. For 3 months, I felt girly-er. I was deciding what to wear on my smooth
legs, and what it was that I should drink as was I posed there on a local bar
stool. Then things got back to
normal.
But the exercise awoke a certain
sensibility—the notion that I could confuse a habit with identity. I noticed, for example, work deadlines were
just sliding by. For weeks, I simply
reasserted them “it really really has to be
turned in this week.” It didn’t work—I
just felt really really bad when Friday came and went without
accomplishment. I imagined I was
cracking up.
Instead, a habit wasn’t working any
longer. Where deadlines used to
motivate, now they simply sucked up all my energy in worry. Some new-found internal strike brigade
started marching at the moment that a date was set. It took some work to figure out just how to
work sans deadlines; I also had to figure out there was some work I simply
wouldn’t do. The lesson that I took from
this experience—and from this self-help exercise—is that it took a while longer
to discover that I’d changed, because I had so fully identified myself with
this habit of meeting deadlines.
This morning, I considered dreams and
goals. These seem like strange things to
give up—they seem so positive, so bright.
But then again, I hear you feel great on heroin. When finally I heaved myself from bed, I
thought through what I’d just done to myself.
I’d let myself keep dreaming, past the problem and solution. And then I’d let the dreams turn into
goals—the grout, the kitchen projects.
And then the goals had given birth to plans that would obtain
themselves, and plans had shifted into obligations, expectations, things to
do. And then they weren’t so dreamy
anymore.
Again, and rats, it seems I’ve
changed. It seems this habit that I
have, this planning thing, just isn’t working anymore. Maybe it’s become too rote; perhaps it’s just
adulthood, time and money. If I can
dream it, I can do it, can’t I? And if I
can, I guess I should. Except, then,
damn, even all these days away start filling up with obligations—which doesn’t
feel like an easy burden, like the light yoke Jesus mentions. Dread and failure, just like vultures, perch
in wait along the phone lines. And I’ve
got this flock of harpies in the distance; they screech about accomplishment,
and plans.
I remember, as kid, climbing out of bed
on those long empty summer mornings.
Sometimes my mother called me.
Most times, I called myself.
Visions of the day spent at the pool or the by the river, imaginings of
building things—these lured me from the sheets and into sunshine. But these weren’t dreams like what I’m
dreaming now. What I remember is a kind
of energy—a current running through my limbs, a skin-response to temperature
and temperament, the day. I want it
back—want to respond again to all the air around me, to the tilt of sunlight
and the scent the wind is bringing in, to what’s awake in me on any given
morning.
There are stories in the Bible—and in
other myths—about when angels come to visit.
It’s a time to lay your plans aside, to be hospitable. When people do this, wildest dreams come
true; when people don’t, there’s devastation.
There is this quiet kind of ruin in my soul, that brought me to this
place of laying down my work. Now it has
brought me even further. I am trying, at
the moment, to lay down all my plans, to slow down and to welcome whatever
these days bring.
[The exercise on dropping habits comes from The Not So Big Life,
by Sarah Susanka—buy it
from an independent bookstore!
Jesus promises light burdens, easy yokes, abundant
life, etc
in many spots, including Matthew 11:30.
For direction on entertaining angels, see Sarah
and
Abraham (Genesis 18) or the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon;
for warnings against inhospitality, see what
happened
to Baucis and Philemon’s
neighbors, or
© 2008
Melissa Capers