Category: Essay

Part of my belief about change was expressed by my friend, Pat. As I visited with her one day, she told me about her recent visit with another friend, whom she had not seen for many years. 

Her friend said to her, “My, Pat! How you’ve changed!” 

Pat replied, “No! I have not changed. I have merely become that which I’ve always been becoming.” 

This is one of the best explanations of change that I have ever heard or read.

Think about all the changes that have occurred “since we were young.” Many things have changed. When I was still small, we lived in what would now be called “Yuppie” suburban Detroit. Waking up lazily on a late summer Sunday morning brought through the open window myriad neighborhood sounds. First, the clatter of Mr. Phelger’s hand-pushed lawn mower brought with it the smell of the fresh-mown grass. Later in the morning, we heard Kenny Miller’s gas-powered model airplane. Even later, I heard the slap of the Martins’ kitchen screen door as Dr. Martin went out to check his rose bushes for aphids. 

In the summer of 2005, I drove down our old street. The front yards were run down and the lawns were no longer neatly mown. The houses were unkempt. Surely no Yuppie would be caught with an SUV in any driveway on that street. We had left there a month before I turned eleven, on June 19, 1950, the day the Korean War started. I’m pretty sure, from letters my parents received from our former neighbors, that we—not at all on purpose—were the first to leave in what became a veritable exodus. 

When we arrived in Tennessee, seven of us lived for a year-and-a-half in a two-room log cabin with an add-on kitchen and nominal—but not-functional—bathroom that for the first summer had no electricity, running water, plumbing, or other amenities. The family doctor still made house calls when I left for college. We’d had a telephone in Michigan, but we did not get one in Tennessee until I turned seventeen. I had a panic attack the first time I had to call home during my first semester in college—long distance, on a dial phone in a booth. 

I never lived in a home with a TV until I married in 1964. Only five years later, in July, 1969, that TV died an untimely death while my first husband, Richard, and our children and I waited for the live video to return the pictures of the last moments of the Lunar Excursion Module’s descent to the moon. We rushed three blocks to Montgomery Ward and bought a tiny new TV. We got back just in time to see the lunar landing and hear Neil Armstrong announce: “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” 

Look in our homes, in our driveways, in the stores, on our map, out in space. Can you point to any place at all where nothing has changed? Can you name a single change, any one of them, that happened all by itself without a (human) cause? Can you point to any single place where you have not had an effect, in some way? 

All these new technical gadgets! Games! Cell phones! Computers! Blogs! Twitter! Texting! WiFi! Who needs them? Do you have a GPS navigation system in your car? Have you thought about getting one? Why? Who among us does not have a cell phone? Or a computer? Did you have one when you were 25? Well, why do you have one now?  

If this is not your first cell phone or TV, how did you decide which one to buy this time? Did you just walk into the store and buy the first one you came to? Not on your life! You had some ideas about which features you wanted, and you looked at a bunch of models and compared them, and decided which had the best combination of features for the money, and bought that one. You drove change, because the manufacturer took note of the features you bought. When a new TV is designed, the most frequently chosen features this month will be built into the next technology for a new TV, cell phone, GPS, computer game, car, microwave, and food on the Space Shuttle. You’ve bought re-constituted freeze-dried food, even if you haven’t thought about it, and “they” have counted up how many “orange-flavored” boxes were bought, and how many “lemon-flavored” boxes were bought; you can bet your sweet bippy!

If you read the paper and watch the news on TV and engage in loud discussions about the “state the world is coming to,” do you go beyond that to act in such a way as to change the course of events? Or are you like me? I have not watched TV for more than thirteen years, I refuse to read a newspaper, and I have no desire to talk about any of it. Other than the unavoidable impact of the covert and hidden things over which I have no control, there seems to be no way I can have any real impact on (the results of) events that are controlled by powers and powerful people far beyond my reach. I do feel guilty about the impact I implicitly have but do not exercise. Most definitely, I am aware that my failure to act has an impact, a result, makes a difference, changes the outcome. 

Go back to the beginning of what I said. Even though the measure of my impact, of that change on the outcome, is minute, remember that it is permanent. So, even though I am human and forgetful, I try always to be Mindful. I try as much as I can to make my every action thoughtful because, even though I have no idea what—in some far off time or place—the effect may be, there will be an effect. I want it to be a good effect. I intend a good change, insofar as good means beneficial to the whole, to the unity and all there is in it. If that happens, every individual, also, will benefit. 

With all of the above in mind, and the knowledge that so many drastic changes have happened and are happening, I believe that the process of change, itself, is neither good nor bad. It is simply a major facet of existence. It is part of “becoming what always has been becoming.” Societies, cultures, nations, peoples, governments, policies, mores, machines, tools, toys will change. Some of the changes will seem pleasant to some people; some will undoubtedly be very unpleasant. All we can do is work hard. We can, and must, do the best we can do, where we are, with what we have to work in the moment. We cannot stop change. We cannot even change the fact of its occurrence. 

