Sweating the small stuff

Don’t sweat the small stuff! I remember my mother reading a book with the same title when I still lived at home. I had always thought I steered a rather good line past the minor issues of life, focussing on things of importance, but now I am not so sure...

It took a line from a film trailer to wake me up. The film was titled, ‘The Tree of Life’. The film has Brad Pitt in it, but my wife turned her nose up at it. The brief snippet involved a mother shouting after a father and son, who were walking away together. She yelled something to the father about teaching lessons their son could understand because he was only a child.

 
It struck me how often I try and get my children to get everything perfect all of the time. Many of those things being the small things like hanging up towels, not complaining about unpacking the dishwasher, cleaning their rooms, etc. I cannot believe how frustrated I become when they fail to get these things right. Perhaps it’s because the small stuff still goes wrong despite numerous repeated requests for change. Even more likely is that I have allowed the small stuff to take over my life. Where it has become more important for everything to be perfect and stay perfect.

Though strangely enough, I am not perfect at all...

The effort required to continuously focus on all of this stuff is enormous. The shouting, tempers, and frustration is ludicrous. I like consistency in the way things are done and in the way I discipline. Yet consistency for the sake of consistency is a rather pointless exercise.

My oldest son’s penchant for walking around without tying his shoelaces may be a minor safety issue but certainly will have no bearing on him growing up into a man of character, values, and love. As parents, we only have so much time with our offspring, surely it should be spent focussed on the things that will make a real difference in their future. As a parent with over ten years experience, I am continually surprised at how much I still have to learn.

Time to step up and let the little things go!

I have discovered that writing is an art form and to date I have just been dabbling on the fringes. On Saturday something changed! I got wordacious! 3000 words just tumbled out of my fingers and onto my Word document, poised to catch such wonderful musings. It was a fantastic experience to be in the flow with a amazing story just aching to come alive in words.

Hopefully I have broken my writing drought! Prior to this, I had only revised my current chapter about four times and ended up with something very preachy. Not where I wanted my writing to be at all. The Saturday attempt was off the wall and it worked. I now have another new angle through which I may just be able to communicate my own social commentary. I was telling somebody the other day that it feels like I am a moth circling a flame. I am getting closer and closer to the end product and hopefully soon I, as the moth, will merge with the flame in a great explosion of celebration as I put this chapter to bed!!! Then I can move on to the next infernally frustrating chapter.

Truth be told, that burst of writing made all of the frustration and procrastination and lack of imagination all worth while. I cannot wait for another experience of electrifying insight. Like anything in life, it will be the product of some hard and dedicated work. Gonna get busy now!

Today was another of those frustrated stuck at the bottom of the wall days. So frustrated was I that I took it out on my lawn as I cut it down to size. One of the pieces of advice that I have received over the last couple of weeks was not to get uptight about things like my garden but rather to plough on through with what I am doing. Hmmm it was easy to agree to a couple of weeks ago. Not so easy to implement this morning. The grass certainly received my frustration with grace and had the decency to look pretty afterward!

I am not sure why I am uptight as I did manage to get through four typed pages but it was all hard work! I suppose that I am a bit of an idiot if I think that it will all be fun and easy! Then again there are so many tempting things to be busy with like stepping into my running shoes and taking them for a trot, or smashing some waves with my surfboard or even watching my son swim in a gala. There are plenty of more exciting things to be doing but at some stage I need to wake up and understand that this is a responsibility to myself that needs to be discharged. I will write and I will write well. Perhaps that will even be my new mantra as I meditate on my writing with my palms pressed together and a lopsided grin on my face as I sit in the lotus position!

I was going to include a couple of paragraphs of todays writing but perhaps in the morrow. For now know that even those out there whose lives seem to be filled with fun and freedom sometimes also struggle with getting down to work. So if you are huddled up close to your PC in your office, smile, take three deep breaths and have some fun with whatever you are doing!! I am certainly going to try!