The French say, “C’est la vie!” 

Many Americans say, “Get used to it!” 

I say, “Do your best, whatever that’s supposed to mean!”

Here’s something our (girls) mothers never told us: One of a man’s most important characteristics is his capacity to feel sorry for himself.

Girls should be trained to observe, query, and rate all prospective mates on this trait before serious involvement with them. It is more important than material wealth, good looks, appreciation of good cooking, compatibility in areas of thinking and feeling, desire to have children, political position, educational level, job ranking, income, types of entertainment enjoyed, love-making ability, or any of the other traits women are taught are important.

Men cannot “let go” of past hurts; each hurt serves as kindling for the fires of current felt pain and tribulation. The more past hurts there are, the greater the burden of self-pity becomes, until—finally—the poor sod cannot sustain even a pretense of a relationship in the present. He views it as yet another failure he can add to his list of reasons for which he feels sorry for himself.

Self-pity can make or break a relationship. The more willing a man is to wallow deeply in self-pity, the less willing he is to invest himself in an on-going relationship of any nature. That’s all there is to it.

Oh, the stories I could tell …. But then I would sound like a man, wouldn’t I?

Actually, I’m pretty sure the same things can be said of women. But I’m not talking about women, right now. Another day, maybe?

I started to think about time one evening, and I couldn’t get to the end of it.

I have a friend in India. Chandigarh is half-way around the world from where I lived until a year ago, and I had a hard time keeping track of what time it is there, so I made a chart. I called him one day, and I updated my chart because I had just moved to a different time zone.

There I sat, changing time. Can we change time? I always struggle with Einsteinian physics. I do get the general concepts, so I am aware that theoretically we can change time in some sense. We can bend time, or stretch it, or shrink it; time is, as they say, plastic, not concrete. But we cannot, as I understand things, change time’s consistency. For example, water can be turned into steam or ice, but I haven’t heard that time can be made liquid or solid. My sense is that time is evanescent. At least, it gets away from me in the same way as does a cloud.

Think of all the things we do with time: We take time, make time, use time, keep time, save time, lose time, spend time, waste time. If we have time, we can spare time, give time, share time.

We bandy those words about with abandon. At first, as I listed them, I thought them all to be literal impossibilities. Then I thought again.

Make time. How do you do that? Well, you decrease the amount of time you spend on one or more activities and thus release time not otherwise available. It’s like when you pinch off a bit of dough from two already formed cookies to make a third.

Taking time works much the same way, but you could be taking it from someone else’s allocation, and that might not be fair.

Using and spending time mean pretty much the same thing. Once you have done one of them, the time is gone; we all know that. Where did it go? When you use water, you know where it went: You drank it or you took a bath in it and let it go down the drain. Where does the time go? We ask ourselves that many times.

Keeping time has several meanings. You keep time with music by tapping your feet or dancing well. A young man keeps time with his girl.

You can save time by hurrying while you perform some action or activity. But, I ask you, where is that time you saved? Do you have a drawer full of time at the end of the week? A book in which you record all the time you saved, and the interest accrued?

All of us have lost time. I am sure that, once you let it get away, you never get it back. I doubt that no one who reads this has never wasted time. That time is as good as lost, also. But I believe that some wasted time is valuable, so I never worry about that.

When we plan ahead, we leave time for the unexpected.

Here are a few puzzles: We can run out of time, but not into it. We can take a time out, but not a time in. We can do different things at the same time, but not exactly the same thing at different times. At the end of an event, we say time’s up, but we never say time’s down. We have both down times and up times.

I’m ashamed to admit this one: We all kill time.

Sometimes, we just sit around with time on our hands. Again, you cannot see this time, or put it away to use later. We all know that it is good to give some time—say a few minutes—to someone else who needs a hand; we all can spare time at a time like this.

Best of all, we can share time with all the folks whose company we enjoy. There’s nothing better to do with time than share it.

Oh dear! I had a lot more to say and I never did answer the question about whether or not we can change time, but now I don’t have time.

 

How to Procrastinate

I’ve been thinking of ways I procrastinate when I have a major project to do, and can’t seem to get started. If you’re like most folks you, too, manage to find other things to do, things that probably don’t need to be done anywhere near as much as “The Project.” Sometimes, it’s hard to even think about those things, so I provide, below, a short list of ideas that might help you do a good job of procrastination.

You can do any or all procrastinations for any effort, in no particular order and depending on how desperate you are:

• File your nails—this task can take as few as ten minutes or, for greater procrastination, you can make it last for a half-hour.
• Polish your nails—you have options for a half-hour quickie or a full, all steps included, job that can take a mere 2.25 hours, or as much as 3.75 hours. It depends on which preparations you make before you actually apply polish, how many coats of polish you use, and how long each takes to dry.

I usually go for the big job that includes cuticle preparation, an oil soak for 10 minutes, and five different kinds of clear polish that take ten or fifteen minutes to dry satisfactorily. (Actually, the final coat takes about two and a half hours to dry solid, so I can bump into something and the combination of polishes doesn’t smear.)

• Check all your pens and markers to see which ones are out of ink and can be thrown away—this is a fairly quick procrastination device. The length of time to allow for it varies proportionately to the number of writing and coloring instruments you can find. You might survey only those implements on your own desk or you could scavenge the whole house, including the bedroom of your thirteen year old daughter.
• Load more paper into your printer—a really quick intervention. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes unless you have to unwrap a whole new ream of paper, in which case you might stretch it to ten minutes.
• Make that appointment with your dentist—the length of time to accomplish this exercise depends primarily on the number of people in your dentist’s office. Time elapsed can range from ten to thirty minutes. It’s a matter of how long you are on hold.
• Straighten, delete items from, or add items to:
  • Desk drawers—allow at least fifteen minutes per drawer; if you get carried away, you may take a half-hour for each drawer.
  • File drawers (those in file cabinets)—Consider how deep the drawers are from front to back, how tightly packed they are, and how much reading you must do in order to decide what to keep (and/or refile somewhere else). For each drawer you can take between a half hour and a whole hour.
  • Kitchen and/or Pantry drawers / shelves / cabinets—these require, at best, only guesstimates. Each could take as few as fifteen-to-twenty minutes or as long as a half hour or more. If you go all out, probably you can spend at least a half day, maybe a whole day, getting your whole kitchen straightened up. If you are compulsive enough, and think you can take the time, you can wipe each surface clean as you go, and add another five to ten minutes to the time you estimate for each component.
  • Clothes closet(s)—Oooh! This one’s pretty big. You can simply go through a closet and scan the contents for things you can / should remove and discard or donate. You might add to that a re-organization—by type of garment, for example, or you can go all out and arrange the garments by color, length, where you are likely to wear them, or how often you wear them. You almost certainly have a much better idea than I of how to plan for this work.
  • Garage—the garage, most likely, is the biggest activity of all options for the procrastinator. A real quickie, for the average two-car garage in which both cars are usually parked, should take only two or three hours. But, for the same garage with no cars ever parked in it, you can easily spend a full day, or more. Beware: nearly all predictions for how much can be done in how long turn into final reports of time taken that are approximately twice as long as predicted.
• Balance your bank account(s)—here, I hesitate to prognosticate. This activity can take as little as twenty minutes or as long as two hours (and, possibly, the account still doesn’t balance). Variables include how many transactions you’ve made, whether (or not) you recorded them as they occurred, and, possibly, how good you are with basic arithmetic. 
• Work on your photos / albums—the first variable, here, is the number of photos involved. The depth of your work may be simply gathering all loose photos and sorting them by album, or you might be really anxious to get all of your photos really properly organized and securely positioned in their intended albums. It seems to me that the best thing to do is decide on how long you will give to this task, work that long and only that long, then quit before you find yourself trapped into twice or three times the allotted time.
• Make lists, of everything—I love lists and practice their usefulness as often and as much as I can. The amount of time you devote to list-making is entirely up to you and may be restricted to only one list for the hardware store or an overall list (perhaps of lists) that encompasses everything from phone calls for the day to Excel charts for long-term planning. The lists listed below are only a few suggestions. I am sure your list of lists (even if it exists only in your head) is the most practical for you and your situation.
  • To Do
  • People to call / email / send a note or letter
  • Things you need / want
  • Recipients of next December’s Holiday Greetings / Newsletter
• Call as many people you can think of (especially the long-winded folks)—I’m sure you know better than I how long you want to talk with each contact. Probably, you will want to set aside a block of time available, rather than predict actual time involved.
• Work in the garden—some people can spend as little as fifteen minutes in the garden. Others like to take a half- or whole-day. It’s entirely up to you.
• Exercise / Walk—I have to procrastinate to do either of these, so I’ll leave it up to you.
• Take up bird-watching—the amount of time you spend on this activity depends on your particular circumstances and/or need to procrastinate.
• Start a New Project—this strategy is for only the most serious procrastinators. You can take a few minutes (say a half hour) to sketchily outline your new project. At the other extreme, if the New Project will take as much or more time and effort as your current Project, and you need to provide a detailed proposal, it can take days. Only you can determine and make an educated guess about how long it will take you to create a plan and complete work on your New Project.

I’m sure I’ve left out many opportunities for procrastination. You will think of some yourself, as you read through those listed above. At least this is a start.

Good Luck! Enjoy your status as an Official Procrastinator. You’re in the best of company.